immutable goddess of laughter and love" and "the splendour and vigour of ... immanent, multiplied, voluptuous vitality". He encouraged his fellows "to taste life to the full" by throwing themselves with "extreme exuberance" into its "manifold sensations", allowing its joys to "pulse in the passionate blood and burst through the brain" until "body and mind quiver and bound as though interpenetrated by an instantaneous current of electric fluid". This won him friends and admirers in Melbourne's bohemian community, including such well-known artists as Arthur Streeton (with whom he shared digs for a time in St Kilda), Tom Roberts and Lionel and Norman Lindsay, who reacted favourably to his convivial exhortations to come "Be merry while we may" in the enjoyment of "the glorious ardours of the genial bowl". No doubt they also welcomed his pronouncements on the superiority of artists over ordinary mortals. But his abrasive personality gained him enemies, too. Former Victorian Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Robinson's 1890 warning to Melbourne University council that Marshall-Hall exhibited "a certain outspoken roughness in his manner" was something of an understatement. On taking up his new post in the following year, he was clearly intent on rousing his fellow citizens out of what he saw as their smug philistinism. He denounced local musical performances as "execrable" and deplored the vacuousness of Melbourne's concert-goers who, he declared, had "no taste ... and are profoundly ignorant of what music is". He proclaimed the city's music teachers to be "frightfully bad" and when private school principals grumbled about the high failure-rate in the matriculation music examination for which he was responsible, he retorted that it was fortunate that "our schools are the last places in the world to which our youth turn for light and understanding, otherwise they would grow up mentally akin to those monstrosities which I remember with dim horror upon the tables of boarding-houses and which go by the name of resurrection pies." And he complained rancorously about the "frivolous incapable buffooneries", "vicious emanations" and "sterile, unproductive mediocrity" of local music critics. People who disagreed with his literary judgements were also in danger of feeling his sharp tongue. At a Town Hall concert on 24 July 1893, he took time off from conducting to inform the audience that a recent article in The Argus condemning the "putrid ... mass of ... sensuality" in the plays of Henrik Ibsen was the "shameless and ignorant"