He explained that some other guests who were coming to Lichfield that day were—non-Etonians.

But in spite of the large and lion-like geniality of the bishop, there were anxious moments when the sight of some indolent or slovenly action caused his quick temper to give way, and then one knew not whether to tremble or be inwardly amused at the forms which his anger would take. Once, on a dull Sunday afternoon (the Sundays were dull at the Palace), he overheard his nephew yawning wearily and saying he did not know what to do. “What!” cried the bishop. “A Christian boy not know what to do on a Sunday afternoon!” Then, in terrible tones: “Go and fetch your Greek Testament.” Forthwith, while I made haste to escape from that scene of wrath, the wretched boy had to undergo a long lesson from his uncle.

On another occasion it was my pupil’s sister, a very beautiful child of ten or twelve, who caused an eruption of the volcano. She had left, in the course of luncheon, “a wasteful plate”—that is, she had put the gristle of the meat at the side, cleverly hidden, as she thought, under knife and fork—and the bishop, observing this, lectured her sharply on the sinfulness of such a habit. Then, to our consternation, his anger rising higher, he ended by seizing the girl’s plate, and then and there himself devoured the disgusting stuff as a practical lesson in frugality. “The bishop’s in a very bad temper, to-day, sir,” the butler gravely remarked to me afterwards.[9]

Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow—the difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was to come; and when it was time to write our Vale—that last copy of the weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English for Latin—we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate.

Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did, into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket.

III

LITERÆ INHUMANIORES

The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such merriment must not be indulged in while he was passing by. That he himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility which had not entered his mind.

Next in authority was the dean, a wan and withered-looking clergyman named Churton, who always seemed unhappy himself and infected every one who entered his rooms with a sense of discomfort. He used to invite undergraduates to breakfast with him, a melancholy function in which he often had the aid of Fred Whitting (the name was pronounced Whiting), a bluff and more genial don whose conversation just saved the guests from utter despair; and at these entertainments poor Churton’s one remark, as he helped the fish, was to say with a sour smile of ineffable wretchedness: “Whitting, will you be a cannibal?”

Very different from this chilly dean, and much more interesting, as being genuine relics of the brave old days when Kingsmen had no need to study or to exert themselves, inasmuch as their University career was assured them from the first, were two portly and inseparable bachelors, Messrs. Law and Brocklebank, whose sole employment it seemed to be to reap to the full the emoluments of their life-fellowship, which they had held for a goodly number of years. “Brock” and “Applehead” were their nicknames; both were stout and bulky, but there was a rotundity about Mr. Law’s cranial development which gave him a more imposing appearance. As they ambled side by side about the courts and lawns, it amused us to fancy them a pair of strange survivals from a rude prehistoric age, we ourselves, of course, playing the part of the moderns and intellectuals. When “Applehead” died, we were enjoined in a poetical epitaph, by some anonymous admirer, to deck his grave with pumpkins, gourds, melons, cucumbers and other emblematic fruits.

The literary element was not strong in King’s; but in Henry Bradshaw, one of the senior Fellows, the College could boast a University Librarian of much distinction. He was a kind, but most whimsical and eccentric man, whose friendship was open to any undergraduate who sought it, only it must be sought, and under the conditions imposed by Bradshaw himself, for it was never in any circumstances offered. If you presented yourself uninvited at his rooms—rather an ordeal for a nervous freshman—you were welcomed, perhaps taken to his heart. If you did not present yourself, he never asked you to come; on the contrary, however often he met you on the stairs or elsewhere, he passed with a look of blank and stony indifference on his large and somewhat inexpressive visage. I knew a scholar of King’s who lived on Bradshaw’s staircase, and who for more than a year was thus passed by as non-existent: then, one evening, moved by a sudden impulse, he knocked at the great man’s door, entered, and was immediately admitted to the cheery circle of his acquaintance. It was useless to resent such waywardness on Bradshaw’s part; there was no “ought” in his vocabulary; you had to take him on his own terms, or “go without”; and the great number of University men who came on pilgrimage to his rooms was in itself a proof of his mastery. I recall the following lines from an epigram which some rebellious undergraduate wrote on him:

It was so; and Bradshaw, having a gift of very pungent speech, was well able to keep his “herds” in order when they were assembled: he would at times say a sharp and wholesome word to some conceited or presumptuous visitor. Even his nearest friends could take no liberties with him. It was said that when Mr. G. W. Prothero, then a Fellow of King’s, took to omitting the “Esquire” in the address of letters, and wrote plain “Henry Bradshaw,” the librarian retaliated in his reply by addressing laconically to “Prothero”—nothing more.

