easy for
him; while if he shows no desire to go ahead, what on earth is the good of
trying to shove him forward?«
    Ernest I believe went on with a homily upon education generally, and upon
the way in which young people should go through the embryonic stages with their
money as much as with their limbs, beginning life in a much lower social
position than that in which their parents were, and a lot more, which he has
since published - but I was getting on in years and the walk and the bracing air
had made me sleepy, so ere we had got past Greenhithe Station on our return
journey I had sunk into a refreshing sleep.
 

                                   Chapter 92

Ernest being about two and thirty years old and having had his fling for the
last three or four years, now settled down in London, and began to write
steadily. Up to this time he had given abundant promise, but had produced
nothing - nor indeed did he come before the public for another three or four
years yet.
    He lived as I have said very quietly, seeing hardly anyone but myself and
the three or four old friends with whom I had been intimate for years. We and
Ernest formed our little set and outside of this my godson was hardly known at
all.
    His main expence was travelling which he indulged in at frequent intervals
but for short times only. Do what he would he could not get through more than
about fifteen hundred a year; the rest of his income he gave away if he happened
to find a case where he thought money would be well bestowed - or put by until
some opportunity arose of getting rid of it with advantage.
    I knew he was writing, but we had had so many little differences of opinion
upon this head that by a tacit understanding the subject was seldom referred to
between us, and I did not know that he was actually publishing till one day he
brought me a book and told me that it was his own. I opened it and found it to
be a series of semi-theological, semi-social essays purporting to have been
written by six or seven different people and viewing the same class of subjects
from different standpoints.
    People had not yet forgotten the famous Essays and Reviews, and Ernest had
wickedly given [a] few touches to at least two of the essays which suggested
vaguely that they had been written by a bishop. The Essays were all of them in
support of the Church of England, and appeared both by implied internal
suggestion, and their primâ facie purport to be the work of some half dozen men
of experience and high position who