"No, no, no," replied the Master;
"I can hardly persuade myself that he _split_ the _table_, though I
believe he _divided_ the _Board_."'
Some of his sayings of course survive in family tradition. He was once
calling on a gentleman notorious for never opening a book, who took him
into a room overlooking the Bath Road, which was then a great
thoroughfare for travellers of every class, saying rather pompously,
'This, Doctor, I call my study.' The Doctor, glancing his eye round the
room, in which no books were to be seen, replied, 'And very well named
too, sir, for you know Pope tells us, "The proper _study_ of mankind is
_Man_."' When my father went to Oxford he was honoured with an
invitation to dine with this dignified cousin. Being a raw
undergraduate, unaccustomed to the habits of the University, he was about
to take off his gown, as if it were a great coat, when the old man, then
considerably turned eighty, said, with a grim smile, 'Young man, you need
not strip: we are not going to fight.' This humour remained in him so
strongly to the last that he might almost have supplied Pope with another
instance of 'the ruling passion strong in death,' for only three days
before he expired, being told that an old acquaintance was lately
married, having recovered from a long illness by eating eggs, and that
the wits said that he had been egged on to matrimony, he immediately
trumped the joke, saying, 'Then may the yoke sit easy on him.
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