thin reach of some coveted
"colour," which gives them social importance. What I desire is that
boys should be serious about their work in a practical, business-like
way, and amused by their games. As a matter of fact they are serious
about games and profoundly bored by their work. The work is a relief
from the tension of games, and if it were wholly given up, and games
were played from morning to night, many boys would break down under the
strain. I don't expect all the boys to be enthusiastic about their
work; all healthily constituted people prefer play to work, I myself
not least. But I want them to believe in it and to be interested in it,
in the way that a sensible professional man is interested in his work.
What produces the cynicism about work so common in classical schools is
that the work is of a kind which does not seem to lead anywhere, and
classics are a painful necessity which the boys intend to banish from
their mind as soon as they possibly can.

This is a melancholy jeremiad, I am well aware; but it is also a frame
of mind which grows upon me; and, to come back to my original
proposition, it is the stupidity of virtuous men which is responsible
for the continuance of this arid, out-of-joint system.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
July 22, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--. . . I took a lonely walk to-day, and returned
through a new quarter of the town. When I first knew it, thirty years
ago, there was a single house here--an old farm, with a pair of pretty
gables of mellow brick, and a weathered, solid, brick garden-wall that
ran along the road; an orchard below; all round were quiet fields; a
fine row of elms stood at the end of the wall. It was a place of no
great architectural merit, but it had grown old there, having been
built with solidity and dignity, and having won a simple grace from the
quiet influences of rain and wind and sun. Very gradually it became
engulphed. First a row of villas came down to the farm, badly planned
and coarsely coloured; then a long row of yellow-brick houses appeared
on the other side, and the house began to wear a shy, regretful air,
like a respectable and simple person who has fallen into vulgar
company. To-day I find that the elms have been felled; the old wall, so
strongly and firmly built, is half down; the little garden within is
full of planks and heaps of brick, the box hedges trodden down, the
flowers trampled underfoot; the house itself is marked for destruct