CHAPTER III

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!”