And he said, by Gad;
When I was a lad,
And the very best dry bob alive,
I should have made a million,
But a man in the Pavilion
Was killed by my first hard drive.”
J. K. Stephen used often to come down to Eton, dressed always in slippers, a dark blue flannel blazer, and a dirty pink cap on the back of his head; and thus dressed, and reading a small book, I saw him serenely and unconsciously walk across the pitch during the Winchester match.
Arthur Benson stimulated our reading tremendously, and we were startled and interested by his frank heresies. He said he did not care for Milton’s Lycidas. He wished Shakespeare had been a modern and had written novels. He was indifferent to Shelley. He loathed Byron, but was none the less impressed, when one Sunday Arnold Ward read out the description of the battle of Talavera (Childe Harold, I. xxxviii.), and he admitted it was moving. He disliked Carlyle, Ruskin, and Thackeray. On the other hand, he introduced us to Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, FitzGerald, and many others, and encouraged us to go on liking anything we did like. By this time I had read many novels—Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Pickwick, a good deal of Scott (I was given the Waverley Novels for Christmas 1889), George Eliot’s Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and quantities of poetry. Betty Ponsonby gave me Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, but explained to me that the denunciations of God in it only applied to the Greek gods, and she and my Aunt M’aimée both changed the subject when I suggested reading Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads.
Willie Coventry and I found out that there was a competition going on at this time in a magazine called Atalanta for who should write the best essay in 500 words. You were allowed to choose your own subject. Willie Coventry won it one month by writing an essay on Dr. Schliemann’s Excavations, a subject suggested to him by Arthur Benson. The next month I competed, and chose as my subject a poem by Edgar Allan Poe called “For Annie,” and I won the prize too.