To attend lectures and chapel services formed the chief duties of undergraduates; and the lectures were much the less tedious task. It was a chilly business, however, on a cold winter morning, to hear the great Greek scholar, R. Shilleto, hold forth for an hour on his beloved Thucydides; for he was an elderly man with a chronic cough, and his enthusiasm for a Greek idiom hardly compensated his audience for the physical difficulties with which he laboured. He would begin cheerily on a difficult passage, and, overtaken by a bout of coughing, lose the place for a while; then, with a drawling “yes,” catch up the thread of his discourse, till another spasm overwhelmed him; while we, desiring our breakfasts much more than the privilege of listening to a second Porson, fumed and fidgeted, and took notes, or neglected to take notes, till the stroke of the clock released us. Much more popular were some of the lectures which we attended, in other Colleges, given by such skilled exponents of the Classics as Henry Jackson and R. C. Jebb. Jebb was always the same—self-composed, neat and eloquent; Jackson, on the contrary, though not at all less competent, used to work himself into a fever of fretfulness when he could not find the exact word he sought for; and then, to our amusement, he would upbraid himself as “dolt” and “idiot,” even while he was giving a most suggestive address.

The compulsory “chapels” were a great trial to some of us; and each King’s scholar was further liable, in turn, to the function of reading the Lessons for a week. I do not know why this should have seemed more formidable than “speeches” at Eton, but it was an office which we would very thankfully have escaped. It needed some courage to step down from a stall in that spacious chapel—most of all when, as on a Sunday afternoon, there was a large concourse of visitors—and then to mount, by what cragsmen would call an “exposed ridge,” the steps that led up to the big lectern in the middle of the nave. The sensation was one of extreme solitariness and detachment, with little but the lectern itself to give support and protection; so that we could almost sympathize with the plight of that disreputable undergraduate who, according to a current story (which, be it hoped, was fictitious), had essayed to read the Lessons, in some college chapel, when he was not so sober as he should have been. Throwing his arms round the eagle—for his lectern was fashioned in the shape of that pagan bird—he appalled the congregation, it was said, by exclaiming, in a pensive voice: “If it wasn’t for this [something] duck, I’d be down.”

But practice makes all things easier; and after a time one or two of us so far overcame our nervousness as to utilize our position at the lectern for the benefit, as we thought, of the congregation at large—certainly for our own personal comfort; for we ventured to dock and shorten the Lessons as we felt inclined. “Here endeth the Lesson,” we would cry, when we had read, perhaps, no more than a dozen verses out of twice or thrice that number; and immediately the great organ would sound, and the pompous choral service continued on its course. We had private information that this irregularity did not pass unobserved by some of the dons; but as nothing was said we concluded that they blessed us for it in secret.

The relations between dons and undergraduates were for the most part very friendly; but the blandness of the dons was somewhat measured and condescending—not without reason, perhaps, for undergraduates, like schoolboys, were apt to take undue advantage of any excess of affability. Once, when I was walking along King’s Parade with a friend, we saw the great Dr. Lightfoot coming from the opposite direction. “Now just look,” said my companion, “how polite Lightfoot will be. See how I’ll make him smile as he passes.” And sure enough, the learned divine, in response to an audacious salute from one who had no sort of claim to his acquaintance, was instantly wreathed in smiles and benignity, as if he were meeting the son of his dearest friend, instead of being impudently imposed on by a stranger.

