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School and at Virginia University, Jack had devoted himself with equal enthusiasm to Latin, Greek and sport, putting himself with equal confidence in the hands of Horace, Virgil, Simonides and Xenophon and in those of the masseurs of the University gymnasiums. In 1928 he had been a sprinter in the American Olympic Track Team at Amsterdam, and he was prouder of his Olympic victories than of his academic honours. After 1929 he had spent some years in Paris as a representative of the United Press, and he was proud of his well-nigh perfect French. "I learned French from the classics," he used to say. "My French tutors were La Fontaine and Madame Bonnet, the caretaker of the house in which I lived in rue Vaugirard. Tu ne trouves pas que je parle comme les animaux de La Fontaine? It was he who taught me qu'un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque."
    "And you came to Europe," I would say to him, "to learn that? Un chien peut bien regarder un Evêque in America as well."
    "Oh non," Jack would reply, "en Amerique ce sont les Eveques qui peuvent regarder les chiens."
    Jack was also well acquainted with what he called la banlieue de Paris, in other words Europe. He had journeyed through Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Sweden in the same spirit of humanism and with the same thirst for knowledge as the English undergraduates who, before Dr. Arnold's reform, used to journey across Europe during their summer Grand Tour. After his travels Jack had returned to America with the manuscripts of an essay on the spirit of European civilization and of a thesis on Descartes, which had earned him an appointment as Professor of Literature in a great American university. But academic laurels do not flourish on an athlete's brow as Olympic laurels do; and Jack could not get over the fact that a muscular strain in the knee prevented him from running again in the international contests for the honour of the Stars and Stripes. In an attempt to forget his misfortune Jack would repair to the changing-room of the University gymnasium and read his adored Virgil or his beloved Xenophon, surrounded by that odour of rubber, soaking towels, soap and linoleum which is peculiarly associated with classical culture in the universities of the Anglo-Saxon countries.
    One morning I came upon him unawares in the changing-room —deserted at that hour—of the Peninsular Base Section's gymnasium, deeply engrossed in Pindar. He looked at me and smiled, colouring slightly. He asked me if I liked Pindar's poetry, adding that the Pindaric odes written in honour of the athletes who had triumphed at Olympia do not convey any idea of the long, hard drudgery of training, that those divine verses resound with the yells of the crowd and the triumphal applause, not with the hoarse whistling and the rasping sound that comes from the mouths of athletes when they make their last terrible effort. "I know all about it," he said, "I know what the last twenty yards are. Pindar is not a modern poet. He is an English poet of the Victorian era."
    Although he preferred Horace and Virgil to all other poets because of their serene melancholy, Greek poetry and ancient Greece filled him with a sense of gratitude—not the gratitude of a scholar, but that of a son. He knew by heart whole books of the Iliad, and tears would come into his eyes when he declaimed, in Greek, the hexameters on the "funeral Games in honour of Patroclus." One day, as we sat on the bank of the Volturno, near the Bailey bridge at Capua, waiting for the sergeant guarding the bridge to give us the signal to cross, we discussed Winckelmann and the concept of beauty among the ancient Hellenes. I remember Jack's telling me that the gloomy, funereal, mysterious imagery of ancient Greece, so raw and barbaric, or, as he put it, Gothic, appealed to him less than the joyful, harmonious, clear imagery of Hellenistic Greece, which was so young, vivacious and modern, and which he described as a French Greece, a Greece of the eighteenth