ETON
There are days in a man’s life which he never forgets; his first day
at school is one of them. My maiden appearance at Eton was in 1846,
sixty-nine years ago at this time of writing, but that lovely day in May
is as fresh in my memory as if it had been last week. I was only nine
years old, but I suppose that I was rather impressionable for my time of
life, and my young imagination had been fired by the enthusiasm of my
father and many of his friends, whose chief pride always had seemed to
lie in the fact that they were old “Eton fellows.”
Their stories of school days—chiefly blood-curdling tales of scrapes and
punishments borne with Spartan fortitude or avoided by hair’s-breadth
escapes, the chief joys of scholastic memory—had sunk deeply into my
mind, so that Eton seemed very familiar; and yet when I faced its
reality, the _religio loci_ was a revelation. I remember the mixed
feeling—a great joy, a shrinking fear—before the plunge into the great
unknown; the sorrow of leaving home, the freedom of new wings, the
exultation of life. I remember the terror lest I should be guilty of
some solecism upon which the wrath of the gods of the sixth form should
fall; I remember a heart throbbing, as men’s hearts might throb before
a battle, when my father rang at Mr. John Hawtrey’s[17] door (for I was
to start in lower school) and my relief at the sight of his and Mrs.
Hawtrey’s kind faces, and of the comfortable matron, Mrs. Paramour, ample
of bosom and sympathy, to whose care I was commended!
Then the awe of being led through the gate into the school-yard with
the statue of the King-Founder and the entrance to the cloisters under
Lupton’s tower, from the ground-floor room on the right of which there
issued the weird and muffled noises of a not unmelodious flute—sounds
that were to become very familiar to me later on, for the room was
occupied as a schoolroom by dear old Herr Schönerstedt, professor of
Hebrew and German, who, like Tityrus and Frederic the Great, used to
solace his leisure hours, which were many, with a flute.
Thence into the playing fields, in which the elms planted in Charles the
First’s time, then at the zenith of their pride, now all dead and gone,
were just putting forth their summer plumage; Fellows’ Pond, with a lazy
pike or two basking on the surface; Poet’s Walk, Sixth Form Bench, and
above all, the glory of Windsor Castle, most regal of palaces, towering
above the Thames. How beautiful it all was, and how romantic! The fairies
must have been tripping in rings on the turf, the dryads tempted out of
their barken hiding-places, the water-nymphs making high festival on the
silver flood, so radiantly joyous was the day!
* * * * *
We lingered under the one oak tree standing in lonely majesty on the
river bank, trying in vain to dip its boughs into the ripples on which
the sunbeams were dancing; we looked at Lord Wellesley’s weeping willows
(I wonder whether the planting of them by the great Duke’s brother
might have had some dim connection with St. Helena). It was delightful
wandering through those Elysian fields in which every tree, every corner
was a peg upon which our elders could hang a story of thirty years
ago—the fields that the Duke of Wellington loved to the end of his days.
We were to go to luncheon with the Head Master, my father’s old tutor and
lifelong friend. He used often to come and see us in the holidays, and so
was perhaps not quite such a figure of awe to me as he was to most new
boys.
But before penetrating into Weston’s Yard, where the new College
buildings had recently been erected, we must cast one glance at the
corner of the playing fields known as “Sixpenny”—just below what was then
Miss Edgar, the dame’s, tumbledown old labyrinth of a house—the classic
place for battles in the past, where I was to see many a famous fight in
the next few years. From “Sixpenny” it was that in 1825 the great Lord
Shaftesbury’s younger brother, Francis Ashley, was carried home to die
from exhaustion after fighting with a boy of the name of Wood for the
best part of two hours. I witnessed three fierce fights that were nearly
as bad, and many lesser battles, but the subject is only worth alluding
to because it is dead. There is no fighting now, I believe; perhaps,
savage as it may seem to say so, that is not altogether an advantage. Dr.
Hawtrey once said to me, “If two boys have a quarrel I would rather see
them fight it out. They shake hands afterwards, and become firm friends;
but this grudge-bearing is dreadful and has no end.”
Boys form great friendships at school; they also form great antipathies.
There was a boy at Eton, a few years older than myself, who was an
arch-bully. For some reason he bore me a special spite; his methods of
torture were curious and ingenious. If I saw him in the distance I fled.
I have heard that he is a good, gentle, harmless old gentleman, a kind
landlord, a Chairman of a Board of Guardians, greatly respected—but I
should still dread to meet him.
Venerable and imposing, very dear to us who loved him well, was the
figure of Edward Craven Hawtrey, the Head Master of Eton. He was not a
handsome man, indeed so far as features were concerned, he was distinctly
the reverse; but he was tall and upright, with the dignity of a commander
of boys or men. When he called Absence on the Chapel steps, dressed in
his cassock and doctor’s gown, his presence was imposing. When he went
out walking his attire was scrupulously neat, with as much smartness
as might become a cleric of high degree. He always wore a frock-coat
with a deep velvet collar, with which the high white cravat of those
days and his silver hair, worn slightly, but not unduly long, made a
fine contrast. Skilled “in the nice conduct of a clouded cane,” he
looked essentially a gentleman, a clergyman of the best old school.
He was a traveller, a man of the world, and a linguist, proficient in
French, German and Italian, able to hold his own, and always welcome,
in the political and learned society of many continental cities and
universities. His personality was as well known in Paris, Rome, and the
great German towns as in London or at Windsor.
[Illustration: EDWARD CRAVEN HAWTREY, D.D., ETON COLLEGE.
(_A sketch by a sixth form boy._)]
To be a good head master of Eton demands many qualifications. Dr. Hawtrey
had them all; he seemed born for the post, so admirably did he fit it.
His hospitality was unbounded, and when on a great gala day like the
Fourth of June he welcomed as guests many of the greatest people of the
kingdom, it was a lesson to see the lofty yet kindly courtesy with which
he maintained the dignity of what he justly conceived to be his great
office. His tall, stately figure stalking amongst the smartly millinered
ladies in his little slip of a garden was indeed princely.
Later in life I met him in Paris, surrounded by some of the most notable
men of the day, leaders of thought, who rejoiced in the society of
the great head master, and in listening to his cultured, many-sided,
cosmopolitan talk. He was equally at home in more frivolous surroundings.
He was welcome everywhere; at a gathering at Stafford House he would
wander through the famous galleries, a pet guest of the great Duchess
Harriet, stopped every here and there by some reigning beauty, eager to
greet and make much of the genial old man of whom she had heard so many
kindly tales from husband or brothers, the old boys whom he loved and who
loved him. Queen Victoria had the greatest regard for him, and it was his
inspiration which induced Prince Albert to found the Prince Consort’s
prizes for modern languages at Eton—a princely boon as wise as it was
generous.
