I was always irregular in my tastes. If I liked a piece of
verse, I liked it with passion and praised it inordinately;
again I was apt to be as absolute in my dislike. I was a
kind of poaching gipsy of literature. I had not only a
willingness to eat any wild thing from a hedgehog to a
beechnut or a wild raspberry, but also an uncanny power
of finding out literary game, raising it, and trapping it,
not by the stately methods of the scholar but by some
irrational and violent intuition. Instead of reading slowly,
patiently, and laboriously, as no doubt I ought to have
read, i.e., as my tutors would have liked me to read, I used
to dive headlong into some poet, old or young. Even if
I could only "get at him" for an odd half-hour, I could
bring back with me something worth keeping, something
which would sing in my head and be forced into the ears
of my friends for many days, and sometimes many weeks.

This habit of what one might call random and sudden
quotation was amusingly hit off by a friend of mine, Fry,
son of the late Lord Justice Sir Edward Fry. In a neat
little verse after the manner of Beeching's and Mackail's
celebrated verses on the Balliol Dons -- verse modelled, it
may be noted, on the pageant of Kings and Queens in
Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Fry thus delineated me:

I am Strachey, never bored
By Webster, Massinger or Ford;
There is no line of any poet
Which can be quoted, but I know it.

In the first couplet I have to own a true bill. Even if my
friends were bored, though I was not, which I now feel
must have often been the case, they certainly never
showed it. I seemed to be given a kind of privilege or
license to quote as much as ever I liked.

I expect, however, that the Dons were not quite as easy-

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