except perhaps an ecclesiastical biography; he would say that he had no time to read a novel; probably he glances at the Christian Year on Sundays, and peruses a Waverley novel if he is kept in bed by a cold.  Yet he considers himself, and would be generally considered, a well-educated man.  I believe myself that the reason why we as a nation love good literature so little is because we are starved at an impressionable age on a diet of classics; and to persist in regarding the classics as the high-water mark of the human intellect seems to me to argue a melancholy want of faith in the progress of the race.  However, for the moment we all believed ourselves to be men of a high culture, soundly based on the corner-stone of Latin and Greek.  Then the Bishop went on to speak of athletics with a solemn earnestness, and he said, with deep conviction, that experience had taught him that whatever was worth doing was worth doing well.  He did not argue the point as to whether all games were worth playing, or whether by filling up all the spare time of boys with them, by crowning successful athletes with glory and worship, by engaging masters who will talk with profound seriousness about bowling and batting, rowing and football, one might not be developing a perfectly false sense of proportion.  He told the boys to play games with all their might, and he left on their minds the impression that athletics were certainly things to be ranked among the Christian graces.  Of course he sincerely believed in them himself.  He would have maintained that they developed manliness and vigour, and discouraged loafing and uncleanness.  I am not at all sure myself that games as at present organised do minister directly to virtue.  The popularity of the athlete is a dangerous thing if he is not virtuously inclined; while the excessive organisation of games discourages individuality, and emphasises a very false standard of success in the minds of many boys.  But the Bishop was not invited that he might say unconventional things.  He was asked on purpose to bless things as they were, and he blessed them with all his might.

Then he went on to say that the real point after all was character and conduct; that intellect was a gift of God, and that conspicuous athletic capacity was a gift—­he did not like to say of God, so he said of Providence; but that in one respect we were all equal, and that was in our capacity for moral effort; and that the boy who came to the front was not always the distinguished scholar or the famous athlete, but the industrious, trustworthy, kindly, generous, public-spirited boy.  This he said with deep emotion, as though it were rather a daring and unexpected statement, but discerned by a vigilant candour; and all this with the air that he was testifying faithfully to the true values of life, and sweeping aside with a courageous hand the false glow and glamour of the world.  We did not like to applaud at this, but we made a subdued drumming with our heels, and uttered a sort of murmurous assent to a noble and far from obvious proposition.