were to make out a list of the scholars whom I have met starving and in
rags, I should make people gape. I once shared a pot of fourpenny ale
with a man who used to earn £2000 a year by coaching at Oxford. He was
in a low house near the Waterloo Road, and he died of cold and hunger
there. He had been the friend and counsellor of statesmen, but the vice
from which statesmen squeeze revenue had him by the throat before he
knew where he was, and he drifted toward death in a kind of constant
dream from which no one ever saw him wake. These once bright and
splendid intellectual beings swarm in the houses of poverty: if you pick
up with a peculiarly degraded one you may always be sure that he was one
of the best men of his time, and it seems as if the very rich quality of
his intelligence had enabled corruption to rankle through him so much
the more quickly. I have seen a tramp on the road--a queer, long-nosed,
short-sighted animal--who would read Greek with the book upside-down. He
was a very fine Latin scholar, and we tried him with Virgil; he could go
off at score when he had a single line given him, and he scarcely made a
slip, for the poetry seemed ingrained. I have shared a pennyworth of
sausage with the brother of a Chief Justice, and I have played a piccolo
while an ex-incumbent performed a dance which he described, I think, as
Pyrrhic. He fell in the fire and used hideous language in Latin and
French, but I do not know whether that was Pyrrhic also. Drink is the
dainty harvester; no puny ears for him, no faint and bending stalks: he
reaps the rathe corn, and there is only the choicest of the choice in
his sheaves. That is what I want to fix on the minds of young
people--and others; the more sense of power you have, the more pride of
strength you have, the more you are likely to be marked and shorn down
by the grim reaper; and there is little hope for you when the reaper
once approaches, because the very friends who followed the national
craze, and upheld the harmlessness of drink, will shoot out their lips
at you and run away when your bad moment comes.