s of their doom,
The little victims play."

They do indeed! they find work so dispiriting a business that they put
it out of their thoughts as much as they can. And when they grow up,
conscious of intellectual feebleness, they have no idea of expressing
their resentment at the way they have been used--if they are modest,
they think that it is their own fault; if they are complacent, they
think that intellectual things don't matter.

While I write there comes in one of my cheerful opponents to discuss
the situation. We plunge into the subject of classics. I say that, to
boys without aptitude, they are dreary and hopelessly difficult. "There
you go again," he says, "always wanting to make things EASIER: the
thing to do is to keep boys at hard, solid work; it is an advantage
that they can't understand what they are working at; it is a better
gymnastic." The subject of mathematics is mentioned, and my friend
incidentally confesses that he never had the least idea what higher
Algebra was all about.

I refrain from saying what comes into my mind. Supposing that he,
without any taste for Mathematics, had been kept year after year at
them, surely that would have been acting on his principle, viz. to find
out what boys can't do and make them do it. No doubt he would say that
his mind had been fortified, as it was, by classics. But, if a rigid
mathematical training had been employed, his mind might have been
fortified into an enviable condition of inaccessibility. But I don't
say this; he would only think I was making fun of the whole thing.

Fun, indeed! There is very little amusement to be derived from the
situation. My opponents have a strong sense of what they call
liberty--which means that every one should have a vote, and that every
one should register it in their favour. Or they are like the
old-fashioned Whigs, who had a strong belief in popular liberty, and an
equally unshaken belief in their own personal superiority.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Nov. 22, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--"Be partner of my dreams as of my fishing," says the old
fisherman to his mate, in that delicious idyll of Theocritus--do read
it again. It is one of the little masterpieces that hang for ever in
one of the inner secret rooms of the great halls of poetry. The two old
men lie awake in their wattled cabin, listening to the soft beating of
the sea, and beguiling the dark hour before the dawn, when they must
fare forth, in sim