It is the almost inevitable outcome of
a university education, and will last as long as Oxford and Cambridge do,
but not much longer.
Lord Beaconsfield sent Lothair to Oxford; it is with great pleasure that
I see he did not send Endymion. My friend Jones called my attention to
this, and we noted that the growth observable throughout Lord
Beaconsfield's life was continued to the end. He was one of those who,
no matter how long he lived, would have been always growing: this is what
makes his later novels so much better than those of Thackeray or Dickens.
There was something of the child about him to the last. Earnestness was
his greatest danger, but if he did not quite overcome it (as who indeed
can? It is the last enemy that shall be subdued), he managed to veil it
with a fair amount of success. As for Endymion, of course if Lord
Beaconsfield had thought Oxford would be good for him, he could, as Jones
pointed out to me, just as well have killed Mr. Ferrars a year or two
later. We feel satisfied, therefore, that Endymion's exclusion from a
university was carefully considered, and are glad.
I will not say that priggishness is absolutely unknown among the North
Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn
German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as
essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and
if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably
show a hankering after German institutions.
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