Memories and Hopes
Memories and-Hopes. By. Edward Lyttelton. (John Murray.
12s. &I.) -
MEMORIES: and hopes are apt in real life to be somewhat disjointed though often enough poignant and delightful. Di. Lyttelton's bookful of them is certainly disjointed, but it makes excellent reading none the less. He tells many very good stories, draws some striking word-portraits approaching at times to caricature, and says many trenchant things, grilve and gay, religious ant secular.
'His acquaintance with Public Schools, Eton boys and Eton masters, is, of course, exhaustive. Here is his description ofEnglish boys as he has known them :----• -
4" I would suggest that it is broadly true to say that English boys are. more English in their characteristics thanmen—more emotional, more reserved, more ironical, even more inarticulate, more casual, more optimistic, and lastly, at fifteen and sixteen years of ago thgy are liable to very • baffling forms of incipient but temporary lunacy."
Small wonder that no foreign master can understand them. Dr. Lyttelton tells of an unfortunate Frenchman who, thinking to make his authority recognized from the first, announced to his hilarious pupils : " I stand no om-bogs," adding " Do not _you suppose you boozle-ham me ;_ when I. turn my back to write on ze board you laugh in my face." When Dr. Lyttelton first became an Eton master—before he was head master Archbishop Temple said to him, " You are going to be a master at Eton, are you ? I consider Eton the best school in the world." His interlocutor " bubbling over with enthusiasm," expressed gratification. " What mean is this," said Temple. " You have a whole lot of boys there whom nobody could poskibly make anything of, and you manage them somehow." The recollections of Temple here set before us, however, are most of them honorific and set the great Archbishop in a lovable light. The picture of Mr. Gladstone is less attractive. " Did anyone ever hear Gladstone allow real weight to an opponent's view ?" we read ; and the impression left upon the reader's mind is one of extreme overbearingness—but Dr. Lyttelton has a habit of mingling severe criticism with • praise even when his affection for his subject is obviously strong. Canon Scott Holland, for instance, is not let go quite unscathed. A certain unspar- ingness, however, gives an added interim t.to his pages, especially as he does not spare himself and speaks as openly of failures as of successes. " The rejection of truth," he says; " is far more often due to its being disliked than to its being disbelieved," and he never " staggers " at it, to make use of an expressive archaism.
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