We rather dreaded the invitations that sometimes reached us to a formal breakfast, or worse still, a soirée (familiarly known as a “stand-up”), at the residence of some high authority. I have spoken of the Churton breakfasts in King’s; still more serious an affair was it to be one of a dozen undergraduates summoned en bloc to breakfast at Trinity Lodge, for Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity, was a great University magnate, widely famed and feared for his sententious sayings and biting sarcasms, many of which were reported from mouth to mouth. We had heard of that deadly verdict of his on a University sermon preached by Dean Howson, joint author of Conybeare and Howson’s Life of St. Paul: “I was thinking what a very clever man Mr. Conybeare must have been.” As a member once or twice of such a breakfast-party, I recollect how awkwardly we stood herded together when we had entered the sage’s presence, and how, as we passed into the breakfast-room, we almost jostled each other in our anxiety to get a seat as far as possible away from that end of the long table where the Master in his majesty sat. As for the soirées at Trinity Lodge and elsewhere, they demanded some strength of limb; for the number of visitors exceeded the number of seats, and to stand for two hours in a corner, and look as if one liked it, was irksome even for youth. At these ceremonials, when the Provost of King’s was the host, he used to invite undergraduates with immense condescension to “be seated”; and when he added with emphasis: “You may sit down here,” he was understood to be reflecting on the superior comfort of a Provost’s entertainment as compared with that of Trinity Lodge.

One thing that rather galled the feelings of undergraduates was that none but Provost and Fellows might set foot on the extensive lawns at King’s—a selfish privilege of the few, as it appeared, maintained to the exclusion of the many. However that may have been, there came a night when a small party of Kingsmen committed the sacrilegious act of releasing a mole in front of the Provost’s Lodge, and dauntlessly awaited the result, thus anticipating Lord Milner’s policy of “damning the consequences.” There were no serious consequences, except to the most innocent of all the persons concerned—the mole. We watched him with admiration as he sank into that soft green turf, like a seal into water; and the next morning we were thrilled to see a small line of earthen hillocks on the sacred sward. Then followed a great to-do of gardeners and mole-catchers; and on the third day, to our regret and remorse, the poor mole paid the penalty for the trespasses of others. We put a London newspaper on the track of this incident, and the editor published some humorous speculations, for the benefit of readers interested in natural history, as to how the mole could have found his way to that cloistered spot.

The Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal (I am now speaking of the year 1873 and thereabouts) was a fortnightly paper—edited at one time by G. C. Macaulay, at another by Hallam (now Lord) Tennyson—in which some of us used to try our hands at the higher journalism, and write satirical essays on the various anomalies of Cambridge life. Compulsory chapels; compulsory Latin and Greek; “cribbing” in examinations; antiquated college customs; the exactions of college servants; the social functions known as “stand-ups”—these were but a few of the topics on which we held forth with all the confidence of youth. It was the Adventurer over again, but on a more comprehensive scale; for the undergraduate could express his feelings more openly than the schoolboy; else the writer of an article on compulsory chapels could hardly have inveighed, as he did, against the ordinance of full choral service, where “the man without an ear” was doomed, for two long hours, “to sit, stand, and kneel in wearisome succession.”

The annual competition for the English Prize Poem afforded another opportunity for nascent ambition. The subject one year was the recovery of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) from a serious illness; and it was this rather snobbish theme that drew from one of the competitors a couplet which went the round of a delighted University:

Then there were the “Sir William Browne’s Medals,” offered annually for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams. These prizes were usually the perquisite of a few select scholars (my friend E. C. Selwyn had a way of carrying them off); but as the poems were sent in anonymously, the envelope containing the competitor’s name not being opened except when he won the medal, it was a safe and rather good sport to try one’s luck in the contest. One of the surprises of my life was when old Shilleto (the coughing grammarian) walked into my room one evening, and told me that the examiners had awarded me the medal for Greek epigram. There being a defect in one of the lines, he sat down and corrected it, there and then, by an emendation which was doubtless better Greek and certainly worse poetry.

Another high Cambridge authority, at that time, was Dr. Benjamin Kennedy, famed as former headmaster of Shrewsbury School, and as author of a Latin Grammar familiar to many generations of schoolboys. I had been told to call on him at his house, for my father had been under him at Shrewsbury, and there was an old friendship between the families; and when I did so with some trepidation—perhaps because a recent experience at Trinity Lodge had made me fearful of “receptions”—I found him a most benign old gentleman, quite free from the awful stateliness of a Provost or a Master; indeed, when he asked undergraduates to dinner he relaxed to an extent which could not but restore confidence in the most timid. After dinner he would give us “words” to decipher, in ivory letters, according to that rather inane Victorian pastime; or he would recite odd verses to us in his quaint sing-song voice, something between a whisper and a wheeze. Who could have feared even the most learned of Professors, when he stooped to conquer by rehearsing for us such an example of an English pentameter as the following, presumably of his own composition:

