he himself described her as “very hot pastry.”  He was familiar with certain shops in the neighbourhood of Shaftesbury Avenue, which made persuasion easy.  To Edwin, whose life at home had kept him in ignorance of all that a boy of fifteen ought to know, everything sounded horrible, and he said so.  He remembered the look of the girl quite well: rather anæmic with black hair and a pretty oval face.  Griffin and Widdup howled over his innocence, and began to instruct him in the “origins of life.”  All these things came as a great shock to Edwin.  He felt a passionate conviction that the other two were fooling him.  Unfortunately his father had never employed a coachman.

“I don’t believe a bit of it,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“You silly kid,” said Widdup.  “Everybody knows it’s true.”

“I don’t believe my father would do a thing like that,” cried Edwin.

It seemed suddenly as if the world had become a gross and horrible planet.  The fetters of earth were galling his limbs.  He felt a sudden immense yearning for the coolness and cleanliness of stellar space.  If only he could pass the rest of his life in the great square of Pegasus! . . .  And he was consoled by the assurance that in heaven, at any rate, there was no marrying or giving in marriage. . . .

III

Next term, to his great joy, he was moved up into the Upper Fourth, and had for his form-master the gentle Mr. Leeming, a fat and cheerful cleric with clean-shaven cheeks that shone like those of a trumpet-blowing cherub.  He was very shortsighted, rather lazy, and intensely grateful for the least spark of intelligence to be found in his class.  Edwin soon attracted him by his history and essays.  His mother had fulfilled her promise of reading The Fortunes of Nigel aloud in the holidays, and, as luck would have it again, the Upper Fourth were supposed to be concentrating on the early Stuarts.  To the bulk of the form the period was a vast and almost empty chamber like the big schoolroom, inhabited by one or two stiff figures, devitalised by dates—a very dreary place.  But to Edwin it was crowded with the swaggerers of Alsatia, the bravoes of Whitehall, with prentices, and penniless Scotchmen, and all the rest of Scott’s gallant company.

“Have any of you read Nigel?” Mr. Leeming asked the class.

“I have, sir,” said Edwin shyly.

“I have already gathered so, Ingleby.  Has anybody else read it?”

Silence.  “I think I shall ask the head master to set it to the Middle School as a holiday task,” said Mr. Leeming.

Thus narrowly did Edwin escape the disaster of having Scott spoiled for him.

Mr. Leeming was the master in charge of the library, and Edwin began to spend the long winter lock-ups in this room.  Most of the boys who frequented it came there for the bound volumes of the Illustrated London News, with their pictures of the Franco-Prussian War, Irish evictions, the launching of the Great Eastern, and mild excitements of that kind.  Edwin found himself drawn early to the bookcase that held the poets.  To his great joy he discovered that the key of his playbox fitted the case; and so he would sometimes sneak into the room at odd moments in the day and carry away with him certain slim green volumes from the top shelf.  These were Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, together with their Complete Works.  He had been attracted to them in the first place by the memory of a polished urn, about as graceful in contour as a carpenter’s baluster, that stood in a neglected corner of the parish church at home.  This urn was encircled by a scroll which bore these directions

“O smite thy breast and drop a tear—
For know thy Shenstone’s dust lies here.”

A palpable falsehood; for Edwin had already discovered the tomb of the elegist in another part of the churchyard, elbowed almost into the path by that of a Victorian ironmonger.

But it was something to have been born in the same parish as a poet; and Edwin, at an age when everything is a matter of taking sides, ranged himself boldly with Shenstone and pitted his judgment against that of Johnson, who rather sniffed at the poet’s unreality, and quoted Gray’s letters in his despite.  The crook and the pipe and the kid were to Edwin very real things, as one supposes they were almost real to the age of the pastoral ballad; and the atmosphere was the more vital to him because he dimly remembered the sight of the poet’s lawns frosted on misty mornings of winter, the sighing of the Leasowes beeches, and the damp drippings of the winter woods.  Thus he absorbed not only Shenstone but Shenstone’s contemporaries: men like Dyer and Lyttleton and Akenside, and since he had no other standard than that of Johnson he classed them by the same lights as their contemporaries.  Brooding among Augustan poetasters in the library Mr. Leeming found him.

“Poetry, Ingleby?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me see?  Prior?  Ah, that was a little age, Ingleby!  The Augustans were not great men, and some of them were very coarse, too.  Have you read the Idylls of the King?”

Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he himself was an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at Ingleby’s ignorance of the school in which those cherubic cheeks had expanded.  He was very fond of talking about purity and conceived it his duty to keep his class spotless.  In the Lent Term, when the form were working through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent.  The explanation of some passages troubled him.  “From fornication . . . that’s a bad thing,” he would mutter.

And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not going to look back.  A week or two later he asked him how he was getting on with Tennyson.  “Who is your favourite character in the Idylls?” he asked.

Edwin glowed.  “Oh, sir, Launcelot—or Bors.”

“But what about Sir Percivale?  ‘Sir Percivale whom Arthur and his knighthood called “The Pure,”’” he quoted in the Oxford variety of Cockney.

“I don’t know, sir,” stammered Edwin.  “They seem somehow made differently from me.”

“Arthur,” said Mr. Leeming impressively, “has a great and wonderful prototype whom we should all try to imitate no matter how distantly.”

Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming lowered his voice like that in speaking of the Prince Consort.

In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare.  One day he had got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the Newstead ruins and the poet’s own handsome head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed.  “Lord Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man.  Have you read Hiawatha?”  And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch.

At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s attentions.  He never read Byron because the books were too big to be sneaked out of the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, without distinction, nearly every volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in this way.  He read these books in second “prep” when Layton was poring over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out the cricket averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was