XXXVlll PROCEEDINGS. 



traditional mental attitude of educated Englishmen in the 

 mid- Victorian era. The English gentleman knew no science, 

 he did not want to know any, and honestly thought that 

 neither did his country need to know any. We are all 

 too apt to imagine that what we don't happen to care about 

 is not worth other people caring about. The English gentle- 

 man certainly seemed to get on very well without science as 

 countless ancestors had done before him; and where were 

 there any gentlemen so perfect as those of English birth? 

 He spoke, like one of the characters did in "Trilby", con- 

 temptuously of all foreigners as "damned". The French 

 perhaps were his only rivals, and even in them he discerned 

 faults, for did they not gesticulate when they spoke, and 

 were they not wholly ignorant of sport? Without doubt ^ 

 England's product par excellence was gentlemen. The 

 public schools turned them out each year worthy of the 

 high traditions of their forefathers. The English gentleman 

 had his ancestral country seat in its beautiful timbered 

 park, a haunt of ancient peace, for in all probability it was 

 once an ivy-covered monastery; he had a rent roll so large 

 that he never needed to soil his hands; but if he did want a 

 profession for a younger son, were not the Church, the Navy, 

 the Army, the Diplomatic Service, the Civil Service prefer- 

 ably of India, the Bar or lastly Politics all open to him? 

 Everything else if not vulgar might be left to eccentric, 

 beastly, long-haired foreigners — painting, sculpture, poetry, 

 music. Literature as a profession was not to be thought 

 of: of course it was respectable, for Macaulay, Lytton, and 

 Beaconsfield had been it, and Scott was a gentleman; but 

 really it was not "the thing". Of course there was the life 

 of a 'Varsity Don, if by chance j^ou were badly off and your 

 son had brains — the life of a classical scholar was not vulgar; 

 but the typical English gentleman didn't need University 

 emoluments, and certainly didn't wish to assume University 

 duties. The vast majority of University or School appoint- 



