Master of Trinity, but headmaster at Harrow at the time when I was
there; and in this letter he says, “You and Arthur Evans are, I think,
the chief antiquarians of our Harrow generation, Hastings Rashdall and
Charles Gore our most learned and original theologians, Walter Sichel
and George Russell our most fertile writers in general literature.” I do
not know whether that was a considered opinion or only a passing
thought: in either case I offer Sir Arthur my condolences on being
mentioned in the same breath with me. As for the two theologians, here
is something that Dean Rashdall lately wrote--“I am sure that on no
subject but theology could Bishop Gore have been so blind to the
requirement of ordinary fairness and straight dealing between man and
man.” I suggested that he could have put it better in schoolboy diction
with words like liar and sneak, but he informs me that he thinks those
terms too strong.
It was rather a shock to me when a former fag of mine was made a
Bishop--not Gore, of course--but you can never tell how fellows will
turn out. Another fellow, in the same house, was sacked for getting
drunk and disorderly in Harrow town. He succeeded to a Peerage and was a
huge success as a Colonial Governor; and I believe his secret of success
was giving the Colonials a finer Cognac, and more of it, than any
Governor had given them before.
In his Harrow holidays down here my brother was telling one of my
great-aunts such yarns that my sister wrote off to my father, 12 August
1862, “He teazes her dreadfully, and tells her the most extraordinary
things about the Exhibition. When she asked him if all the boys dined
together at school, he told her that half dined at the King’s Head and
the other half at the Turk’s, and those that were not hungry could have
a chop and bottle of stout in their rooms.” It was not so: at any rate,
in my time.
He usually was very accurate, feeling that exaggeration spoiled a
narrative of facts. Keep strictly to the facts, or launch out boldly
into fiction. On the same principle he would not give a sixpence to
relieve a case of destitution; but if the case was put before him and he
was asked for twenty pounds, he might perhaps give the twenty, feeling
that it might do good where sixpences were wasted. He did not often
waste his money; but one evening on coming out of a theatre he meant to
throw a sixpence to a man who found a hansom for us, and threw him a
half-sovereign by mistake, and I heard the man say fervently, “Thank
God, all the Gentlemen aren’t dead.”
With his prodigious memory my brother could have written books of this
sort far better than I have written these; and I am sorry I did not
oftener make sure of things by asking him. (He died five-and-twenty
years ago.) As it is, I have left out things of which I am not sure; and
some of these things were quite worth saying, if true; but I wished to
keep as closely as I could to facts.
I once was telling a man a thing I thought would interest him; and he
stopped me short--“I heard that from your brother, and shan’t forget it.
I was out in Kensington Gardens with my wife, before we married, and he
came up and told us that; and I didn’t want it then. I had just that
moment proposed to her, and she had not had time to reply.” I hope I
have not said anything here that has been heard before, like that.
End of Project Gutenberg's Small Talk at Wreyland. Third Series, by Cecil Torr