19For there could be no two opinions about Charles Tansley: he was amiserable specimen. When he took his coat off to play cricket hewas all humps & hollows;but what he liked best was & he joked soThen one could hearhimhe walkedeverwalking up &jokedsarcasticallystiffly, & he poked & shuffled;what he liked best wasforeverforeverdown with Mr. Ramsay, &saying who had won this & that,who wasthe a 'first rate man'at this or that,who was 'brilliant butfundamentally unsound' who , was the ablest the fellow inBalliol, who had buried his light temporarily, at Bristol orBedford, but was bound to be heard of later when somehis Prolegomena, of which Mr. Tansley had read the firstpageschapters inproof, saw the light were finally delivered - tobranch ofinterestnotday. His most serious shortcoming, however, It might be truethat the great universities of England & Scotland were institutionslamps of which in all ages had attracted to themselves thefinest spirits, plants of light, which like the wax whitebell shaped flowers in the gard gardenofclarity &luminous, statelydignitywhen allwas thorn & thistle round them.Nobody had a word to sayor universities in the abstractagainst learning as such. Mr. Ramsay himself alwaysimpressed, however he might annoy,by a purity,&an integritywhich was that of ivory or bone from which all superfluity orthe daily dropping finehad been eaten away by the some caustic; dropped day by day,noBut Charles Tansley, was not that; Charles Tansley, havinglearnt all the parrot phrases of learning, its repeatedsimply what he had picked up; He mightcouldrepeat; word for word, all the sad disillu authorativedenunciations m of he could deny; he could correct; hecould purse his lips up when Mrs. Ramsay who was herself given topicturesque exaggerations, spoke of waves "mountains high"& of everyone "drenched to the skin, & say certainly it had beena little rough, & his overcoat was wet but not right through;but when it came to adding something, to giving himself away, so tospeak, to being not merely a repetition - but there, whoever itsaying something
off his own
battho g such generositywas alien to himwh. was respected,but he wasfornaturallygenerous
with profounddelight intersome mathematicalor philosophical or economical branch of science saw the light ofyouyou
