ticulateness--all
these qualities are very hard to indicate. Only a boy could formulate
these things, and no boy has sufficient ease of expression to do so, or
sufficient detachment both to play the part and describe it. A very
clever undergraduate, with a gift of language, might write a truthful
school-book; but yet the task seems to require a certain mellowness and
tolerance which can only be given by experience; and then the very
experience would tend to blunt the sharpness of the impressions.

As a rule, in such books, the whole conception of boyhood seems at
fault; a boy is generally represented as a generous, heedless,
unworldly creature. My experience leads me to think that this is very
wide of the mark. Boys are the most inveterate Tories. They love
monopoly and privilege, they are deeply subservient, they have little
idea of tolerance or justice or fair-play, they are intensely and
narrowly ambitious; they have a certain insight into character, but
there are some qualities, like vulgarity, which they seem incapable of
detecting. They have a great liking for jobs and small indications of
power. They are not, as a rule, truthful; they have no compassion for
weakness. It is generally supposed that they have a strong sense of
liberty, but this is not the case; they are, indeed, tenacious of their
rights, or what they suppose to be their rights, but they have little
idea of withstanding tyranny, they are incapable of democratic
combination, and submit blindly to custom and tradition. Neither do I
think them notably affectionate or grateful; everything that is done
for them within the limits of a prescribed and habitual system they
accept blindly and as a matter of course, while at the same time they
are profoundly affected by any civility or sympathy shown them outside
the ordinary course of life. I mean that they do not differentiate
between a master who takes immense trouble over his work, and
discharges his duties with laborious conscientiousness, and a master
who saves himself all possible trouble; they are not grateful for
labour expended on them, and they do not resent neglect. But a master
who asks boys to breakfast, talks politely to them, takes an interest
in them in a sociable way, will win a popularity which a laborious and
inarticulate man cannot attain to. They are extremely amenable to any
indications of personal friendship, while they are blind to the virtues
of a master who only studies their best in