Читать книгу The Letters of Charles Sorley - Charles Hamilton Sorley - Страница 5

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The letters in this chapter belong to the latter half of the writer’s school-days, when he was beginning to think for himself and to discover the books and causes which interested him. In the Michaelmas Term 1911 a Junior Literary Society was started, to which he read papers on Browning’s Shorter Poems, and afterwards on a comparison of Burns and Scott, and on Blake. In the following term he made his maiden speech at the Debating Society, declining to “deplore the state of the Modern Drama,” and later in the term he seconded a motion in favour of Home Rule before an unsympathetic house. “Next time,” he wrote, “I think I shall be Conservative. It is more restful.” And actually next time (4 March 1912) he was disapproving “the demands and methods of Modern Labour.” The life of the school is most graphically represented in a series of letters descriptive of successive Field Days. Of these only one is given, and it shows that other things than tactics had then found a place in his mind. But an account of an O.T.C. “outing” to Devizes for an oral examination is given in full.

As all the letters in this chapter were written to his father and mother, the addresses are omitted.