Matthew Arnold says that "Byron
shattered, inevitably shattered himself against the black rock of
British Philistinism." He was at present full of hope. The Poetry of
Revolt coloured his imagination to such a degree that he saw himself
standing alone and triumphant amid the wreck of the world he had
overthrown. He was always protesting that Swinburne's finest line was in
the _Hymn to Proserpine_:

"_I neither kneel nor adore them, but standing look to the end._"

It raises a wonderful picture to a young imagination: Swinburne standing
on a mountain, looking across the valley of years in which man fights
feverishly for little things, in which nations rise to empire for a
short while, in which constitutions totter and fall, looking to where,
far away behind the mountains, flickered the faint white streamers of
the dawn. Oh, he was very young; very conceited too, no doubt; but is
there anyone who, having lived longer, having seen many bright dreams go
down, having been disillusioned, and having realised that he is but a
particle in an immense machine, would not change places with Gordon, and
see life once more roseflushed with impossible loyalties?

* * * * *

In its passage school life seems very long; in retrospect it appears but
a few hours. There is such a sameness about everything. A few incidents
here and there stand out clear, but, as a whole, day gives place to day
without differing much from those that have gone before it. We do not
realise this till we can look back on them from a distance; but it is
none the less true.

In the Sixth Gordon's scholastic career took the way of all other
fugitive things. It had once given promise of leading somewhere, of
resulting in something, but it wanted more than ordinary perseverance to
overcome the atmosphere of the deep-rooted objection to work that
overhung all the proceedings in the Sixth Form room. And that
perseverance Gordon lamentably lacked.

The Lower Sixth was mainly under the supervision of Mr Finnemore; and it
was a daily wonder to Gordon why a person so obviously unfitted should
have been entrusted with so heavy a responsibility. Finally he came to
the conclusion that the last headmaster had thought that the Sixth Form
would probably make less fun and take fewer liberties with him than any
other form, and that when the present Chief had come he had not had the
heart to remove a school institution. Mr Finnemore was an oldi