Poems were sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and subversive.

For they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and showed especially scant respect for the "Protestantism of the Protestant religion." The father warned him grimly that he was not going to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he had taken a double first in Greats.

Then the publication of an article in one of the leading Reviews on "The Ideals of Modern Culture," not only brought him a furious letter from home stopping all supplies, but also lost him a probable fellowship.

His college was one of the narrowest and most backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him before the fellowship examination that he would not be elected.
He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a vacant fellowship at St.Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and got it with flying colors.
Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favorable mental development was secured to him.

Not at all.