I was often invited to his breakfast parties, which were interesting
feasts, for he frequently had some man of note staying with him. More
than once I met Guizot there after the collapse of the monarchy in 1848—a
quiet, grey-haired old gentleman whom it was difficult to imagine facing
the stormy Chamber with his famous “Criez, messieurs! hurlez! vos cris
n’atteindront jamais le niveau de mon dédain!”
Monsieur de Circourt was another friend of Hawtrey’s. One morning at
breakfast—it must have been about the year ’50 or ’51—the Irish famine
was being discussed. M. de Circourt, who prided himself on his knowledge
of England, and more especially of our language, startled the table
by saying: “But why did you not feed zem wiz mice?” (maize). The host
without a smile answered: “Oh! but we did send them quantities of Indian
corn,” and so cleverly turning the difficulty, saved his guest’s face.
His wit was very ready—and would sometimes manifest itself in very
unexpected moments. On one occasion, a boy of the name of Bosanquet was
sent up to the Head Master for execution. The paraphernalia of doom
were all in order; the block was drawn out from the wall, and two small
collegers stood beside it—the holders-down. The sixth form Præpositor
handed the rod to the Doctor with the “bill” upon which were written the
names of the victims. Hawtrey read out: “Bŏsānquet!” The boy corrected
him rather pertly: “Please, sir, my name is Bōsănquĕt not Bŏsānquet.”
“Sive tu mavis Bōsănquĕt vocari
Sive Bŏsānquĕt,”[18]
answered Hawtrey, pointing majestically to the block with his long rod.
He was so pleased with his neat paraphrase of Horace that the metrically
injured boy got off very cheap.
One night three boys, Gerry Goodlake, who afterwards won the V.C. at the
battle of the Alma, Suttie and another whose name I have forgotten, got
out of their tutor’s (Elliot’s) house, disguised as navvies, went up town
and procured a liberal supply of the materials necessary for the brewing
of a bowl of rum punch, with which they managed, as they hoped unseen,
to get back into their rooms. Unfortunately for them old Bott, the good
old Waterloo man who was the College policeman, had marked them down,
and at the moment when the brew was steaming fragrance in walked the
tutor. The result was, of course, an execution, the anticipation of which
aroused such a fever in the school that many boys committed small crimes
in the hope of having a fine view of the tragedy at the expense of the
traditional four cuts of the birch.
Hawtrey was bewildered by the number of “bills” that kept coming in; but
he knew his boys and he smelt a rat, so he decided to hold the great
execution _à huis clos_, divided the remaining “complaints” into two
halves—kept one half himself to be dealt with at future “after schools,”
and sent the other half down to Dickie Okes[19] to be attended to in
lower school. Great was the disappointment of the bloodthirsty little
villains at the Doctor’s cleverness.
In Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte’s otherwise admirable “History of Eton
College” there is one great blemish in the very niggardly praise, or
perhaps it would be more truthful to say the very liberal dispraise,
which is attached to Hawtrey’s scholarship. We are continually being
told that it was inaccurate. In one very unjust passage it is contended
in addition “that he was not thoroughly well-informed, though he spent
thirty thousand pounds on books;” that “he could not estimate correctly
the intellectual development of younger men, though he corresponded with
the leaders of England and France;” that “he was not qualified to train
schoolboys, like Vaughan and Kennedy,” etc., etc., etc.
Not for one moment would I detract from the teaching of those great
masters. All that I care to insist upon is the immense value of
Hawtrey’s teaching, equally as good as theirs, though different; the
boys felt that his object was not so much to make the divine poetry
of the Greeks nothing but a peg upon which to hang a discussion on
grammatical problems, but in addition to reveal the soul which animated
the work, and so to arouse a love of philology, lighting in the young
minds of his scholars the same spark of enthusiasm which had been the
beacon illuminating and making beautiful his own life. Surely if this
be dilettantism, it is also that which draws the highest value out of
what is called a classical education. Profoundly versed in the European
classics, he was able to illustrate his lectures by quotations from
French, German, and Italian sources, and so by his observations in
comparative criticism he would galvanize into new life the beauties of
the ancient writers, redeeming them from that deterrent dullness which
attaches to what are looked upon as lessons. The result of his teaching
can be seen by the great position attained by his pupils in their after
life in the great world.
As an older boy, and later as a young man, I often had the chance of
listening to his talk upon classical subjects, which was in the highest
degree interesting and stimulating. I only wish that Sir Henry Maxwell
Lyte had had the same opportunity; I think that his estimate of Dr.
Hawtrey would have been very different. There was something bright and
sunny and joyous in his scholarship, which was absolutely free from all
pedantry, and was totally different from that of the two men who preceded
and followed him in his office.
Dr. Keate was a stern, severe disciplinarian; indeed, in the remembrance
of his severity people are apt to forget that he was famous for sound and
accurate scholarship. Dr. Goodford, too, was a great scholar, but his
learning was rather of a dull, dry-as-dust type. In his classes the Greek
particles reigned supreme—imagination, the winged child of the muses,
flew away into space, scared by the digamma. It used to be said that his
children, aged five and six, were translating Plato, while the poodle dog
looked out the words in Liddell and Scott’s dictionary—then, by the bye,
a new apparition.
Hawtrey, on the contrary, was full of fun—witness some of his
translations in the “Arundines Cami.” He could turn an epigram in French,
Italian or German such as would deceive the very elect into the belief
that it was the work of a native; some of his Italian poems, privately
printed, won special praise from those best capable of judging. His
appreciation of wit was alive to the last. When he was already a very
old man, and I a clerk in the Foreign Office, I remember the enthusiasm
with which he welcomed the arrival of Mrs. Poyser to enrich the gaiety of
the world. It was this spirit of fun which enabled him to enter into the
wildest pranks of his boys—so long as they were harmless.
Windsor Fair, held in Bachelor’s Acre, was a forbidden playground for
the younger boys. The sixth form, on the other hand, went there to act
as police. Once I had been sent for to dine with the Head Master, with
whom my father was staying during the Fair time. He came in rather late,
dressed in cap and gown, laughing merrily, and carrying half a dozen
penny dolls, monkey-sticks, and toys which had been laid upon his desk.
