“I have always divided,” he said, “the great influences by which ordinary people are determined to action into two classes; and I have connected them with the two staves that the prophet cut, and named ‘Beauty and Bands.’

“Some people are worked upon by Beauty—­direct influences of good; they choose a thing because it is fair; they refrain from action because it is unlovely; they take nothing for granted, but have an innate fastidious standard which the ugly and painful offend.

“Others are more amenable to Bands—­home traditions, domestic affections:  they do not act and refrain from action on a thing’s own merits because it is good or bad; but because some one that they have loved would have so acted or so refrained from acting—­’My mother would not have done so;’ ‘Henry would have disliked it.’  The idea is fancifully put, but it holds good, I think.”

Shortly after my return to London, I got two letters from him of considerable importance.  I give them both.  The first is apropos of the education of Edward Bruce.

“Tredennis, August 30.

“My Dear Friend,

“I want you to get me the inclosed list of books, which I find are culpably absent from my library.  It is a very engrossing prospect, this child’s mind:  it is a blank parchment, ready for any writing, and apparently anxious for it too.

“‘Insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs,’ wrote Milton, as the end of his self-education—­something like that I intend, if I am allowed, to give this child.  I have the greatest contempt for knowledge and erudition qua knowledge and erudition.  A man who has laboriously edited the Fathers seems to me only to deserve the respect due to a man who has carried through an arduous task, and one that must have been, to anyone of human feelings and real enthusiasm for ideas, uncongenial at first.  Erudition touches the human race very little, but on the ‘omne ignotum’ principle, men are always ready to admire it, and often to pay it highly, and so there is a constant hum of these busy idlers all about the human hive.  The man who works a single practical idea into ordinary people’s minds, who adds his voice to the cry, ’It is better to give up than to take:  it is nobler to suffer silently than to win praise:  better to love than to organize,’ whether it be by novel, poem, sermon, or article, has done more, far more, to leaven humanity.  I long to open people’s eyes to that; I learnt it late myself.  Before God, if I can I will make this boy enlightened, should I live to do it; or at least not at the mercy of every vagrant prophet and bawler of conventional ideas.

  “Ever your friend,
     “Arthur Hamilton”

The next explains itself.

“Tredennis, September 15.

“My Dear Friend,

“As you write to inquire so affectionately about my health, I think it would be very wrong of me not to answer you fully; so I will take ‘health’ to mean well-being, and not confine myself to its paltry physiological usage.