Sweet = Higgins?

Henry Sweet, the man who ‘taught phonetics to Europe’, graduated with a fourth class degree when he was thirty! Later, he was turned down several times for a professorship, something which crippled his relations with colleagues and fellow professionals for the rest of his life. Sweet was, in the eyes of many, a difficult man to like, and he was the starting-point (though not the model, as Shaw himself said) for Shaw’s Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, rather more so than for the Higgins of My Fair Lady. (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 179-82)