Page:Tom Brown's School Days.djvu/12

xiv into the stream of life, away from their own homes or while they are yet shivering after the first plunge. My sole object in writing was to preach to boys: if ever I write again, it will be to preach to some other age. I can't see that a man has any business to write at all unless he has something which he thoroughly believes and wants to preach about. If he has this, and the chance of delivering himself of it, let him by all means put it in the shape in which it will be most likely to get a hearing; but let him never be so carried away as to forget that preaching is his object.

A black soldier in a West Indian regiment, tied up to receive a couple of dozen for drunkenness, cried out to his captain, who was exhorting him to sobriety in future, "Cap'n, if you preachee, preachee; and if floggee, floggee; but no preachee and floggee too!" to which his captain might have replied, "No, Pompey, I must preach whenever I see a chance of being listened to, which I never did before; so now you must have it altogether; and I hope you may remember some of it."

There is one point which has been made by several of the reviewers who have noticed this book, and it is one which, as I am writing a Preface, I cannot pass over. They have stated that the Rugby undergraduates they remember at the Universities were "a solemn array," "boys turned into men before their time," "a semi-political, semi-sacerdotal