9. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD and become a real scholar, which is a great thing and a noble. He will combine the new and the old, and show how much better the world would have been if it had stuck to Hellenism. You are dreaming of the schoolboy who does not follow up his work, or becomes a mere poll man. Good enough for parsons, not for men. LAWRENCE WILL GO TO OXFORD.
Ever your aggrawatin'
Pa.
[Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared that old age found him ever learning. Not indeed with the fiery earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied. History and philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading in these later years.
Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the struggle which had now passed into other hands, still ready to strike a blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University reform.
His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the occupation of former days. The day began as early; he never relaxed from the rule of an eight o'clock breakfast. Then a pipe and an hour and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay. Then a short expedition around the garden, to inspect the creepers, tend the saxifrages, or see how the more exposed shrubs could best be sheltered from the shrivelling winds. The gravelled terrace immediately behind the house was called the Quarterdeck; it was the place for a brisk patrolling in uncertain weather or in a north wind. In the lower garden was a parallel walk protected from the south by a high double hedge of cypress and golden elder, designed for shelter from the summer sun and southerly winds.
Then would follow another spell of work till near one o'clock; the weather might tempt him out again before lunch; but afterwards he was certain to be out for an hour or two from half-past two. However hard it blew, and Eastbourne is seldom still, the tiled walk along the sea-wall always offered the possibility of a constitutional. But the high expanse of the Downs was his favourite walk. The air of Beachy Head, 560 feet up, was an unfailing tonic. In the summer he used to keep a look-out for the little flowers of the short, close turf of the chalk which could remind him of his Alpine favourites, in particular the curious phyteuma; and later on, in the folds of the hills where he had marked them, the English Gentians.
After his walk, a cup of tea was followed by more reading or writing till seven; after dinner another pipe, and then he would return to my mother in the drawing-room, and settle down in his particular armchair, with some tough volume of history or theology to read, every now and again scoring a passage for future reference, or jotting a brief note on the margin. At ten he would migrate to the study for a final smoke before going to bed.
Such was his routine, broken by occasional visits to town on business, for he was still Dean of the Royal College of Science and a trustee of the British Museum. Old friends came occasionally to stay for a few days, and tea-time would often bring one or two of the small circle of friends whom he had made in Eastbourne. These also he occasionally visited, but he scarcely ever dined out. The talking was too tiring.
The change to Eastbourne cut away a whole series of interests, but it imported a new and very strong one into my father's life. His garden was not only a convenient ambulatory, but, with its growing flowers and trees, became a novel and intense pleasure, until he began] "to think with Candide that 'Cultivons notre jardin' comprises the whole duty of man."