=Comradeship.=—We have all been interested in the late Mr Rhodes’s illuminating will, and I suppose most mothers and most masters have pondered the four groups of qualifications for scholarships. In (3) we have ‘fellowship,’ in (4) ‘instincts to lead and take an interest in his schoolmates.’ It is well that a talent for _Comradeship_ should be brought before us in this prominent way as a _sine quâ non_. Here is the rock upon which Ruskin’s education split, as he was sadly aware; he never knew the joys of comradeship. Having spoken of ‘peace, obedience, faith; these three for chief good; next to these the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind,’ as the main blessings of his childhood, he goes on to enumerate ‘the equally dominant calamities’:— “First, that I had nothing to love. My parents were—in a sort—visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than the sun and the moon: only I should have been annoyed and puzzled if either of them had gone out; (how much, now, when both are darkened!)—still less did I love God; not that I had any quarrel with Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people told me was His service, disagreeable; and what people told me was His book, not entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel with neither; nobody to assist, and nobody to thank. Not a servant was ever allowed to do anything for me, but what it was their duty to do; and why should I have been grateful to the cook for cooking, or the gardener for gardening?... My present verdict, therefore, on the general tenor of my education at that time, must be, that it was at once too formal and too luxurious; leaving my character at the most important moment for its construction, cramped indeed, but not disciplined; and only by protection innocent, instead of by practice virtuous.” Wordsworth, on the contrary, as we have seen, lived the life of his schoolfellows with entire _abandon_. He was with a crowd of his mates or he was with a friend, and was only alone in those moments of deeper intimacy which we shall speak of presently. The simple life of his ‘belovèd Vale’ took such hold on his tenacious northern nature that not Cambridge, nor London, nor (as we have seen) Europe in its time of convulsion, could displace the earlier images or give new direction to his profoundest thought. Scott laid claim to ‘intimacy with all ranks of my countrymen from the Scottish peer to the Scottish ploughman,’ and—we get the Waverley Novels. Wordsworth was satisfied to know the fine-natured peasant folk of his own dales, and poet-souls like his own. Perhaps such limitations went to the making of the poet of plain living and high thinking; but limitations are hazardous. CHAPTER XIX WE ARE EDUCATED BY OUR INTIMACIES PART III.—_VOCATION_