That for most of my life I have been a teacher of ‘English’ would have both amazed and puzzled my father. Lawrentians are fond, perhaps over-fond, of a story Lawrence tells in one of his late autobiographical writings. His first novel having just been published, he showed a copy to his father who asked him how much he had been paid for it. When Lawrence told him fifty pounds, the dumbfounded response was ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha's niver done a hard day's work in thy life’. No writer ever worked harder than Lawrence, and often under the most extreme difficulties, but there is a sense in which his father, who was down the pit well into his sixties, was of course right. There is all the difference in the world between physical and mental labour while another important distinction centres around the question of constraint. Work you impose on yourself, or which can be done in what is largely your own rather than factory or office time, is never hard in Arthur Lawrence's sense. As far as constraints are concerned, having to sit through endless meetings you know are mostly pointless or administer a course, examination, graduate school or even a department can definitely make university teachers feel that there are better ways of spending their time. Marking piles of essay may be tedious and there are occasions when teaching itself can be difficult. Almost the last seminar I taught consisted of about fifteen friendly girls, mostly from the Home Counties, whom I was trying to interest in Falstaff. Feeling there might be a rocky road ahead, I painted an imaginary picture of intense audience expectation at the first performance of Henry IV Part Two, after the success of its predecessor. As a huge fat man trundled onto the stage followed by his tiny page, everyone in the theatre, I suggested, would be agog to hear Falstaff's opening lines so that ‘Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water?’ must have brought the house down. It could well have done but the effect of this line on my students was nil and no English comic at the Glasgow Empire died more comprehensively than I did in trying to persuade them that Falstaff was not, as they tended to think, just a dirty and intemperate old man.