Sunday, January 11, 2015

 

The Education of the Young

Dear Mike,

Your latest (on "an old fogey") reminds me of the "rum-soaked club men" of my favorite letter by John Jay Chapman, from M.A. DeWolfe Howe's edition of John Jay Chapman and his letters (Houghton Mifflin 1937). The Rev. Samuel Drury was headmaster of St. Paul's School, Concord, N.H., where Chapman's sons were students.

As ever,

Ian [Jackson]



To S. S. Drury
                                                                                                                      BARRYTOWN, N.Y.
                                                                                                                      Nov. 26: 1916

MY DEAR DR. DRURY
Do you really think that if I had any ideas on the parent and child question I'd waste them on you? But just now I am taking a loaf and trying to forget the whole subject. Is the education of the young the whole of life? I hate the young — I'm worn out with them. They absorb you and suck you dry and are vampires and selfish brutes at best. Give me some good old rumsoaked club men — who can't be improved and make no moral claims — and let me play chequers with them and look out of the Club window and think about what I'll have for dinner.
                                                                                         Yours faithfully
                                                                                                                     JOHN JAY CHAPMAN



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