the army. On the whole, I would try immediately to procure a cadetship; if you cannot get one, I would try to induce Harry to take orders. I said something about Ireland and the colonies in connection with farming. On second thoughts, I don’t think Harry would be a suitable person. Amiable tempers always require (at first) some one to look up to and lean upon; they are longer in learning to stand alone. Now, no one is so much isolated as a colonist. He is thrown entirely on his own resources, and has no one to give him advice and sympathy. In the army, and indeed in orders, one is generally trained to bear responsibility. So I am for the cadetship. He will be at once provided for, and will return to England in the prime of life with a competence. This is always supposing that he will escape the dangers of the profession (as I think), and that you and he do not think the advantages counterbalanced by the separation. I have no doubt that when communication with India is easier (and it will soon be incredibly easier), officers will come home at shorter intervals.” Meantime he was studying the same question carefully in his own case, with a view to determining whether he should take orders when his work at Harrow was over. His father and mother, though on the whole wishing that he should do so, were perfectly content to let him think the matter out, and settle it his own way. They seem, however, to have supplied him with specimens of contemporary pulpit literature, upon some of which he comments in his correspondence, not, on the whole, with any enthusiasm. “Surely,” he sums up some criticism on a popular preacher of that day, “there is a pulpit eloquence equally remote from fine writing and familiarity, such as was Dr. Arnold’s. I am doubtful as to reading these books, for I know that I ought not to think of the style, and yet I cannot help it. It takes me down against my will.” Your grandfather replied: “The Church ought certainly to be a labour of love, and followed with zeal. If on a final review of your sentiments, aided perhaps by the advice of some clergyman you look up to (why not Vaughan?) you do not think you could engraft this zeal on sound convictions, and an upright character, you are quite right in deciding for the Bar. In after life you will not be wholly dependent on a profession, and many of our best men have started as late.” In the end he made up his mind against taking orders, but not on any of the grounds which deter so many young men of ability now. “My only objection,” he writes to his mother, “to taking orders is, that it might not suit me. Once ordained, it is impossible to change your profession; and unless a man has his whole soul in this profession, he is useless, or worse.”