2.  Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will be well taught classics at school—­not well taught in other things—­will easily get a scholarship either at school or university.  So much in parents’ pockets.

3.  Exceptionally clever, energetic lad will get as much mathematics, mechanics, and other needful preliminaries to architecture, as he wants (and a good deal more if he likes) at Oxford.  Excellent physical school there.

4.  Splendid Art museums at Oxford.

5.  Prigs not peculiar to Oxford.

6.  Don Cambridge would choke science (except mathematics) if it could as willingly as Don Oxford and more so.

7.  Oxford always represents English opinion, in all its extremes, better than Cambridge.

8.  Cambridge better for doctors, Oxford for architects, poets, painters, and-all-that-sort-of-cattle (all crossed out).

9.  Lawrence will go to Oxford and become a real scholar, which is a great thing and a noble.  He will combine the new and the old, and show how much better the world would have been if it had stuck to Hellenism.  You are dreaming of the schoolboy who does not follow up his work, or becomes a mere poll man.  Good enough for parsons, not for men.  Lawrence will go to Oxford.

Ever your aggrawatin’

Pa.

[Like the old Greek sage and statesman, my father might have declared that old age found him ever learning.  Not indeed with the fiery earnestness of his young days of stress and storm; but with the steady advance of a practised worker who cannot be unoccupied.  History and philosophy, especially biblical criticism, composed his chief reading in these later years.

Fortune had ceased her buffets; broken health was restored; and from his resting-place among his books and his plants he watched keenly the struggle which had now passed into other hands, still ready to strike a blow if need be, or even, on rare occasions, to return to the fighting line, as when he became a leader in the movement for London University reform.

His days at Eastbourne, then, were full of occupation, if not the occupation of former days.  The day began as early; he never relaxed from the rule of an eight o’clock breakfast.  Then a pipe and an hour and a half of letter-writing or working at an essay.  Then a short expedition around the garden, to inspect the creepers, tend the saxifrages, or see how the more exposed shrubs could best be sheltered from the shrivelling winds.  The gravelled terrace immediately behind the house was called the Quarterdeck; it was the place for a brisk patrolling in uncertain weather or in a north wind.  In the lower garden was a parallel walk protected from the south by a high double hedge of cypress and golden elder, designed for shelter from the summer sun and southerly winds.