“What in the name of wonder have you got there?” asked my father. “I
always get my fairings,” he said. He made the life of a pedagogue a life
of sympathy and good comradeship, and so a life of joy for all who came
under his kindly rule. What wonder that he was adored?
After all, the worth of the work for good or for evil which has been done
by an administrator must be judged by the fruit which it has borne. How
did Hawtrey find Eton? how did he leave it? Happily we are able to call
upon a great and unimpeachable witness. It was Hawtrey who first sent
up for good Mr. Gladstone. “It was,” he writes, “an event in my life.
He and it together then for the first time inspired me with a desire to
learn and to do.” Again—“The popular supposition is” (Mr. Gladstone,
January 3, 1890), “that Eton from 1830 onwards was swept along by a tide
of renovation due to the fame and contagious example of Dr. Arnold. But
this, in my opinion, is an error. Eton was in a singularly small degree
open to influence from other public schools. There were three persons to
whom Eton was more indebted than any others for the new life poured into
her arteries: Dr. Hawtrey, the contemporary Duke of Newcastle, and Bishop
Selwyn.”[20]
In 1846, the year of which I am writing, mathematics were no part of
the school curriculum, which remained untouched as it had been from
all time. Hawtrey in 1851 made mathematics compulsory, to the intense
disgust of all us, little conservatives to the core, who considered that
the knowledge that two and two make four might be an accomplishment,
but formed no part of the education of a gentleman. He substituted
competition for nomination to scholarships on the foundation. He fostered
the study of modern languages, promoted examinations, and did all that
was in his power to bring Eton up to the standard required by modern
advancement and culture.
His greatest feat, achieved in the face of cruel unpopularity, was the
abolition of Montem. He was wise enough to see that a custom, kindly and
picturesque in old days, must, with the arrival of the railway, which did
away with all the privacy of Eton, degenerate into an ugly saturnalia.
So long as the festival was confined to the friends and relations of the
boys, it was all very well to collect from parents, old boys and their
friends “Salt,” a sum destined to help the senior colleger in his first
year at Cambridge. But now, with the influx of a mob from London, it
must become a degradation. Many influences were against him, not in Eton
alone, but in the greater world outside; wisely he stuck to his guns, and
Montem ceased to exist. Generous as always, when the triennial feast came
round in 1847, he gave, out of his own purse, to the parents of the boy
who would have profited by the “Salt” a present of three hundred pounds.
How strong the feeling was is shown by the fact that on that day some of
the masters were stoned on their way to school. It is only fair to say
that Provost Hodgson, who succeeded Goodall, backed up the Head Master in
this crisis.
I may record another instance of his large-hearted love of giving. An old
friend and colleague of his had got himself into financial difficulties.
Hawtrey could not see the home of a brilliant man broken up and himself
brought to a pecuniary misery. He paid up all debts and set his friend
free. He was rewarded by the blackest and most treacherous ingratitude.
He never uttered a reproach, but I have reason to know that he was cut to
the quick. He suffered in silence.
Such was the dear old man who bent down to welcome me, the little boy
whom he had known in petticoats, on my first entry into his kingdom.
Smiling and laughing, brimming over with kindness, he regaled me with
all sorts of delightful old-time tales of his own school days, little
experiences all chosen because in them there was just a taste of
schoolboy wisdom: some useful hint conveyed with fun and merriment;
advice not flung like a cricket ball at the youngster’s head, but just
brought out in such a way as to be reassuring and encouraging. That
luncheon was a memorable episode in a memorable day, and it was the first
link in a long chain of kindnesses which lasted during the eight years
that I was at Eton, and did not abate until the good man’s death in 1862.
The consulate of Dr. Hawtrey was a time of transition at Eton as
elsewhere. The Eton to which I was sent in 1846 differed in little
from that which my father had known some thirty years earlier. With
the exception of the new College buildings, only just finished, in
Weston’s Yard, the outer aspect of the place had undergone no change.
There were the same old tumbledown, crazy tenements with weather-stained
walls and patched roofs, occupied by tutors and dames. All the sanitary
arrangements—save the word!—were primitively disgusting. Baths were
unknown. During the summer months, by the grace of Father Thames, there
was bathing in Cuckoo Weir, at Upper Hope, and at Athens, but from
September till about May foot-tubs of hot water carried to the various
rooms on a Saturday night represented all the cleanliness that was deemed
necessary.
The Reform Act and new forces, born of railways and machinery, and what
were by many derided as new-fangled fads of hygiene were compelling and
irresistible. During the last two years of my schoolboyhood the cold tub
had become an institution of every morning. Many other improvements were
in progress and have long since been carried out.
The head master’s house, if an anachronism, was eminently fitted to
its venerable and book-loving tenant. It still stands, a picturesque
building of which the red bricks and tiles have grown hoary with age,
long, low and rambling, flush with the Slough Road on one side, separated
on the other from Weston’s Yard by a narrow strip of garden. It was so
shallow that, like Hampton Court, Berkeley Castle, and many old-fashioned
buildings, it consisted only of a succession of rooms leading into one
another. On the first floor a very meagre passage had been negotiated,
so as to give some privacy to bedrooms, but on the ground floor there
was nothing but a chain of rooms. From floor to ceiling every room was
lined with bookcases criss-crossed with thick brass wires, in which the
treasures which were the accumulation of a lifetime were amassed. Even
the bedrooms were fitted in the same way. It was one huge library.
I do not remember any works of art or ornaments with the exception of
one of Wedgwood’s copies of the Portland Vase. When Provost Hodgson died
on the 29th of December, 1852, Dr. Hawtrey succeeded him. The drop in
income was considerable, and he had been too large a giver to have saved
anything. A great portion of the library had to be sold, and it went for
what even at that time was a song. What would it have been worth now?
Before changing over into the Provost’s lodge, Dr. Hawtrey sent for me
and gave me, as a keepsake in memory of many happy days spent with him
among his books, a beautiful little Elzevir Livy. To my father, his old
pupil, he gave a grand copy of Tasso.
The house is very old, having been occupied by Sir Henry Savile, the
handsome lay Provost whose appointment by Queen Elizabeth in May, 1596,
“any statute, act or canon to the contrary notwithstanding,” raised a
small storm. Here he set up his printing-press, and in 1613 published his
great edition of S. Chrysostom in eight folio volumes. He also printed
Xenophon’s “Cyropædia” and Thomas Bradwardine’s “De Causâ Dei contra
Pelagium.” With the Provostship of Eton he combined the office of Warden
of Merton College at Oxford.
Probably no private house can claim such a connection with books and
letters. For many years now it has been occupied by the Precentor, Dr.
