It is like our Divinity lessons: one has to test whether a boy has done his preparation by asking all sorts of silly questions, while all the time one is longing to preach, to point out the inspiration, to expound the Bible as a complete guide to life. It is very difficult to reconcile the two. My best Divinity scholars are certainly my least reliable boys as regards Christian practice. I wish I knew where the solution lies. I am tempted always to let the exact knowledge go and preach from a text whenever I go in to class. The object of education is to fit a boy for life, so that he may learn to conduct himself honourably and valiantly wherever he goes. Does our present system succeed in doing this? If not, it is a very serious shortcoming. What we want is much more Christian doctrine taught--it ought to pervade every lesson. There is still far too great a tendency to regard Sundays, chapels, and the Divinity lessons as something quite outside the ordinary things of life: boys are not made to perceive that their whole life is a religion and that where there is no religion there is no life, and that to try to live according to one code of ethics on Sundays and an entirely opposite one all the rest of the week is simply to kill either the spiritual or the material. During these holidays I have devised several new schemes for next term: I don't know how many of them I shall bring to fruition. I've been reading a good many books on school life lately, but they all seem to me to lack something, I don't quite know what it is. Most novelists at one time or another try their hand at a Public School novel--but I expect that the next generation will smile at our present efforts, just as we do at "Eric, or Little by Little." H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent in the human boy. He hates and loves whole-heartedly. Other men and boys become the whitest of heroes and the blackest of villains in his eyes. But beyond this there was nothing of truth to life in what was an exceedingly successful book. Arnold Lunn in his counterblast to this, "The Harrovians," dwelt too distinctly on the reverse side of the picture, on the more drab side of life at school. He is certainly truer in his descriptions but somehow he missed the soul: "The Harrovians" and "The Hill" are both like Academy pictures. I don't know if the real Public School novel will ever be written: I don't quite know if it can. In the first place, to make it both readable and true, you must take an exceptional boy like Denis Yorke in St. John Lucas's "The First Round," or those immortal scamps in "Stalky and Co."