Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

ognize in the infamous blackguard who penned these abominations the saintly and delicate- minded hero of their dreams. But there is at my disposal sufficient matter of a noncommittal character to enable me to indicate for the purposes of the student the circumstances in which K. has lived, and lives. He was born about the year 1860 in a hunting shire of Eng- land. His parents were of that lesser class of county magnate which does not care to make any great show. They had enough self-respect to live the life of their choice. The boy, delicate in his youth, was not able to bear the roughness of public school for long, but he passed with honours through Oxford, respected for his piety and learn- ing by his professors and (I am ashamed to say) adored by a certain unsavoury coterie for the baby- ish beauty of his face, with its unfathomable eyes, its small and scarlet mouth, and the impudent cynicism of his — bottomless lust, I would say, but for the peculiar inappropriateness of the epi- thet. In a word he was the foremost scholar and courtesan of his year. It would be admittedly ridiculous to claim the latter note of his life as hypocritical ; only prigs will so stigmatize the former. A boy of 20 does not render Thomas à Kempis into Greek Anapaests without genuine scholarship and equally sincere piety. Yet he is the author of the nauseous hex- ameters beginning : “ Hail to the f . . ting lips of an open Athenian a . . .” He it was who capped the hexameter in St. James : “ Husbands ! Love your wives and be not bitter against them ! ” with “ Husbands ! F . . . them often, or surely some- body else will ! ” A few examples of his quaint, often recondite, wit will delight all who hear. [3]