The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green | Page 8

of such good means towards a good
end, than I would of keeping him from any thing else that was likely to
improve his mind or affect his heart."
Mr. Larkyns put matters in a new light; and Mr. Green began to think
that a university career might be looked at from more than one point of
view. But as old prejudices are not so easily overthrown as the
lath-and-plaster erection of mere newly-formed opinion, Mr. Green was
not yet won over by Mr. Larkyns' arguments. "There was my father,"
he said, "who was one of the worthiest and kindest men living; and I
believe he never went to college, nor did he think it necessary that I
should go; and I trust I'm no worse a man than my father."
"Ah! Green," replied the rector; "the old argument! But you must not
judge the present age by the past; nor measure out to ~your~ son the
same degree of education that
[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 17]
your father might think sufficient for ~you~. When you and I were
boys, Green, these things were thought of very differently to what they
are in the present day; and when your father gave you a respectable
education at a classical school, he did all that he thought was requisite
to form you into a country gentleman, and fit you for that station in life
you were destined to fill. But consider what a progressive age it is that
we live in; and you will see that the standard of education has been
considerably raised since the days when you and I did the 'propria quae
maribus' together; and that when he comes to mix in society, more will

be demanded of the son than was expected from the father. And besides
this, think in how many ways it will benefit Verdant to send him to
college. By mixing more in the world, and being called upon to act and
think for himself, he will gradually gain that experience, without which
a man cannot arm himself to meet the difficulties that beset all of us,
more or less, in the battle of life. He is just of an age when some
change from the narrowed circle of home is necessary. God forbid that
I should ever speak in any but the highest terms of the moral good it
must do every young man to live under his mother's watchful eye, and
be ever in the company of pure-minded sisters. Indeed, I feel this more
perhaps than many other parents would, because my lad, from his
earliest years, has been deprived of such tender training, and cut off
from such sweet society. But yet, with all this high regard for such
home influences, I put it to you, if there will not grow up in the boy's
mind, when he begins to draw near to man's estate, a very weariness of
all this, from its very sameness; a surfeiting, as it were, of all these
delicacies, and a longing for something to break the monotony of what
will gradually become to him a humdrum horse-in-the-mill kind of
country life? And it is just at this critical time that college life steps in
to his aid. With his new life a new light bursts upon his mind; he finds
that he is not the little household-god he had fancied himself to be; his
word is no longer the law of the Medes and Persians, as it was at home;
he meets with none of those little flatteries from partial relatives, or
fawning servants, that were growing into a part of his existence; but he
has to bear contradiction and reproof, to find himself only an equal
with others, when he can gain that equality by his own deserts; and, in
short, he daily progresses in that knowledge of himself, which, from the
~gnothiseauton~ days down to our own, has been found to be about the
most useful of all knowledge; for it gives a man stability of character,
and braces up his mental energies to a healthy enjoyment of the
business of life. And so, Green, I would advise you, above all things, to
let Verdant go to college."
[18 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]
Much more did the rector say, not only on this occasion, but on others;
and the more frequently he returned to the charge, the less resistance

were his arguments met with; and the result was, that Mr. Green was
fully persuaded that a university was the proper sphere for his son to
move in. But it was not without many a pang and much secret
misgiving that Mrs. Green would consent to suffer her beloved Verdant
to run the risk of those dreadful contaminations which she imagined
would inevitably accompany every college career.