MY DEAR, I have no posthumous activities to recommend to-day, having just returned from a temple consecrated to youth, where, but for its antiquity and its Roll of Honour, no one would think of death. I mean Winchester.
My sister’s boy is there and I went down for the day to see him: a nice candid jolly boy.
I came to the conclusion that there is a charm about an old public school greater than that of a university. The boy is more engaging than the youth: he may have “side” and affectation among his contemporaries, but with a much older man such as I am he is himself in a way that the undergraduate seldom is. The undergraduate’s whole desire is so often to be taken for a man, whereas the schoolboy at most would like to approximate to an undergraduate.
Of all the schools that I know none is so attractive as this. Its age, its traditions, its beauty, alone would single it out: but I am taken with its spirit too. When I go to see Dick I naturally meet many of his school-fellows; and I find a candour and friendliness which is a strange contrast to the social reserves of boys from other schools I could name. I don’t know whether the whole school is similarly fortunate, but in Dick’s house there is a door-opening, door-closing and passing-the-salt tendency which I fancy is often bad form elsewhere. To talk with the immature man is never easy, wherever you find him, and my inclination would always be to jump the gulf that is fixed between real childhood and real manhood; but Dick’s companions are easier.
Nephews and uncles go through strange vicissitudes. At first the uncle is an imposing creature who appears but rarely and when he does must be treated with respect and called Uncle on every occasion. And then as the boy grows older and understands the powers and possibilities of half-crowns the uncle takes on a god-like mien. And then, older still, he meets him on more equal terms; which get more and more equal until the time comes when he discovers that this once remarkable person is nothing but a fogey and a bore. Some uncles, before this last stage is reached, attach themselves to their nephews as satellites or boon companions and vie with them in youthfulness, but I am not likely ever to do that.