Gardens to meet Mr. Mawer Cowtan, Master Sidney Wells and Master
William Wells. Conversation about Frederick the Great, Voltaire and
Macaulay. Cheerful and enlivening discourse on Germs, Dr. Koch,
Consumption and Tuberculosis."

"Conservative" Oldershaw regards his friend as a "red hot raging
Republican" and it is interesting to note already faint
foreshadowings of Gilbert's future political views. His parents had
made him a Liberal but it seemed to him later, as he notes in the
Autobiography, that their generation was insufficiently alive to the
condition and sufferings of the poor. Open-eyed in so many matters,
they were not looking in that particular direction. And so it was
only very gradually that he himself began to look.

Your Humble Servant read Oldershaw Elizabeth Browning's "Cry of the
Children," which the former could scarcely trust himself to read, but
which the latter candidly avowed that he did not like. Part and
parcel of Oldershaw's optimism is a desire not to believe in pictures
of real misery, and a desire to find out compensating pleasures. I
think there was a good deal in what he said, but at the same time I
think that there is real misery, physical and mental, in the low and
criminal classes, and I don't believe in crying peace where there is
no peace.

Of his brother, Gilbert notes, "Innocent Child's fault is not a
servile reverence for his elder brother, whom he regards, I believe,
as a mild lunatic." And Oldershaw recalls his own detestation of
Cecil, who would insist on monopolising the conversation when
Gilbert's friends wanted to talk to him. "An ugly little boy creeping
about," Mr. Fordham calls him. "Cecil had no vanity," writes Mrs.