Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge | Page 3

the
pleasure of clapping his hands from the nursery window to summon them in. "Children,
children, come in," he used to say.
A curious little dialogue is preserved by his aunt in a diary. He laughed so immoderately
at something that was said at lunch by one of his elders, that when his father inquired
what the joke was, he was unable to answer. "It must be something very funny," said his
mother in explanation. "Arthur never laughs unless there is a joke." The little boy became
grave at once, and said severely, "There's hardly ever anything to laugh at in what you
say; but I always laugh for fear people should be disappointed."
He was very sensitive to rebuke. "I am not so sensitive as I am always supposed to be,"
he said to me once. "I am one of those people who cry when they are spoken to, and do it
again."
For instance, he told me that, being very fond of music when he was small, he stole down
one morning at six to play the piano. His father, a very early riser, was disturbed by the

gentle tinkling, and coming out of his study, asked him rather sharply why he couldn't do
something useful--read some Shakespeare. He never played on the piano again for
months, and for years never until he had ascertained that his father was out. "It was a
mistake," he told me once, apropos of it. "If he had said that it disturbed him, but that I
might do it later, I should have been delighted to stop. I always liked feeling that I was
obliging people."
He disliked his father, and feared him. The tall, handsome gentleman, accustomed to be
obeyed, in reality passionately fond of his children, dismayed him. He once wrote on a
piece of paper the words, "I hate papa," and buried it in the garden.
For the rest, he was an ordinary, rather clever, secretive child, speaking very little of his
feelings, and caring, as he has told me since, very little for anybody except his nurse. "I
cared about her in a curious way. I enjoyed the sensation of crying over imaginary evils;
and I should not like to say how often in bed at night I used to act over in my mind an
imaginary death-bed scene of my nurse, and the pathetic remarks she was to make about
Master Arthur, and the edifying bearing I was to show. This was calculated within a
given time to produce tears, and then I was content."
He went to a private school, which he hated, and then to Winchester, which he grew to
love. The interesting earnest little boy merged into the clumsy loose-jointed schoolboy,
silent and languid. There are hardly any records of this time.
"My younger sister died," he told me, "when I was at school. I experienced about ten
minutes of grief; my parents were overwhelmed with anguish, and I can remember that,
like a quick, rather clever child, I soon came to comprehend the sort of remark that
cheered them, and almost overdid it in my zeal. I am overwhelmed with shame," he said,
"whenever I look at my mother's letters about that time when she speaks of the comfort I
was to them. It was a fraus pia, but it was a most downright fraus."
I think I may relate one other curious incident among his public school experiences: it
may seem very incredible, but I have his word for it that it is true.
"A sixth-form boy took a fancy to me, and let me sit in his room, and helped me in my
work. The night before he left the school I was sitting there, and just before I went away,
being rather overcome with regretful sentiments, he caught hold of me by the arm and
said, among other things, 'And now that I am going away, and shall probably never see
you again, I don't believe you care one bit.' I don't know how I came to do it," he said,
"because I was never demonstrative; but I bent down and kissed him on the cheek, and
then blushed up to my ears. He let me go at once; he was very much astonished, and I
think not a little pleased; but it was certainly a curious incident."
During this time his intellectual development was proceeding slowly. "I went through
three phases," he said. "I began by a curious love for pastoral and descriptive poetry. I
read Thomson and Cowper, similes from 'Paradise Lost,' and other selections of my own;
I read Tennyson, and revelled in the music of the lines and words. I intended to be a poet.
"Then I became omnivorous, and read everything, whether I understood it or