his—­which, indeed, practically was already his—­for his grandfather was an old man with a boundless trust in the heir on whom, his affections and hopes were centred.  The dim churches scattered over the immediate plain below; the villages clustered round them, where dwelt the toilers in these endless fields; the farms amid their trees; the cottages showing here and there on the fringes of the wood—­all the equipment and organisation of popular life over an appreciable part of the English midland at his feet, depended to an extent hardly to be exaggerated, under the conditions of the England of to-day, upon him—­upon his one man’s brain and conscience, the degree of his mental and moral capacity.

In his first youth, of course, the thought had often roused a boy’s tremulous elation and sense of romance.  Since his Cambridge days, and of late years, any more acute or dramatic perception than usual of his lot in life had been wont to bring with it rather a consciousness of weight than of inspiration.  Sensitive, fastidious, reflective, he was disturbed by remorses and scruples which had never plagued his forefathers.  During his college days, the special circumstances of a great friendship had drawn him into the full tide of a social speculation which, as it happened, was destined to go deeper with him than with most men.  The responsibilities of the rich, the disadvantages of the poor, the relation of the State to the individual—­of the old Radical dogma of free contract to the thwarting facts of social inequality; the Tory ideal of paternal government by the few as compared with the Liberal ideal of self-government by the many:  these commonplaces of economical and political discussion had very early become living and often sore realities in Aldous Raeburn’s mind, because of the long conflict in him, dating from his Cambridge life, between the influences of birth and early education and the influences of an admiring and profound affection which had opened to him the gates of a new moral world.

Towards the close of his first year at Trinity, & young man joined the college who rapidly became, in spite of various practical disadvantages, a leader among the best and keenest of his fellows.  He was poor and held a small scholarship; but it was soon plain that his health was not equal to the Tripos routine, and that the prizes of the place, brilliant as was his intellectual endowment, were not for him.  After an inward struggle, of which none perhaps but Aldous Raeburn had any exact knowledge, he laid aside his first ambitions and turned himself to another career.  A couple of hours’ serious brainwork in the day was all that was ever possible to him henceforward.  He spent it, as well as the thoughts and conversation of his less strenuous moments, on the study of history and sociology, with a view to joining the staff of lecturers for the manufacturing and country towns which the two great Universities, touched by new and popular sympathies, were then beginning to organise.