Law—and it seems likely to remain the official home of music.
Hawtrey’s reforms would probably have been carried out much
sooner—perhaps even Keate might have fathered some of them—but Provost
Goodall, a grand and courtly gentleman of the old school, had the faults
of his qualities; he was the deadly enemy of change; he was one of those
men to whom progress means disaster, and having the might to spoke
the wheels of the coach, he used it with such effect that Hawtrey was
practically powerless. But in 1840 Provost Goodall died, and after some
trouble between the Court and the Fellows, the candidate favoured by
Queen Victoria was appointed, and Archdeacon Hodgson, the intimate friend
of Lord Byron, became Provost.
Lyte’s history shows how keenly the new Provost set to work to improve
the position of the collegers, and how ably he was seconded by Hawtrey.
The new buildings in Weston’s Yard were the result, and they, with
the two red-brick houses by Keate’s Lane opposite upper school, were
the only substantial additions made to the College since the early
days of the nineteenth century. The two doughty champions worked well
together—Hodgson for the much-wronged collegers; Hawtrey determined that
Eton should no longer be a mere school of ornamental classical culture
for the small minority who could or would take advantage of it, but
should march with the times, and give a boy such an education as would
fit him to play a practical part in a world which was beginning to be
very much on the move.
It is almost incredible in these days that, as I have said above, until
the year 1851 mathematics were no part of the school work. French, German
and Italian were, needless to say, in the same boat. That Frenchmen
should exist and have a language of their own was, however deplorable, an
admitted fact, but only on condition that one Englishman should be equal
to four Frenchmen, or, according to Boswell in his adulation of Johnson,
forty. Such were the archaic doctrines in which we were brought up, until
wise Dr. Hawtrey swept all the old cobwebs away.
When at last mathematics were introduced, Mr. Stephen Hawtrey, a cousin
of the Doctor’s, who had been a high wrangler at Cambridge, was appointed
master. In order to parcel out the boys into divisions under his several
assistants he had to hold an examination. Naturally the object of every
one of us was to make as bad a show as possible in order to be put into
an easy place. When my form came up for _vivâ voce_, question after
question did the unhappy man put. No answer. At last in despair he cried:
“Is there no boy here who can tell me what twice two makes?” After a
pause, “Yes, sir! Please, sir, I can!” said a very cunning little chap
called K——. “Well, what is it?” “Five, sir, please, sir!” There were many
applauding grins, but for that day Stephanos, as he was called, gave up
our form in despair. What troublous days the poor assistant mathematical
masters suffered! How they were teased and worried! Very foolishly,
the authorities would not give them the same status that the classical
masters enjoyed; they were not allowed to wear cap and gown, and might
not complain to the Head Master direct. Of course this encouraged the
boys to be as rebellious and wicked as they pleased; and being boys, they
took royal advantage of it.
Talking of extras, I do not think that many boys in my time learned
French; still fewer German. Old Mr. Tarver, of dictionary fame, the
French master, was a very charming person, liked by all of us who knew
him. His story was curious. He was an Englishman born at Dieppe in 1790.
His parents were imprisoned in France in 1793, while he was staying at
the house of a friend, M. Féval, who was chief engineer in the Ponts et
Chaussées of the Seine Inférieure. When his parents escaped to England
he was left behind, and it was not until 1814, after holding various
appointments, amongst others that of Secretary to the Admiral of the
French fleet at Toulon and in other places, that he was able to seek them
out. His father was dead, but his mother was still alive.
After holding different educational posts, amongst others that of tutor
to the Duke of Cambridge, he became French master, and held the place for
twenty-five years. He died in 1851, and was succeeded by his sons, Henry
and Frank. He had a pupil-room in the Christopher Inn Yard, and I used
often to go and pay him a little visit, quite apart from lessons, and
listen to the stories of his old adventures. One of his sons, Charles,
was classical tutor to King Edward when Prince of Wales.
To Herr Schönerstedt and his beloved flute I have already alluded. He was
a tall, handsome, very courtly gentleman. If a boy met him in the street
he would treat him as ceremoniously as if he were a Russian Grand Duke,
never forgetting, even if he were meditating revenge for some crime,
to make a sweeping bow and take leave with a grandiloquent “gehorsamer
Diener.” With Signor Sinibaldi I had little more than a forefinger-to-hat
acquaintance.
Such were the materials out of which the new Eton was evolved. All
the principal changes took place in my time. I was born under the old
dispensation and I lived through the transition stage into the new.
Revolutions, even in a school system, are not brought to maturity in a
day, and those who read Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte will see that time was
needed to make the new machinery work smoothly.
Provost Hodgson, as I recollect him, was a short, fat, sturdy little man,
almost as broad as he was long, waddling not without a certain web-footed
dignity out of the Provost’s Lodge into Weston’s Yard, but how difficult
it was to think of him as the cherished friend of the romantic,
devil-may-care poet, rebel against all law and convention. Later in life
I got to know Lord Broughton. Here again was a contrast with Byron—the
reverend, calm, wise and judicious statesman, and the wild, defiant
child of genius. Those who cry out so loudly against the unhappy poet
might pause and ask themselves whether, since he could inspire undying
affection in two such men, he himself could be all bad.
* * * * *
As I have said, we were in a period of transition. There were here
and there a few old gentlemen who, clinging desperately to ancient
traditions, refused to exchange their knee-breeches with bunches
of ribbons at the knee for the vulgar but comfortable trousers.
Knee-breeches were the outward and visible sign of obstruction. Among
the Fellows of Eton two of these faithful veterans still lived and
hindered—Mr. Bethell and Mr. Plumptre. Mr. Bethell was a fine old
dignitary of the Church, handsome and well-nourished, with a glowing face
and noble paunch, suggestive of a good cook, an excellent digestion,
and a well-stored cellar. He was the hero of the crusty old story of
the days when he was a master: “‘Ærati postes’—‘brazen gates’—very good
translation; probably so called because they were made of Brass.” He
had been a friend of some of my people, so I was sometimes invited to
breakfast with him. The rolls were memorable. Mr. Plumptre was famous for
sermons of appalling length, preached upon texts that were absolutely
grotesque.
Lyte quotes several of these, but this I think is better than any that he
gives. Being asked once to preach a sermon to the Blue-coat boys, he took
for his text: “Moreover his mother made him a little coat and brought it
to him from year to year.” As the poor old gentleman had not a tooth left
in his head, his sermons, bellowed out at the top of a powerful but very
indistinct voice, were exquisitely comic.
