WILL WIMBLES
Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a refuge in Tennessee for the
large class of young Englishmen whom he calls "Will Wimbles," after
one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addison's _Spectator_, is
said to be a failure, owing mainly to the poverty of the land and
the remoteness of the markets. An acute writer in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ maintains that there is another and more potent cause to be
found in the quality of the Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the
young men who are educated in the public schools and universities,
or at least in the public schools, and are turned out into the world
between eighteen and twenty-one, without any special training
whatever, but with the manners and instincts of gentlemen, and with
entire willingness to take to any calling but the lower walks of
"trade." The great body of them are the sons of middle-class
parents--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small squires--whose means
are very moderate, and who have to submit to more or less privation
in order to send their sons to the public schools at all.
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