Dulce Desipere

Extract

It is a rare privilege to have been born an Englishman. But it is a rare misfortune to have nurtured the ambition of one day growing up to be a great Englishman.

A friend of mine who did so has just died of a broken heart in a workhouse asylum, aged forty. As a child he showed great promise, and received even greater encouragement. At fourteen he construed Xenophon with such rapidity and intelligence that his masters spoke to him without reserve of their hope that he might become even as themselves one day. He was esteemed and praised as much for his moral as for his intellectual virtues. He had an engaging manner, a quick creative fancy, a keen eye, and neat, clever, untiring hands.

His first great shock befell him when he was seventeen. It was on the annual prize day, when he was leaving school. He had been heaped with prizes and congratulations by a Right Reverend Prelate, and cheered to the echo by his hundreds of companions and the whole teaching staff. He sat at his desk modestly concealed behind Lingard’s History, Jebb’s SofHoctes, Morley’s English Poets, sundry popular scientific treatises, and a tiny purse of golden sovereigns. He had a minimum of ordinary human vanity, and a maximum of ordinary human gratitude. He was meditating profoundly and with some wonder on the inscription at the head of the prize-list—Paltnam Qui Meruit Ferat—when the Right Reverend Prelate rose to sum up the prize-giving with appropriate words.

It was customary (he said) on these occasions to congratulate the prize-winners and to condole with those who had gained no prizes.