His students realised that they had a legend on their hands, and made the most of it. Dozens of stories circulated about his rumbustious asides, his impossible handwriting, the convolutions of his syntax.*

* In the Saintsbury Memorial Volume a former student recalls learning a specimen sentence by heart: ‘But while none, save these, of men living, had done, or could have done, such things, there was much here which – whether either could have done it or not – neither had done.’

George Saintsbury (1845-1933) recalled in The Rise And Fall Of The Man Of Letters by John Gross (1969)