Of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious thing about boys--I mentioned it the other day--which is, their extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than they are. Even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if they were not only not particular, but positively vicious. They don't like aspersions on their moral character to be made by others, but they rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the most virtuous boys can bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to be what is called "Pi." This does not happen when boys are by themselves; they will then talk unaffectedly about their principles and practice, if their interlocutor is also unaffected. But when they are together, a kind of disease of self-accusation attacks them. I suppose that it is the perversion of a wholesome instinct, the desire not to be thought better than they are; but part of the exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral tone of public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming to a public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as is often the case, they are wholly untainted by it. The same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. The old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in the Master of Ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of drink, bears himself like a Christian martyr, has gone out; just as the kind of pride is extinct against which the early Victorian books used to warn children, and which was manifested by sitting in a carriage surveying a beggar with a curling lip--a course of action which was invariably followed by the breaking of a Bank, or by some mysterious financial operation involving an entire loss of fortune and respectability.