This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY - THE EDITORS APOLOGY I fulfilling a promise made to my friend, whom by your leave I will call simply Tubby, I have been conscious of a some- what difficult dilemma. When he went to Canada, he placed the manuscript of his autobiography in my hands, with power to select and abridge. I perceived that if I published it in all its length nobody would read it his life in England was not various, his orbit was circumscribed, the people he met and the situations he faced had a cer- tain sameness, the comments he made on them dealt in repetitions. On the other hand, having made my selections on the principle of giving you none but typical viii AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY incidents, and these but once, I find the result is meagre, and fear you may be angry at being troubled with it at all. Tubby himself was for publishing the whole. But craving your pardon, if you be angry, I think it is better to be amused if amused you be for an hour or so than to be bored for a day. I do assure you, you could have borne no more. The autobiography covers only the period from his leaving Oxford to the other day, and it may therefore be well to give you a few facts of his earlier life, and perhaps a word or two concerning the period men- tioned above, since I may be deceived bymy intimate acquaintance with him in thinking that his mode of life, his point of view, and his peculiar qualities are indicated suffi- ciently by himself. He was expelled from two private and our public school but his private tutor gave him an excellent character, proving that the rougli and ready methods of school- masters appreciation were unsuited to the fineness of his nature. As a young boy he was not remarkablefor distinction of the ordinary sort at his prescribed studies and at games involving muscular strength and activity. But in very early life the infinite indulgence of his smile was famous, and as in after years was often misunderstood it was even thought by his schoolfellows that its effect at a crisis in his career was largely responsible for the rigour was treated by the authorities not men of the world, 1 with which he they were was the harshest comment he himself was ever known to make on them. He spoke with invariable kindness also of the dons at Oxford who sent him down in his third year, com- plaining only that they had not absorbed the true atmosphere of the place, which he loved. He was thought eccentric there, and was well known only in a small and very exclusive set. But a certain amount of general popularity was secured to him by the disfavour of the powers, his reputation for wickedness, and the supposed magni- ficence of his debts. His theory of life also compelled him to be sometimes drunk. In his first year he was a severe ritualist, in his second an anarchist and an atheist, in his third wearily indifferent to all things, in which attitude he remained in the two years since he left the University until now whe, n he is gone from us. His humour of being carried in a sedan chair, swathed in blankets and reading a Latin poet, from his rooms to the Turkish bath, is still remem- bered in his college. When he came to live in town, he used to quote Ambition was my idol, which was broken but I think he never really thought of it, certainly not in its common forms, but lived his artistic life naturally, as a bird sings. One or two ambitions he did, however, confide to hisintimates. He drsiivd to be regarded as a man to whom no chaste woman should be allowed to speak, an aim he would mention wistfully, in a manner inexpressibly touching, for he never achieved it...