isliked it.' The idea is
fancifully put, but it holds good, I think."

Shortly after my return to London, I got two letters from him of
considerable importance. I give them both. The first is apropos of
the education of Edward Bruce.

"Tredennis, August 30.

"My Dear Friend,

"I want you to get me the inclosed list of books, which I find are
culpably absent from my library. It is a very engrossing prospect,
this child's mind: it is a blank parchment, ready for any writing,
and apparently anxious for it too.

"'Insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs,' wrote
Milton, as the end of his self-education--something like that I
intend, if I am allowed, to give this child. I have the greatest
contempt for knowledge and erudition _qua_ knowledge and erudition.
A man who has laboriously edited the Fathers seems to me only to
deserve the respect due to a man who has carried through an arduous
task, and one that must have been, to anyone of human feelings and
real enthusiasm for ideas, uncongenial at first. Erudition touches
the human race very little, but on the 'omne ignotum' principle, men
are always ready to admire it, and often to pay it highly, and so
there is a constant hum of these busy idlers all about the human
hive. The man who works a single practical idea into ordinary
people's minds, who adds his voice to the cry, 'It is better to give
up than to take: it is nobler to suffer silently than to win praise:
better to love than to organize,' whether it be by novel, poem,
sermon, or article, has done more, far more, to leaven humanity. I
long to open people's eyes to that; I learnt it late myself. Before
God, if I can I will make this boy enlightened, should I live to do
it; or at least not at the mercy of every vagrant prophet and bawler
of conventional ideas.

"Ever your friend,
"Arthur Hamilton"

The next explains itself.

"Tredennis, September 15.

"My Dear Friend,

"As you write to inquire so affectionately about my health, I
think it would be very wrong of me not to answer you fully; so I will
take 'health' to mean well-being, and not confine myself to its
paltry physiological usage.

"In the last month I have really turned a corner, and gained serenity
and patience in my outlook. I do not mean that I am either patient or
serene yet, but I have long and considerable spaces of both, when I
feel content to let God make or mar me as He will, and realis