Letters to His Friends

This volume has been printed for private circulation at the request of many of Forbes Robinson's personal friends. The first edition having been exhausted, a second has been prepared, in which are included six additional letters (cf. pp. 151, 154, 164, 166, 167, 182). Copies of this volume will be supplied (price 2s. 6d. post free) to all who desire to obtain them, on application to the Rev. Canon Charles H. Robinson, Hill Brow, Woking. The volume of College and Ordination Addresses which will be published by Longmans in about two months' time can be ordered through any bookseller.
October 1904.


Forbes Robinson was born on November 13, 1867, in the vicarage of Keynsham, a village in Somerset lying between Bristol and Bath. He was the eleventh child in a family of thirteen, of whom eight were sons and five daughters. His parents were both from the north of Ireland, and his Christian name had been his mother's surname. The motto attached to his father's family crest was 'Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati.' Before he was three years old his father moved to Liverpool and became incumbent of St. Augustine's, Everton. He died before Forbes was thirteen, but the memory of his holy life remained as an abiding influence. Thus he writes of him in 1903:
'The old memories form a kind of sacred history urging me onwards and upwards. I like to feel that I reap the prayers and thanksgivings of my father, that God blesses the son of such a father. The same work, the same God, the same promises, the same hope, the same sure and certain reward. I thank God and take courage.'
As a boy he was never robust and might even be regarded as delicate. After attending one or two private schools he was entered, at the age of twelve, at Liverpool College, where five of his brothers had been. When his father died in February 1881, the house in Liverpool was given up and Forbes was sent to Rossall. He continued at Rossall till he entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1887.