[Footnote 10: _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle, Book II., chap, ii.,
p. 68. Chapman and Hall, 1831.]




CHAPTER VI

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL LIFE


I now come to what must always be the great moral crux in a boy's life,
that on which all the higher issues of his character will, in all human
probability, turn--his school life. One of our great educators took
what, looked at superficially, seemed the somewhat retrograde step of
giving up the mastership of a college at Oxford to take again the
head-mastership of a great public school. But in a conversation I had
with him he led me to infer that he had done so from the conviction
forced upon him that the whole moral trend of the character must be
given, if given at all, prior to university life, at the public school;
and to him nothing less than the formation of high moral character
seemed worth striving for. Fine scholarship and high mathematics are
excellent, but after all, as the apostle of culture, Matthew Arnold, has
told us, conduct, and not intellectual attainment, forms seven-tenths of
life.

Now, it is in connection with your boy's school life that you will have
your greatest dangers to face, your hardest battle to fight.

I am, of course, aware that your school system is in some respects