18 AUGUST 1939, Page 15

I was shocked by this suggestion. In my own generation

there were many inheritors of unfulfilled renown who, were they alive today, might not perhaps have lived up to their own legend. I was willing to admit that King might have been a dull young man since Milton had always possessed a taste for dull people. Besides, I knew no more about him than that, on a calm night, he had been drowned like Palinurus in a serene sea. But Clough was certainly not dull. True it is that he " kept not for long his happy country tone "; and that, even before he left Balliol:

"his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground."

Yet his was a sensitive and troubled soul nor can such tem- peraments ever be uninteresting. And how he must have loathed Matthew Arnold!

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