The scholar's monument was different, an edition of Manilius, the Roman astronomer-poet, in five volumes, published (again at the author's expense) over 27 years, which is how long it took for the first volume to sell out its 400 copies, "and the reason it took no longer", Housman wrote, "is that it found purchasers among the unlearned, who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface and hoped to extract from it a low enjoyment".

I count myself among these, and there is much low enjoyment to be had in Housman's treatment of those scholars who had worked on Manilius before him. He was still at it in volume five. A former professor of Latin at Oxford, Robinson Ellis, for example, is described as someone whose readers were "in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child"; and this was the very same Robinson Ellis who, in a testimonial recommending Housman for the Latin chair at UCL, wrote: "Personally I have always found Mr Housman an amiable and modest man ..."

The first volume of his Manilius came out with a dedicatory poem in Latin to Moses Jackson in 1903, but the poem's first draft goes back to December 1895, the year which turned the scholar into a lasting poet.

M. Manilii Astronomicon was the only book Housman dedicated to anyone. He did so "Sodali meo MI Iackson harum litterarum contemptori" ... "To my comrade MJ Jackson, who pays no heed to these writings."

He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.