Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline from within to have a chance. When I left that school for good, I felt myself to be empty of morals. There was avoid within. The outer control had gone and it was a long time before the inner control grew up to take its place. My legacy from that school was a vivid and perfectly unconscious selfishness. From my short, far separated, loving holidays I carried away memories of affection and what it might be for me. And I think my history ever since has been the conflict between these two principles. But I was not self-indulgent. Some remnants of the old superstitions, assiduously poured into my soul by Miss Emma Davenport, still hung about me, and I used to pray to God for letters from home. I could, in all seriousness, debate with myself whether there was any sense in praying when I knew that the time had passed for posting that particular letter that I hoped for. My mother wrote constantly, but could not write often enough to keep pace with my longings. Occasionally my father wrote in his eloquent and intellectual way and fired me with enthusiasm, so that I walked as if I had wings to my feet. The Sun stands for ambition and intellect and power, and the Moon for the poetry of affection, which being insatiable, brings regret and the consciousness of a forced resignation. In those days if my mother was the Moon my father was the Sun, shining aloft in my sky. It was my father who made me the artist I am, and kindled the sort of ambition I have transmitted to my sons. My wife, once meeting an old man who in his youth had associated much with my father, judged it a good opportunity to ask about him, and whether he was a good preacher. The answer came promptly: 'Yes, good--but flighty--flighty.' I do think that romance, which is pleasant beauty, unlike the austere beauty of the classical school, is born of sweet-tempered men. My father was sweet-tempered, and affectionate, also he constantly read Shelley, and, no less, Shelley's antidote, Charles Lamb. To be with him was to be caught up into a web of delicious visionary hopefulness. Every night, when the whole house was quiet, and the servants gone to bed, he would sit for a while beside the kitchen fire and I would be with him. He never smoked during the day, and not for worlds would he have smoked in any part of the house except the kitchen; and yet he considered himself a great smoker. He used a new clay pipe, and as he waved the smoke aside with his hand, he would talk of the men he had known--his fellow-students--of Archer Butler the Platonist, and of a man called Gray who was, I think, an astronomer, and of his friend Isaac Butt, that