Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/267

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Alexander Robertson
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Edinburgh. He also taught in a French Lycée at Caen, and attended the university of that city. But feeling that school-teaching narrowed his sphere too much, he gave it up, and went for three years to Oxford. 'With his scholarly tendencies and aspirations, these were very happy years to him,' says his brother. Dr. Niven Robertson, 'as the tenor of the poems in Comrades show. He spent most of his time in historical research, and gained the B.Litt. of Oxford. The subject of his thesis was The Life of Sir Robert Moray. This is to be published in book form, but its publication has been delayed by the war. By those who are able to judge he was regarded as one who would, sooner or later, make his name as a historian, but this was not to be.'

In September 1914 he enlisted as a private, joining from a sincere sense of duty only, as he had no inclination to fighting—his whole life had been devoted to study; he had never cared for sport or strenuous doings of any but a studious sort; and he could not but have wistful