Plumptre’s defence of Montem is historic; he believed it to have been
substituted for a triennial procession in honour of the Virgin Mary, and
that therefore it ought to be preserved as a sort of protest against
Popery.[21] It is only fair to say that in this case and some others Mr.
Bethell sided with the Provost and Head Master. The Fellows, however
powerful Hodgson and Hawtrey might be, had still a toothless voice in the
government of the College. There was a long and tough fight over every
innovation, but in the end common sense prevailed over the knee-breeches.
It was not long before the last of these disappeared in the waters of
Lethe.
After all, they could claim a goodly record for the old dispensation.
Even in their own narrow scholastic circle they could point to great
teachers like Keate[22] and Hawtrey; among the assistant masters were
Edward Coleridge, a famous tutor, son-in-law of Keate, who certainly
came up to the Greek definition of a gentleman: “handsome and good;”
Cookesley, a crank, but a brilliant scholar, delighting in Pindar and
Greek metrical problems; Carter, clever, but perhaps a little too eager
to exact heavy payment for the pleasures of idleness; my own excellent
tutor, best and kindest of men, Francis Edward Durnford; Edward Balston,
afterwards Head Master, another καλὸς κ’ ἀγαθός; William Johnson, who
afterwards changed his name to Cory, a sound scholar, and no mean poet.
These were all men of a very high standard, the children of the old Eton
herself, children of whom the kind mother might well be proud.
But the old school had to take note of a new sharpness in the struggle
for life. Not the schoolmaster only, but the examiner, was abroad, and
the time had come when every position, no matter how humble, must be won
by hard fighting. So the last three years of the eight which I spent at
Eton were lived in altered circumstances. Many changes, and doubtless
great improvements, have been effected since then, but the first great
upheaval took place in 1851 and was due to the genius and foresight of
Dr. Hawtrey. Far too much credit for all this has been given to Dr.
Goodford. It is true that many alterations took place during his tenure
of office, but they had almost all been proposed by Dr. Hawtrey and were
only delayed by the obstruction of some of the old men, with Provost
Goodall at their head. When Hawtrey became Provost, Goodford’s path was
smoothed by the very man who had laid its foundation. I, who though a boy
or a very young man was much behind the scenes, know to whom the palm was
due.
[Illustration: FIRE-PLACE IN EVANS’ HOUSE.
_From a water-colour sketch by W. Evans._]
I was still but a small creature, and not very strong, when I went to
Evans’s, so I was put into the private part of the house, and Miss Jennie
Evans, then a tall young lady of about twenty, took me under her wing.
About fifty years afterwards, when she had succeeded to her good old
father’s damery, and I took my boy to be in her house, she said to him,
pointing to the staircase: “Many and many a time I have carried your
father pick-a-back up those stairs.” When she died in January, 1906, the
last of the dames, her loss meant the close of a long chapter in the
history of Eton. She was a beloved lady.
By degrees I sprouted and grew, and so I was moved into the main body
of the house, where I had a snug little room with young Charles Dickens
for my next-door neighbour. We soon became allies, and with half a dozen
other boys started a little newspaper club which developed into a big
success. In the “Dictionary of National Biography” his name is given as
“Charles” only. He was christened, as he told me, Charles Boz Dickens.
When he was taken to the font on his baptism, and the parson told the
godfather to “name this child,” the sponsor said “Charles,” but the
old grandfather, the prototype of Mr. Micawber, as proud as Punch of
his already famous son, cried out “Boz,” and “Charles Boz” he became
accordingly. My friendship with him led to my first acquaintance with
his great father, who came down to Eton one fine summer’s day, with Mark
Lemon and, I think, Shirley Brooks, and took several of us up the river
to Maidenhead.
What a day that was! The great man was full of life, bubbling over with
fun, the youngest boy of the party. I often met him in after life, but
then, wonderful as he was upon occasions, his face when at rest already
showed signs of fatigue; the strenuous work had told upon him; he looked
careworn and older than his years. I like to think of him as he was on
that day at Maidenhead, brilliant, young and gay, the spirit of joy
incarnate. It was at the time when he was writing “Bleak House.” I never
saw his son after our Eton days. He was a clever boy, but he did not
achieve as much in life as he might have done; perhaps he never quite
found his legs. In letters, no doubt, he felt crushed by his own great
name; he went into business, for which it seems he had no aptitude, and
he died when still in the prime of life.
Eton has been the Alma Mater of many of the eminent men who have played
a foremost part in the history of England. In my day there were many
brilliant boys, some of whom distinguished themselves in after life. Of
my own immediate contemporaries none could be held to come up to Sir
Michael Hicks Beach, now Lord St. Aldwyn. There was no W. E. Gladstone;
Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, and Lord Roberts had just left;
Arthur Balfour, Lord Rosebery and Lord Randolph Churchill were not yet.
Our fellows did well enough, though we did not produce a Phœnix. Alfred
Thesiger died as a Lord Justice of Appeal at an age when many men are
wondering whether they will ever get a brief.
Montague Williams was famous as a police magistrate; in the Civil Service
we could count as permanent heads of departments, Lord Welby at the
Treasury, Lord Tenterden, Lord Currie and Lord Sanderson at the Foreign
Office, Sir Robert Herbert at the Colonial Office, Sir Charles Rivers
Wilson at the National Debt Office, Sir Algernon West at the Inland
Revenue, Sir Stevenson Blackwood at the Post Office, followed by Sir
Spencer Walpole, who also achieved fame as an historian, Sir Charles
Fremantle at the Mint, myself at the Office of Works.
I have heard it objected that Eton’s successes are due to the fact that
its boys belong to “the governing classes.” They forget that for the
last fifty years and more the entry into the Civil Service has been by
public examination. I myself entered the Foreign Office by competition
just fifty-seven years ago. Even in old days, it was only the first
appointments that were given by patronage. The higher posts, what one
might call the Staff appointments, were given by selection for merit.
Ministers were far too dependent upon the ability and industry of the
permanent heads of departments to hamper themselves with incompetent men.
Judged at the bar of public opinion, the men whom I have mentioned will
not be found wanting.
