He made a close study of Propertius, whose themes he no doubt
found congenial. His classical interests were concentrating on pure
scholarship, and he was greatly influenced by the Kennedy
professor of Latin at Cambridge, H. A. J. Munro, of whom he
later spoke in enthusiastic praise and to whom he wrote many
times while at Oxford, even trying vainly to obtain his photo-
graph. It is practically certain that Munro Lucretius and Criticisms
and Elucidations of Catullus played an important part in attracting
Housman to verbal and textual scholarship.

In the Honour Mods examination he appears to have gained
a first class, but in the ancient history and philosophy part of the
Greats syllabus, to quote the Oxford correspondent of the
Journal of Education of February 1888, he 'chose, in his own
discretion, to avoid the reading required. . . and accordingly was
not classed in it'. He failed in Greats in 1881, and there have been
many explanations of his avoidance of the work required in the
subjects he disliked. It may be that he thought his excellence in
the scholarly parts of the examination would pull him through, in
which case the shock of failure was great, though he must have
seen the risk he was taking in not answering many of the questions
set. Or he may have taken the Cyrenaic attitude to learning which
led him eleven years latei to say: 'If a certain department of
knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study
it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for
that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason
why it most attracts him is that it is best for him.' Long afterwards
he said the examiners had no option, so that he had seen whither
his exclusiveness might lead him, and was not wholly unready
when trouble came. Amongst the 'great and real troubles' of his
early manhood must have been the realization that for the time at
least this view of learning seemed to have failed him, and perhaps
that is partly why he described his London Introductory Lecture
as 'rhetorical and not wholly sincere'.

He returned home and worked for a Civil Service examination,
earning a living meanwhile by teaching the upper forms at his old
school. At this time he produced aversion in Latin hendecasyllables

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