I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the University.  I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I will add that I had always a strong literary bent.  I took in younger days little interest in history or polities, and tended rather to live an inner life in the region of friendship and the artistic emotions.  If I had been possessed of private means, I should, no doubt, have become a full-fledged dilettante.  But that doubtful privilege was denied me, and for a good many years I lived a busy and fairly successful life as a master at a big public school.  I will not dwell upon this, but I will say that I gained a great interest in the science of education, and acquired profound misgivings as to the nature of the intellectual process known by the name of secondary education.  More and more I began to perceive that it is conducted on diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like lines.  I tried my best, as far as it was consistent with loyalty to an established system, to correct the faulty bias.  But it was with a profound relief that I found myself suddenly provided with a literary task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my scholastic labours.  At the same time, I am deeply grateful for the practical experience I was enabled to gain, and even more for the many true and pleasant friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I was allowed to form.

What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled about one’s path in life!  Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture, came my election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life that I had always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had always seemed closed to me.

I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my life of comparative leisure.  I had acquired and kept, all through my life as a schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work; not from a sense of duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure.  I found myself at once at home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of ancient and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle grace.  The little dark-roofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own; the galleried hall, with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined library; the panelled combination-room, with its dim portraits of old worthies:  how sweet a setting for a quiet life!  Then, too, I have my own spacious rooms, with a peaceful outlook into a big close, half orchard, half garden, with bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees, bounded by a slow river.

And then, to teach me how “to borrow life and not grow old,” the happy tide of fresh and vigorous life all about me, brisk, confident, cheerful young men, friendly, sensible, amenable, at that pleasant time when the world begins to open its rich pages of experience, undimmed at present by anxiety or care.