In politics and diplomacy we could claim our fair share of Cabinet
Ministers, Ambassadors and Envoys Extraordinary. Our great president of
Pop, Edmond Wodehouse, and his inseparable friend Reginald Yorke were as
great in the cricket and football fields as they were in Library, born
leaders of boys. Even when he was a lad Wodehouse’s speeches, models of
the purest English, delivered with a gentle musical voice, were very
attractive; he was afterwards, as member for Bath, a prominent Liberal
Unionist—prominent rather in spite of himself, for he sought no office;
and it was a matter of universal opinion that his platform oratory at
the time of the split in the Liberal party was second only to that of
Mr. Chamberlain. A breakdown in health robbed the State of a great
servant—Eton of the fame of an illustrious son. Yorke, after a brilliant
outset, gave up public life much too early; he lacked ambition, which,
had he possessed it, must have driven him into very high places. He,
alas! is no more. When he died I lost a friend of more than sixty years.
But when I first went to Eton the idol before whom all we small imps
prostrated ourselves was the great Chitty, afterwards Lord Justice of
Appeal. He was indeed an Admirable Crichton. Wicket-keeper in the eleven
at Eton, he twice played at Lords in the University eleven, the second
time as captain. Then he took to the river, and stroked the University
eight for three years; took a first class and the Vinerian Scholarship,
and was for many years umpire to the boat-race of the Blues. Long after
he had left we spoke of him with bated breath as fitted to be one of
the chosen guests at the banquets of high Olympus. Should we not in the
same category, as another Admirable Crichton, place Dr. Warre, scholar,
athlete, Head Master—Provost? He was in the same division as myself.
Of all the boys of my time who made a name for themselves in the world
by far the most remarkable was my cousin Algernon Charles Swinburne,
that wayward child of the Muses. I am glad to know that his life is
being written by a brother poet, a foremost man of letters, who knew him
intimately in his most brilliant days, a man who is possessed of all
those qualities which Dr. Johnson deemed to be indispensable in a good
biographer. Mr. Gosse, knowing my relationship to Swinburne, asked me to
furnish him with some particulars as to the poet’s schoolboy life; this
I did in a letter written partly in answer to some foolish misstatements
which appeared in a letter from another schoolfellow written to the
_Times_.
I was in hopes that Mr. Gosse, who printed the letter in a short
biographical sketch which he issued privately in 1912, would have done
me the honour of including my notice in the larger book upon which he is
engaged. He, however, very generously insists that I must take back my
humble gift, and make it part of my sketch of Eton. It would be churlish
to refuse to obey the behest of so good a friend, and so I append from
my letter to him such extracts as seem to be to the point. But how proud
should I have been had they appeared for the first time under his ægis!
Swinburne entered Eton at the beginning of the summer half of 1849. His
father the Admiral, a scion of the grand old Northumbrian family, and my
aunt, Lady Jane, brought him, and at once sent for me to put him under my
care. I was “to look after him.” It is true that I was only a few weeks
older than himself, and so, physically, not much of a protector; but I
had been three years at school, to which I was sent when I was nine years
old, so I knew my Eton thoroughly, and was well versed in all its dear,
delightful ways—mysteries bewildering to the uninitiated. I was already a
little man of the world, at any rate of that microcosm which is a public
school, and so I was able to steer my small cousin through some shoals.
What a fragile little creature he seemed as he stood there between his
father and mother with his wondering eyes fixed upon me! Under his arm he
hugged his Bowdler’s Shakespeare, a very precious treasure bound in brown
leather with, for a marker, a narrow slip of ribbon—blue I think—with a
button of that most heathenish marqueterie called Tunbridge ware dangling
from the end of it. He was strangely tiny. His limbs were small and
delicate, and his sloping shoulders looked far too weak to carry his
great head, the size of which was exaggerated by the tousled mass of red
hair standing almost at right angles to it. Hero-worshippers talk of his
hair as having been a “golden aureole.” At that time there was nothing
golden about it. Red, violent, aggressive red it was, unmistakable red,
burnished copper. His features were small and beautiful, chiselled as
daintily as those of some Greek sculptor’s masterpiece.
His skin was very white—not unhealthy, but a transparent tinted white
such as one sees in the petals of some roses. His face was the very
replica of that of his dear mother, and she was one of the most refined
and lovely of women. What the colour of his eyes was I never knew—grey,
green or brown, they reflected his mood and must have been of the same
colour that his soul was at that moment; they could be soft and tender,
blaze with rage, or sparkle with fire. His red hair must have come from
the Admiral’s side, for I never heard of a red-haired Ashburnham. The
Admiral himself, whom I rarely saw, was, so well as my memory serves me,
already grizzled, but his hair must have been originally very fair or
even red.
Another characteristic which Algernon inherited from his mother was the
voice. All who knew him must remember that exquisitely soft voice with a
rather sing-song intonation, like that of the Russians when they put the
music of their own Slav voices into the French language. All his mother’s
brothers and sisters had it. He alone, so far as I know, among my cousins
reproduced it. Listening to him sometimes I could almost fancy that I
could hear my aunt herself speaking, so startling was the likeness. His
language, even at that age, was beautiful, fanciful, and richly varied.
Altogether my recollection of him in those school-days is that of a
fascinating, most lovable little fellow. It is but a child’s impression
of another child, but I believe it to be just.
That morning, after the manner of little dogs and little boys, we
stood and looked at one another shyly, suspiciously; but by the time
his parents left we had become fast friends and so we remained. We had
something in common to make us sib besides the sisterhood of his mother
and mine. On our fathers’ side we both came from old Northumbrian stocks,
and there is something in the Borderland which makes for a feeling of
kinship, even if in ancient times there should have been blood feuds.
Under the spell of the Border feeling Swinburne was bewitched; it never
lost its power over him. The wind blowing over those wild moors, which
are still the home of legends and ballads of raids and fights and deeds
of derring-do, had pierced his soul. He was a true son of Northumbria,
and was eager to become a soldier and bear arms; little creature as he
was, had he lived in the old days, he would have carried a stout heart
into any fray where there might be the clash of steel against morion and
breastplate, leading a troop of his own people like Barry of the Comb, or
Corbit Jock, in an expedition over the Border against Eliots and Kers,
and Scots and Maxwells. He was born three centuries too late.
Of course, being in different houses, we could not be so constantly
together as if we had both been in the same house. I was at Evans’s and
Durnford was my tutor. He was at Joynes’s and of course Joynes was his
tutor. Still we often met, and pretty frequently breakfasted together,
he with me, or I with him. Chocolate in his room, tea in mine. The guest
brought his own “order” of rolls and butter, and the feast was made
rich by the addition of sixpennyworth of scraped beef or ham from Joe
Groves’s, a small sock-shop which was almost immediately under Joynes’s
house. Little gifts such as our humble purses could afford cemented
our friendship; I still possess and treasure an abbreviated edition of
Froissart’s Chronicles which Algernon gave me now, alas! sixty-six years
ago. We ourselves were abbreviated editions in those days, or rather
duodecimos!
