A good deal of standardisation of opinion and critical method became necessary when Eng. Lit. became a large profession, and I think the results are often mistaken; but it is naturally hard to make my colleagues agree with any such judgment. The best opportunity is where the credibility gap appears at an unexpected place – where the university teachers or examiners feel slightly appalled at the apparently orthodox opinions which the children (whose schoolteachers usually retain more hold upon their loyalty and affection than any later teacher) write sturdily down. When I first met Professor L. C. Knights, which was fairly recently at Gambier, Ohio, there was some mention of the yearly examinations, and he said, ‘The very saddest time of all.’ I said, ‘You mean you find the students haven't followed what you told them?’ ‘Well, of course, there is that too’, he said, ‘but sometimes, you know, they have’. This delicacy of feeling proved at once that he was not a Leavisite in any harmful way. Thinking it over, I doubt whether he had literally said these things which he did not like to read in an answer; they would be deductions from his position, or parodies of it, which he had not foreseen the need for a warning against. I fancy that the salutary shock which he adumbrated here arises more frequently about Ben Jonson than about any other standard author.