"PAT" CURKEY 55 



his second year and I my third, that I met him at breakfast at 

 George Otto Trevelyan's. At Easter 1861, Currey was elected to a 

 scholarship; and thenceforward I played with him and I worked 

 with him during ten happy years. When I think of him as an 

 undergraduate and a bachelor, I am amazed at the multiplicity of 

 his occupations. He rowed : he ran with the Foot Drag : he hunted : 

 he was, I think, one of the first to join the newly established Eifle 

 Corps : he was a footballer before the Association game was invented 

 and played both the Harrow and the Eton Game: he acted, and 

 acted well, at the A.D.C. : he never neglected his music: he was 

 a member of two successive whist clubs which cared more for good 

 fellowship than for the niceties of the game: he was a member 

 of a tea club which had a joyous existence of a single term. There 

 were picnics up the river, at which he sang " The Widow Malone " 

 and "The Shannon Shore" with a delicate brogue, which added a 

 grace to the ditties of Lever and Thackeray. In the informal 

 debates which make so important a part in undergraduate life 

 Currey had a certain air of unreadiness ; I have heard him begin — 

 " Gad ! I don't know what to say ! " But he always had something 

 to say which was worth listening to, and his merry quips and dainty 

 Irishisms enlivened discussion, and often advanced it. The first 

 half of the sixties was for some of us a very good time, and " Pat," 

 as we called him, did much to make it so. 



With all these distractions, Currey meanwhile read classics 

 steadily and effectively, and Long Vacations spent with a few Harrow 

 friends in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland bore excellent fruit. He was 

 fourth, bracketed with the late Provost of King's, Augustus Austen 

 Leigh, in the first class of the Classical Tripos of 1863. He was 

 elected to a Trinity Fellowship in 1865, and held it till it lapsed in 

 1873. As an undergraduate he was supposed to be a good scholar, 

 but not a superlatively good one. Obviously he was not a professional 

 prize getter ; and no doubt his contemporaries took for granted that 

 a man so various could not be a distmguished specialist. I think 

 that they underrated him: but I think also that between his Bachelor's 

 Degree in 1863 and his Master's in 1866 his powers greatly developed 

 and matured. During these years he was taking private pupils, and 



