ely by fits and starts. A feeling of personal
hatred against the examiners seems to urge him on more than any
other motive; but this will not be strong enough to keep him to
regular work, and without regular work he won't do,
notwithstanding all his cleverness, and he is a marvellously
clever fellow. So the first thing I have to do is to get him
steadily to the collar, and how to do it is a pretty particular
puzzle. For he hasn't a grain of enthusiasm in his composition,
nor any power, as far as I can see, of throwing himself into the
times and scenes of which he is reading. The philosophy of Greece
and the history of Rome are matters of perfect indifference to
him--to be got up by catch-words and dates for examination and
nothing more. I don't think he would care a straw if Socrates had
never lived, or Hannibal had destroyed Rome. The greatest names
and deeds of the old world are just so many dead counters to
him-the Jewish just as much as the rest. I tried him with the
story of the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to conquer the Jews,
and the glorious rising of all that was living in the Holy Land
under the Maccabees. Not it bit of it; I couldn't get a spark out
of him. He wouldn't even read the story because it is in the
Apocrypha, and so, as he said, the d----d examiners couldn't ask
him anything about it in the schools.

"Then his sense of duty is quiet undeveloped. He has no notion of
going on doing anything disagreeable because he ought. So here I
am at fault again. Ambition he has in abundance; in fact so
strongly, that very likely it may in the end pull him through,
and make him work hard enough for his Oxford purposes at any
rate. But it wants repressing rather than encouragement, and I
certainly shan't appeal to it.

"You will begin to think I dislike him and want to get rid of
him, but it isn't the case. You know what a good temper he has,
and how remarkably well he talks; so he makes himself very
pleasant, and my father evidently enjoys his company; and then to
be in constant intercourse with a subtle intellect like his, is
pleasantly exciting, and keeps one alive and at high pressure,
though one can't help always wishing that it had a little heat in
it. You would be immensely amused if you could drop in on us.

"I think I have told you or you must have seen it for yourself,
that my father's principles are true blue, as becomes a sailor of
the time of the great war, while his instincts and practice are