To what
shall I liken it? It is not unlike a man casting into the sea a
great dragnet, and when it is full of fish, pulling it up again
and taking out fishes, good, bad and indifferent, and throwing the
bad and indifferent back again into the sea. Among the good fish
there have been Archbishop Tait, Dean Stanley, A. H. Clough, Mr.
Arnold, Lord Coleridge, Lord Justice Bowen, Mr. Ilbert, &c., &c.,
&c. The institution was founded about sixty years ago.
I have been dining alone rather dismally, and now I shall imagine
that I receive a visit from a young lady about twenty-three years
of age, who enlivens me by her prattle. Is it her or her angel?
But I believe that she is an angel, pale, volatile and like
Laodamia in Wordsworth, ready to disappear at a moment's notice. I
could write a description of her, but am not sure that I could do
her justice.
I wish that I could say anything to comfort you, my dear Margot,
or even to make you laugh. But no one can comfort another. The
memory of a beautiful character is "a joy for ever," especially of
one who was bound to you in ties of perfect amity. I saw what your
sister [Footnote: Mrs. Gordon Duff.] was from two short
conversations which I had with her, and from the manner in which
she was spoken of at Davos.
I send you the book [Footnote: Plato's Republic] which I spoke of,
though I hardly know whether it is an appropriate present; at any
rate I do not expect you to read it. It has taken me the last year
to revise and, in parts, rewrite it.
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