Fragment: Isn't he sweet?

From Bowra, Cecil Maurice. Memories: 1898-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966.

When he [Gilbert Murray] was eighty-seven he sent me a postcard on a point of scholarship, and after dealing with it, added a postscript 'I'm getting terribly old, but don't tell anyone.' On his ninetieth birthday some of his old pupils gave him a lunch. I had written about him as a teacher in the Oxford Mail, and in proposing his health Dodds told of his own debt to Murray and how Murray had tamed him in his youth. Murray in his answer said, 'I think that, as Bowra says, I was a good teacher, and I think that I tamed Professor Dodds, for a young lady said to me the other day, "Isn't he sweet?"'

p. 227

Fragment: To get on in the profession

From: MacNeice, Louis. The Strings Are Flase: An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

If I wanted to get on in the profession, Dodds told me, I must do some research. Edit a Greek play perhaps. He recognized that much of the 'research' done at universities was done merely from careerist motives, and much of it was a waste of time.  Pun provided you had a critical faculty, provided you had you had imagination and provided you did some work you might contribute something to Scholarship. Scholarship for Dodds was a living and humane activity, an antidote to sentimentality,  to our more muddled or trumpery brands of civilization...

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