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 round-about 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?'
'If he did err in this way, sir, which I hardly think, I ascribe it to the spirit of the time. The real cause of the evil you complain of, which to a certain extent I admit, was, I take it, the religious movement of the last century, beginning with Wesleyanism, and culminating at last in
