With regard to more important matters, it must suffice to say that then, as always, his moral standard was the highest, and that no evil thing dared manifest itself in his presence.  He had been trained, by an admirable mother, in the best traditions of the Tractarian school, and he was worthy of his training.  Among his intimate friends were Dalmeny, afterwards Lord Rosebery; Henry Northcote, now Lord Northcote; Freddy Wood, afterwards Meynell; Alberic Bertie; and Francis Pelham, afterwards Lord Chichester.  He left Eton in July, 1864, and his tutor, in a letter to a friend, thus commented on his departure:  “There was nothing to comfort me in parting with Holland; and he was the picture of tenderness.  He and others stayed a good while, talking in the ordinary easy way.  M. L. came, and his shyness did not prevent my saying what I wished to say to him.  But to Holland I could say nothing; and now that I am writing about it I cannot bear to think that he is lost.”

On leaving Eton, Holland went abroad to learn French, with an ultimate view to making his career in diplomacy.  Truly the Canon of St. Paul’s is an “inheritor of unfulfilled renown.”  What an Ambassador he would have made!  There is something that warms the heart in the thought of His Excellency Sir Henry Scott Holland, G.C.B., writing despatches to Sir Edward Grey in the style of The Commonwealth, and negotiating with the Czar or the Sultan on the lines of the Christian Social Union.

Returning from his French pilgrimage, he wept to a private tutor in Northamptonshire, who reported that “Holland was quite unique in charm and goodness, but would never be a scholar.”  In January, 1866, this charming but unscholarly youth went up to Balliol, and a new and momentous chapter in his life began.

What was he like at this period of his life?  A graphic letter just received enables me to answer this question.  “When I first met him, I looked on him with the deepest interest, and realized the charm that everyone felt.  He had just gone up to Oxford, and was intensely keen on Ruskin and Browning, and devoted to music.  He would listen with rapt attention when we played Chopin and Schumann to him.  I used to meet him at dinner-parties when I first came out, by which time he was very enthusiastic on the Catholic side, and very fond of St. Barnabas, Pimlico, and was also deeply moved by social questions, East End poor, etc.; always unconventional, and always passionately interested in whatever he talked of.  Burne-Jones once told me:  ’It was perfectly delicious to see Holland come into a room, laughing before he had even said a word, and always bubbling over with life and joy.’  Canon Mason said to me many years ago that he had hoped I kept every scrap Scotty ever wrote to me, as he was quite sure he was the most remarkable man of his generation.  But there was a grave background to all this merriment.  I remember that, as we were coming out of a London party, and looked on the hungry faces in the crowd outside the door, I rather foolishly said:  ’One couldn’t bear to look at them unless one felt that there was another world for them.’  He replied:  ’Are we to have both, then?’ I know how his tone and the look in his face haunted me more than I can say.”