I have a letter of 14 February 1911 from Henry Montagu Butler, then Master of Trinity, but headmaster at Harrow at the time when I was there; and in this letter he says, “You and Arthur Evans are, I think, the chief antiquarians of our Harrow generation, Hastings Rashdall and Charles Gore our most learned and original theologians, Walter Sichel and George Russell our most fertile writers in general literature.” I do not know whether that was a considered opinion or only a passing thought: in either case I offer Sir Arthur my condolences on being mentioned in the same breath with me. As for the two theologians, here is something that Dean Rashdall lately wrote--“I am sure that on no subject but theology could Bishop Gore have been so blind to the requirement of ordinary fairness and straight dealing between man and man.” I suggested that he could have put it better in schoolboy diction with words like liar and sneak, but he informs me that he thinks those terms too strong. It was rather a shock to me when a former fag of mine was made a Bishop--not Gore, of course--but you can never tell how fellows will turn out. Another fellow, in the same house, was sacked for getting drunk and disorderly in Harrow town. He succeeded to a Peerage and was a huge success as a Colonial Governor; and I believe his secret of success was giving the Colonials a finer Cognac, and more of it, than any Governor had given them before. In his Harrow holidays down here my brother was telling one of my great-aunts such yarns that my sister wrote off to my father, 12 August 1862, “He teazes her dreadfully, and tells her the most extraordinary things about the Exhibition. When she asked him if all the boys dined together at school, he told her that half dined at the King’s Head and the other half at the Turk’s, and those that were not hungry could have a chop and bottle of stout in their rooms.” It was not so: at any rate, in my time. He usually was very accurate, feeling that exaggeration spoiled a narrative of facts. Keep strictly to the facts, or launch out boldly into fiction. On the same principle he would not give a sixpence to relieve a case of destitution; but if the case was put before him and he was asked for twenty pounds, he might perhaps give the twenty, feeling that it might do good where sixpences were wasted. He did not often waste his money; but one evening on coming out of a theatre he meant to throw a sixpence to a man who found a hansom for us, and threw him a half-sovereign by mistake, and I heard the man say fervently, “Thank God, all the Gentlemen aren’t dead.” With his prodigious memory my brother could have written books of this sort far better than I have written these; and I am sorry I did not oftener make sure of things by asking him. (He died five-and-twenty years ago.) As it is, I have left out things of which I am not sure; and some of these things were quite worth saying, if true; but I wished to keep as closely as I could to facts.