Poor Eric! What chance can a boy have had whose egregious parent insisted upon outraging every canon of schoolboy law on his behalf? We are not altogether surprised to read, a little later, that though from that day Eric was never troubled with personal violence from Barker, "rancour smouldered deep in the heart of the baffled tyrant." Then, as already noted, the atmosphere and incidents of _Eric_ fail to carry conviction. Making every allowance for the eccentricities of people who lived sixty years ago, the modern boy simply refuses to credit the idea of members of a "decent" school indulging in "a superior titter" when one of their number performed the everyday feat of breaking down in translation. He finds it hard to believe that Owen (who is labelled with damning enthusiasm "a boy of mental superiority") would really report another boy for kicking him, and quite incredible that after the kicker had been flogged the virtuous Owen should "have the keen mortification of seeing 'Owen is a sneak' written up all about the walls." As for Eric and Russell, sitting on a green bank beside the sea and "looking into one another's eyes and silently promising that they will be loving friends for ever"--the spectacle makes the undemonstrative young Briton physically unwell. Again, no schoolboy ever called lighted candles "superfluous abundance of nocturnal illumination"; and no schoolmaster under any circumstances ever "laid a gentle hand" upon a schoolboy's head. A hand, possibly, but not a gentle one. Lower School boys are not given Æschylus to read; and if they were they would not waste their play-hours discussing the best rendering of a particularly knotty passage occurring in a lesson happily over and done with. If the first half of _Eric_ is overdrawn and improbable, the second is rank melodrama--and bad melodrama at that. The trial scene is impossibly theatrical, and Russell's illness and death-bed deliverances are an outrage on schoolboy reserve. Listen again to one Montagu, a sixth-form boy who has caught a gang of dormitory roysterers preparing an apple-pie bed for him. Does he call them "cheeky young swine," and knock their heads together? No! "'By heavens, this is _too_ bad!' he exclaimed, stamping his foot with anger. 'What have I ever done to you young blackguards that you should treat me thus? Have I ever been a bully? Have I ever harmed one of you? And _you_, too, Vernon Williams!' "The little boy trembled and looked ashamed under his glance of sorrow and scorn. "'Well, I _know_ who has put you up to this; but you shall not escape so. I shall thrash you, every one.' "Very quietly he suited the action to the word, sparing none." These silent, strong men! Again, do, or did, English schoolboys ever behave like this?