Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/90

64 and it is of a piece with that last letter he wrote to his mother before her death in March 1915: 'This is not a letter, it 's a testimonial. I give you a character of twenty-six years. You have never advised me to do anything because it seemed wise unless it was the highest right. Single-minded you have chosen love and honour as the "things that are more excellent," and you have not failed....You are to me the dearest friend, the perfect companion, the shining example, and the proof that honour and love are above all things and are possible of attainment.' Pessimists and the few self-righteous who made a virtue of shirking their duty in the crisis that threatened to overwhelm us as a nation have sneered and cast superior doubts upon the sincerity of the ideals for which the best sons of Britain have unselfishly sacrificed all that was theirs to offer, but their fussy complacency and narrow love of self shrink to their true proportions beside the moral and spiritual stature of such a man as Colwyn Philipps. And he was no