Joseph Mallord William Turner Rainbow painting

Joseph Mallord William Turner Rainbow paintingJoseph Mallord William Turner Fishermen at Sea paintingJohn Singer Sargent Venetian Canal painting
One day -- when we need him again." How I should have liked to sleep.
His smile returned, albeit melancholily. "We need him now. Things are worse than they ever were in his day. But he's -- on a sort of sabbatical leave, you might say. It's up to us to carry on."
He pressed upon me then his story, which I heard in my torpor and made this sense of only on later recollection: His father was or had been some sort ofprofessor extraordinarius (of what subject I never learned) whose reputation rested on his success in preparing students to pass their final examinations. His pedagogical method had been unorthodox, and so like many radicals he had worked against vehement opposition, even actual persecutions: I gathered his tenure was revoked and he was dismissed from his position on a charge of moral turpitude while still in his early thirties -- though it was not clear to me whether he had ever held official rank in his faculty. Neither was it plain what had happened to him afterwards: apparently he'd left the campus for a short time, returned