It was at Eton that he began to feel his wings. His bringing up at home
had been scrupulously strict—his literary diet the veriest pap. His
precocious brain had been nourished upon food for babes. Not a novel
had he been allowed to open, not even Walter Scott’s. Shakespeare he
only knew through the medium of his precious brown Bowdler. Now he could
travel over all the wide range of the boys’ library, which was then
alongside of the entrance to the Provost’s Lodge in Weston’s Yard.
I can see him now, sitting perched up Turk-or-tailor-wise in one of the
windows looking out on the Yard, with some huge old-world tome almost
as big as himself on his lap, the afternoon sun setting on fire the
great mop of red hair. There it was that he emancipated himself, making
acquaintance with Shakespeare (minus Bowdler), Marlowe, Spenser, Ben
Jonson, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and the other poets and
playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His tendency was
greatly towards the drama, especially the Tragic Drama. He had a great
sense of humour in others; he worshipped Dickens and would quote him
(especially Mrs. Gamp) unwearyingly; but his own genius leaned to Tragedy.
It is absurd to pretend, as was said in a letter to the _Times_, that as
a boy “he had an extraordinarily wide knowledge of the Greek poets, which
he read with ease in the original.” His study of the Greek tragedians,
upon whose work he so largely modelled his own, came much later in life.
At Eton these were lessons, and lessons are odious; besides no one can
assimilate Æschylus in homœopathic doses of thirty lines, and he knew no
more Greek than any intelligent boy of his age would do, nor did he take
any prominent part in the regular school work, though he was a Prince
Consort’s prizeman for modern languages. His first love in literature
was given to the English poets, and after or together with these he
devoured the great classics of France and Italy. The foundations of his
searching knowledge of the French and Italian languages were laid by his
accomplished mother. Of German he was ignorant, so Goethe, Schiller,
Herder, Wieland were sealed books to him. We may doubt whether they would
have appealed to him, for he was essentially a classicist; he might have
been better in touch with Schlegel and Novalis, as more nearly akin to
the romanticists whom he loved, among whom Victor Hugo was the object
of his special reverence; but that which I should call the Gothic in
literature might never have existed for aught that he cared.
How much he owed to his mother! Lady Jane was an attractive and most
distinguished woman. Her conversation was delightful, for her mind was a
rich storehouse of all that was good and beautiful, and her rare gift of
imparting what she knew was reflected in the bright light of the genius
of her son and pupil.
His memory was wonderful, his power of quotation almost unlimited. We
used to take long walks together in Windsor Forest and in the Home Park,
where the famous oak of Herne the Hunter was still standing, a white,
lightning-blasted skeleton of a tree, a fitting haunt for “fairies black,
grey, green and white,” and a very favourite goal of our expeditions.
As he walked with his peculiar dancing gait, tripping along like a
young faun, his eyes gleaming with enthusiasm, his whole body quivering
with excitement, and his hair, like the _zazzera_ of his own beloved
old Florentines, tossed about by the wind, he would pour out with that
unforgettable voice of his the treasures which he had gathered at his
last sitting in his favourite window-nook.
Other boys would watch him with amazement, looking upon him as a sort
of inspired elfin—a changeling from another sphere. None dreamt of
interfering with him, and as for bullying, there was none of it. He
carried with him one magic charm—he was absolutely brave. He did not know
what fear meant. It is generally the coward, the weakling in character,
far more than the weakling in thews and sinews, that is bullied.
Swinburne’s pluck as a boy always reminds me of Kinglake’s description
in “Eothen” of Dr. Keate, the famous Head Master of Eton: “He was
little more (if more at all) than five feet in height, and was not very
great in girth, but within this space was concentrated the pluck of ten
battalions.” That might have been written of Swinburne, and tiny as he
was, I verily believe that had any boy, however big, attempted to bully
him, that boy would have caught a Tartar.
Of games he took no heed—they were not for his frail build; football
and cricket were nothing to him. I do not think that he ever possessed
a cricket bat; but he could swim like any frog and of walking he never
tired. And so he led a sort of charmed life, dreaming and reading, and
chewing the cud of his gleanings from the world-harvest of poetry, a
fairy child in the midst of a commonplace, workaday world—as Horace said
of himself, “non sine Dîs animosus infans.”
I have spoken of his courage. He was no horseman, and had but little
opportunity at home for riding, but in the matter of horses he was
absolutely without terror. Unskilled as he was, he would back anything,
as fearless as a centaur. As a boy, rides with his cousin, Lady Katherine
Ashburnham, were among his great delights in that glorious, forest-like
country about Ashburnham Place. My uncle, the great book-lover, had an
instinctive appreciation of his genius long before he was famous, and
always had a welcome for him.
There is no truth in the story, coined I know not how, that Swinburne
disliked Eton. The poet was not made of the stuff which moulds the
enthusiastic schoolboy, and I much doubt whether any school would, as
such, have appealed to him. But Eton stands by itself. Its old traditions
and its chivalrous memories, its glorious surroundings, meant for him
something more than mere school: his mind dwelt upon the old grey towers,
Windsor, the Forest, the Brocas, the Thames, Cuckoo Weir, with an
affection which inspired his “Commemoration Ode,” and which, I believe,
never left him. The place touched his poet’s soul as no other school
could have done, and so it fitted him.
Across all these decades I look back to the time when he and I were
very small boys. There came a moment when fate drove us apart. We never
had a quarrel, and no cross word ever passed between us, but I became
a colleger, and between collegers and oppidans there was a great gulf
fixed. By the time that I once more went back to be an oppidan, Swinburne
had left Eton and our paths in life drifted further and further apart.
Only once in after life did we meet. It was one evening at dinner at
Whistler’s. We went on one side together after dinner, and had one of
those long talks over old days that are dear to schoolfellows’ hearts. We
arranged to meet again a few days later, but he was ailing, and could not
keep the appointment—alas! _Sunt lachrymæ rerum!_
I never saw him again. He lies in the lovely churchyard at Bonchurch with
his father and the mother whom he tenderly loved, within sound of the
roaring of the sea which during all his life was to him the sweetest of
God’s music.
* * * * *
I have only noticed the most prominent of my schoolmates, but there is
one more whom I must mention, Sir Francis Burnand, who for so many years
led the merriment of the nation. Did I talk of memories? Here at least is
no memory, but a “happy thought,” for he still lives, as gay, as bright,
as laughter-loving and laughter-compelling as when he was a fourth-form
boy. He remains the real Peter Pan, the boy who will not grow old.
