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All his life he has been as irregular in his ways as the wild tribesmen of the Arabian Desert. Although he completed the required four years’ work for his bachelor’s degree in three years, he never attended a single lecture at Oxford, so far as I have been able to discover. He occasionally worked with tutors, but he spent most of his time wandering about England on foot, or reading medieval literature. In order to be alone he frequently slept by day and then read all night. He was entirely opposed to any set system of education. The aged professor who angrily admonished Samuel Johnson when a student at Oxford, “Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge,” would have been equally displeased with young Lawrence. The idea of obtaining a university education in order to take up a conventional occupation did not please him at all. His unconscious credo from earliest youth, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s, seems to have been that “pleasures are more beneficial than duties, because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest.”