THE WILL-O'-THE-WISP OF OMNISCIENCE 29

the Dante scholar had announced, 'have come to the conclusion that you
have been dispersing your interests too widely, and our advice to you is
to make your choice of some single subject and to concentrate hereafter
on that.' In A.D. 1952 the writer had a still freshly vivid recollection of
his own instantaneous conviction that this advice was bad, and of his
likewise instantaneous decision not to follow it; and his uncle subse-
quently gave him reason in retrospect by amiably sacrificing his own
pernicious intellectual principles on the altar of personal affection when
his wife's literary work was cut short by her premature death. From that
day onwards, her loving survivor took her Walpole, as well as his
Alighieri, under his wing in order to complete her edition of the letters
as a labour of love.1 Meanwhile, his nephew was heading, in spite of his
good resolution at the end of the year A.D. 1906, towards the intellectual
blind alley from which the Dante scholar was to be harshly extricated in
A.D. 1910 by a tragic event in his personal life.

During eleven years of adolescence, from the autumn of A.D. 1900 to
the summer of A.D. 1911, the present writer was continuously at the
stretch in the intellectual hurdle-race of alternately preparing for and
sitting for examinations; and the cumulative demoralizing effect of this
ordeal slowly but surely undermined his resolve never to allow himself
to be corralled in a specialist's pound. As late as his last undergraduate
academic year A.D. 1910-11, he was still wholesomely shocked to find the
dismal orthodox cult of specialization capturing an older contemporary
of his, G. L. Cheesman, who at school had gone out of his way to
stimulate his junior's interest in the Late Roman Empire after having
noticed that the younger boy was reading Hodgkin's Italy and Her
Invaders.2

With these exhilarating memories of the catholicity of his older
friend's intellectual interests still fresh in his mind, the writer, one day at
Oxford, had come straight to Cheesman's rooms in New College (where
Cheesman was then a tutorial fellow, teaching Roman history) from a
meeting in Dr. F. W. Bussell's rooms at Brasenose which this mature
scholar had convened in the hope of generating in Oxford a wave of
interest in Byzantine studies. On separating, we had agreed to widen our
circle by recruiting brother enthusiasts, and the writer had taken it for
granted that his schoolfellow at New College would be as enthusiastic

1 Paget Toynbee was handsomely rewarded for an unprofessional human piety that
had taken for its counsellor an unerring heart instead of a fallible head. For one thing, he
became almost as highly distinguished in the field of scholarship bequeathed to him by
his wife as he had long since been in his own field. But his most gratifying reward was
that, when he had made room in his quiver for Horace Walpple's works beside Dante's,
he found himself armed with an unfailing store of apt quotations. It was hardly possible
for there to be any event in the news which a scholar who had thus made himself a double
hdfiz could not illustrate by a passage from one or other of the two authors whose works
this intellectual archer now knew by heart. On the slightest provocation he would shoot
a letter, containing a quotation from either Walpole or Dante, at the editor of The Times\
and, as the quotation was always attractively felicitous and the covering letter always
discreetly short, the literary arrow usually went home and, in the course of years, the
deft archer scored a prodigious tale of hits. Thus, thanks to his unprofessional addition
of a second string to his academic bow, Paget Toynbee succeeded in lodging in the
columns of The Times a quantity of letters that can hardly have been equalled by any of
his contemporaries.

2 Hodgkin, Thomas: Italy and Her Invaders (Oxford 1892-9, Clarendon Press, 8
vols. in 9 parts).