* * * * *
If it be true that the mountains in labour produce a ridiculous mouse,
it is equally true that out of the smallest of molehills there are
sometimes born colossal elephants. Some time in 1848 there appeared one
day as a new boy a tall, handsome slip of a lad, very good-natured,
very raw, fresh caught from Australia, as green as young wheat—George
Salting. He was a good deal chaffed, never teased or bullied, he was
too good for that. The spirit of the collector was born in him, and the
foundation of the treasures which he amassed was laid in the purchase
of half a walnut-shell. It happened in this wise. We lower boys used to
delight at the proper season of the year in fighting one shell against
another. The conquering shell had the right to lay to its account not
only the beaten enemy but also all the other shells which that particular
enemy had defeated. One day there appeared at “the wall” in Long Walk a
famous “cad” of those days, who produced a half-shell which had gained a
thousand victories. Salting, always plentifully provided with money, gave
five shillings for it.
Alas! the champion was shortly afterwards dethroned by a vulgar novice
which had come into its owner’s possession in the ordinary course of
eating. Goliath was not a greater disappointment to the Philistine army.
But, never mind! out of that wonderful walnut-shell came in due course
all the gems with which the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert
Museum have been enriched. Stand before Holbein’s miniature of Anne of
Cleves, Henry the Eighth’s “great Flanders mare,” and think of that.
From the walnut-shell, to borrow the famous word of Maréchal Macmahon,
he continued,[23] and if in his early days as a collector he was often a
prey to unscrupulous dealers, he ended by gaining experience and became a
good judge. Many were the practical jokes of which, as a boy, he was the
good-humoured victim.
One fine September evening—it must have been in 1850 or 1851; we had just
come back from the summer holidays—a knot of younger boys were gathered
together at the end of Keate’s Lane, and there was a grand recital of
all the great events that had happened in the halcyon days. One boy had
killed a salmon, another had been out cub-hunting, a third had been out
partridge-shooting with his father on the 1st. Salting announced that he
too had been out shooting on the 1st. He was asked what he had shot.
“I shot a yellowhammer,” was the answer.
“What!” cried a small mosquito, “you don’t mean to say that! Don’t you
know what you have done?” (Salting turned a little pale.) “Don’t you know
that after the battle of Waterloo King George the Third gave the Duke of
Wellington the exclusive privilege of shooting yellowhammers on the first
of September? You had better write an apology at once, or there’s no
saying what may happen.” All the boys put on very serious faces, and poor
Salting was fairly terrified. A letter was drafted in which Mr. Salting
presented his compliments to Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington, K.G.,
and in stilted terms implored forgiveness for an offence unwittingly
given. Two or three days later the answer came in which Field-Marshal
the Duke of Wellington presented _his_ compliments to Mr. Salting, with
the assurance that in the circumstances, etc., etc. The offence was
solemnly forgiven. Two Sundays later I was invited by old Sir Charles
Mills, grandfather of the present Lord Hillingdon, to dine and sleep at
Hillingdon. Mr. Algernon Greville, the Duke’s private secretary, was
there. I asked him whether the Duke of Wellington had really received
and answered the letter. Mr. Greville said that the Duke had not only
received the letter, but, suspecting the joke, and greatly amused by it,
insisted on answering it himself. Here would have been a beginning for a
collection of autographs! But Salting’s tutor got hold of the letter and
kept it!
To the end of his life I kept up a sort of fitful friendship with that
amiable man. Slim, tall, and handsome in appearance, he altered very
little. The last time that I saw him was not very long before his death.
I met him in King Street, just outside Christie and Manson’s, where some
sale was going on. We stopped and talked, and I could not help noticing
that, barring the long beard, it was still the old Salting of the
yellowhammer days.
There was one project which lay very near to Dr. Hawtrey’s heart. Between
the oppidans and the collegers there was a great gulf fixed. To bridge
this over was his ambition. I have shown how Provost Hodgson and he had
done much to improve the lives of the boys on the foundation. It had
cost them infinite pains, and in his case great pecuniary sacrifices; of
that he took little heed, for he was always open-handed, and to give was
for him a necessity. By curtailing the Long Chamber and the erection of
the new buildings in Weston’s Yard, and by other corollary reforms, they
had given the collegers a measure of decency and comfort which they had
never enjoyed before. Hawtrey thought that the time had come when, with
the help of these altered conditions, he could amalgamate Eton into one
uniform whole, collegers and oppidans, one body with one soul and one
spirit, all invidious distinctions swept away, all jealousies stifled
and done with. His plan was to get a number of boys who had already been
some years in the school and had therefore made their friends among the
oppidans to compete for college. He thought that in this way he would
be introducing a leaven of intimacy between the two camps. In my time,
at any rate, it was a complete failure. The only result was that the
newcomers lost their oppidan friends, while from the old college hands
they received but a cold welcome. I was one of the vile bodies upon
which the experiment was tried, and that is how I lost my intimacy with
Swinburne.
Dr. Hawtrey’s influence with my father was immense, and for some two
years I became a colleger. I can honestly say that during that time I
never was inside any oppidan’s room, nor do I remember ever having an
oppidan to visit me, or any other colleger. During the last year and a
half of my Eton days, when I was already in sixth form, I went back to
be an oppidan, and Evans’s house being full, was sent to Mrs. Voysey’s,
who was a new dame. In the meantime Provost Hodgson had died in 1852, and
was succeeded by Dr. Hawtrey, to my deep regret, for he was followed as
Head Master by Dr. Goodford, and in a schoolroom over which that dull and
drowsy man presided there was little joy.
Once, I remember, he woke up from one of his naps (vigilant naps they
were, for if one of us blundered he was wide-awake in a moment), and was
minded to be grotesquely humorous. Someone was construing, I forget what,
when all of a sudden he suggested as a translation, “Oh, dear! what can
the matter be?” and asked whether any of us could quote the next line.
One suggested a repetition of the same line; another “Johnnie’s so long
at the fair.” “Wrong! Quite wrong,” he said, “the second line is ‘_Dear!
Dear!_ What can the matter be?’” Dismally he grinned at his own fun,
which did not raise even a sycophantic smile, and then composed himself
once more to “yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of
the hands to sleep.” And so the dreary pedagogic round droned on. What
would I not give now to have had the privilege of passing that year and
a half under the illuminating tuition of Dr. Hawtrey! What a gift to be
able to teach and in teaching please—practically to strike out from the
dictionary the hateful word “lessons!”