‘Don’t interrupt me with public opinion, my dear nephew; you’ll quote me a leading article next. “Young men must be young men,” as the worthy head of your college said to me touching a case of rustication. “My dear sir,” said I, “I only wish to heaven they would be; but as for my own nephews, they seem to me a sort of hobbadi-hoy cherub, too big to be innocent, and too simple for anything else. They’re full of the notion of the world being so wicked and of their taking a higher line, as they call it. I only fear they’ll never take any line at all.” What is the true purpose of education? Simply to make plain to the young understanding the laws of the life they will have to enter. For example—that lying won’t do, thieving still less; that idleness will get punished; that if they are cowards, the whole world will be against them; that if they will have their own way, they must fight for it. As for the conscience, mamma, I take it—such as mammas are now-a-days, at any rate—has probably set that agoing fast enough already. What a blessing to see her good little child come back a brave young devil-may-care!’
‘Exactly, my dear sir. As if at twelve or fourteen a roundabout boy, with his three meals a day inside him, is likely to be over-troubled with scruples.’
‘Put him through a strong course of confirmation and sacraments, backed up with sermons and private admonitions, and what is much the same as auricular confession, and really, my dear nephew, I can’t answer for it but he mayn’t turn out as great a goose as you—pardon me—were about the age of eighteen or nineteen.’
‘But to have passed through that, my dear sir! surely that can be no harm.’
‘I don’t know. Your constitutions don’t seem to recover it, quite. We did without these foolish measles well enough in my time.’
‘Westminster had its Cowper, my dear sir; and other schools had theirs also, mute and inglorious, but surely not few.’
‘Ah, ah! the beginning of troubles——’
‘You see, my dear sir, you must not refer it to Arnold, at all at all. Anything that Arnold did in this direction——’
‘Why, my dear boy, how often have I not heard from you, how he used to attack offences, not as offences—the right view—against discipline, but as sin, heinous guilt, I don’t know what beside! Why didn’t he flog them and hold his tongue? Flog them he did, but why preach?’