HENRY GRAHAM DAKYNS.
[To Tlia EDITOR OF TB8 spserAms.~.1 Sin,—Henry Graham Dakyns was a dear friend of mine, and I read Mr. Plunket Greene's appreciation of him in the Spectator of July 22nd with much interest. It is in many respects admirable. He perceives the power of awakening in the most ordinary schoolboy an enthusiasm for high ideals, which was a marked distinction of Mr. Dakyns in his dealing with boys. All Dakyns's teaching showed this. He could make of a book like Xenophon's " Anabasis a rich mine of high thoughts and noble aspirations and infuse into his boys the spirit of his teaching. I well remember, when I was for a short time one of his colleagues at Clifton College, having to examine his form in that book, which they had been " doing " with him. I found, to my surprise, all his form, " good " boys and " bad " boys alike, so enthusiasti- cally interested in the book—the story and the man—that they one and all insisted on sitting at my elbow while I went through and marked their papers.
But I think Mr. Plunket Greene makes too much of the occasional fits of nervous excitement which led Dakyns on rare occasions to some grotesque exhibition of physical force These things are doubtless characteristics to be remembered and smiled at by those who loved him ; but when brought out and accentuated in a public print, for the benefit of the world which knew him not, they are apt to produce in many minds an impression that there was something strangely brutal in his methods.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There was not and could not be any brutality in his refined and sensitive Hackford Hall, Beepham, Norwich, Norfolk.
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