two in
the morning
`` My object , '' he said , `` is to escape notice , to look like every one else . I think of all despicable people , the people who try to attract attention by a marked style of dress , are perhaps the lowest . '' His life at Cambridge was very monotonous , for he enjoyed monotony ; he used to say that he liked to reflect on getting up in the morning , that his day was going to be filled by ordinary familiar things . He got up rather late , read his subjects for an hour or two , strolled about to see one or two friends , lunched with them or at home , strolled in the afternoon , often dropping in to King 's for the anthem , went back to his rooms for tea , the one time at which he liked to see his friends , read or talked till hall , and finally settled down to his books again at ten , reading till one or two in the morning . He read very desultorily and widely . Thus he would read books on Arctic voyages for ten days and talk of nothing else , then read novels till he sickened for facts and fact till he sickened for fiction ; biographies , elementary science , poetry , general philosophy , particularly delighting in any ideal theories of life and discipline in state or association , but with a unique devotion to `` Hamlet '' and `` As You Like It , '' the `` Pilgrim 's Progress , '' and Emerson 's `` Representative Men . '' He rarely read the Bible , he told me , and then only in great masses at a sitting ; and the one thing that he disliked with an utter hatred was theology of a settled and orthodox type , though next to the four books I have mentioned , `` The Christian Year '' and `` Ecce Homo '' were his constant companions .