[I]ntellect like other human agents, depends much on its environment. Through this environment intellect may be a light for certain ‘veracities’ and all darkness for others. By this environment intellect may be blinded and debased, or may be neutralized and enfeebled. There may be states of society, and an apparatus of human life, in which the myriad forms of human self regard are so developed as to bind the soul in a network which though invisible is of steel, the scales of sympathy and antipathy so weighted, as to impart a hopeless bias to character in the wrong direction, among those very classes which (as I believe) are best endowed by nature to have the largest opportunities from position, so that in extreme cases all the advantages of intellect may be nullified by darkening moral influences and those who ought to know the best and do the best may become a standing conspiracy against things the truest, the greatest and noblest against all the redeeming forces of our nature.

For scholarship is as jealous a mistress as most others, and demands not only a man's time but his undivided allegiance.

It is more important to love the truth than to attain or comprehend it.

You ask for news of what we have been doing at Whittingehame: but I will not drag you through the details of those painful days which [are] annually given up to the horrors of a shooting party. Since that scourge has been withdrawn, I have been left in tolerable peace.