"GL2" - читать интересную книгу автора (vol09)

The Papers, from internal evidence, clearly had no connexion
with any examinations held or lectures given in the Schools
during Mr. Green's many years of office. Neither did they
belong to any of the libraries housed in the building. Advertise-
ment has failed to find any claimant to ownership. It remains
unknown how the Papers reached the waste-paper sack. It
seems probable that they had at some time been prepared for
publication, since they are in many places provided with notes;
yet in form they are nothing more than an elaborate minute-
book of a club, devoted to conversation, debate, and the
discussion of 'papers', in verse or prose, written and read by its
members, and many of the entries have no particular interest for
non-members.
The minutes, or reports, covered probably about 100 meet-
ings or 'nights' during the years of last century, approximately
1980 to 1990. It is, however, not the least curious fact about
these Papers that no such club appears ever to have existed.
Though certain resemblances are inevitable between a group of
imaginary academic persons and their real contemporaries, no
such persons as those here depicted, either with such names, or

such offices, or such tastes and habits, can be traced in the
Oxford of the last generation, or of the present time.
The author appears in one or two passages, and in the
occasional notes, to identify himself with the character called in -':
the dialogues Nicholas Guildford. But Mr. J. R. Titmass, the
well-known historian of twentieth-century Oxford, who has
given all possible assistance to the present editor, has shown that
this is certainly a fictitious name and derived from a mediaeval
dialogue at one time read in the Schools of Oxford.

On examination the bundle was found to contain 205
foolscap pages, all written by one hand, in a careful and usually
legible script. The leaves were disarranged but mostly num-
bered. The bundle contains the entries for Nights 51 to 75, but
they are defective and several leaves appear to have been lost;
some of the longer entries are incomplete. It is probable that
three other bundles, containing Nights 1 - 25, 26 - 50, 76 - 100,
once existed. Of the missing sections, however, only a few
scattered sheets were found in the sack, and these, so far as can
be discerned, belonged originally to the entries 1 - 25. Among
them was a crumpled and much corrected sheet, of a different
paper, containing a list of members.
The total on this scale would have made a volume of
considerable bulk, but its size will be overestimated, if calcula-
tion is based on the length of the extracts here printed. Many
Nights are represented only by a few lines, or by short entries, of
which Nights 54 and 64 have been included as specimens. As
a rule these short items have been omitted, unless they bear
closely on the longer reports here selected and presented to