But even the genial Dr. Kennedy could not wholly release himself from the rigidness of Cambridge etiquette: it was impossible, so he had stated when he desired me to call on him, for him to call on an undergraduate. No such difficulty existed for the greatest yet least assuming of the distinguished men then living in Cambridge, Frederick Denison Maurice. Having heard of me as a pupil of Mr. Kegan Paul’s, he came, though he was an old man, to my room on the top story in King’s, and talked so quietly and naturally that I felt quite at ease with him. On a later occasion I breakfasted at his house, alone with him, a privilege which I much valued; for even then I was aware of his real greatness, unlike as he was to the pompous University magnates who figured so largely in public. If only the heads of Colleges and Universities could know—but, of course, they rarely know—how much more powerful is the influence of simple unaffected kindness than of the affability which betrays a touch of patronage and condescension!

St. Edward’s Church, of which Maurice was the incumbent, was close to the gates of King’s—and some of us undergraduates used to go there on Sunday evenings, notwithstanding our weariness of our own chapel services, in order to hear him preach, for we were drawn to him by the obvious impression which he gave of quiet sympathy and strength. At a time when the revolting doctrine of eternal punishment was still widely held, his humanizing influence must have been very valuable within the Church. Matthew Arnold’s clever gibe, that he beat about the bush, but without starting the hare, left a good deal unsaid; for if he did not start the hare he helped to silence the hell-cat.

Not very long before the time of which I am speaking, Maurice’s curate at St. Edward’s had been a namesake of that saint’s, Edward Carpenter, who, as is related in his autobiography,[11] resigned his Orders, together with his Fellowship at Trinity Hall, in 1871. Some thirteen years later I made his acquaintance in London; and I have often regretted that I went to Cambridge too late to hear him preach, for I have never been able quite to picture the author of Towards Democracy in the pulpit, arrayed canonically in surplice or gown.

The goal of a Kingsman’s career at Cambridge was the Classical Tripos; and for three years he would read steadily, and with increasing intentness, keeping that end in view. It was generally thought advisable to have a “coach”; but experience led me to doubt whether, for those who knew how to direct their own reading, and had the necessary perseverance, it was not a waste of time to invoke such assistance; a good “crib” was a far speedier and more effective instructor. Some “coaches,” moreover, were apt to be rather lazy at times, and to put off their pupils’ attendance on the plea, perhaps, that they had to go to London for the day, or were called off by some equally important engagement; and now, by a curious reversal, we, who at Eton should have been only too delighted if our tutors had perennially shirked their duties, had become in turn the studious ones, and having ourselves paid for the tuition were annoyed if we did not get it! One contemporary of mine at King’s was so upset by his “coach’s” remissness that he wrote him a letter of remonstrance, more in sadness than anger, and roused him to fury by quoting some words from Thucydides (οί δἐ προλαβόντες τὀ ἀργύριον), in open allusion to those who first get their fee and then neglect to earn it.

Young men often fail to realize the sensitiveness of their elders, and thus say and do things which cause more hurt than was intended. We used to be resentful, in those too fastidious pre-war days, of the considerable amount of shale, schist, and rubble which was sold to us with our coal; and a fellow Kingsman once asked me to accompany him to the coal-merchant’s, to whom he proposed to return a basketful of the refuse in question. Foreseeing sport, I went; but the scene that ensued was sorrowful rather than amusing, for the head of the firm, a venerable-looking old man with white hair, happened to be in the office, and when the coal-substitutes were handed to him over the counter his wrath was so great that his hand positively shook with passion. Savages though we were, we came away rather penitent.

There was, however, one Kingsman at that time, an undergraduate senior to myself, who was unpleasantly famed for the remorseless devilry with which he scored off any unfortunate person whom chance placed in his power. His tailor, it was said, having by mistake sent him in a bill that had already been paid, was ordered to set the matter right, on pain of being dismissed. He did so; and then the offended customer said to him: “And now I dismiss you just the same.” On another occasion it was a broken-down clergyman who had the ill-luck to appeal to this young gentleman for pecuniary aid: so rare an opportunity could not be allowed to slip. “You trust in God, I suppose,” said the undergraduate. It was not possible for a clergyman to gainsay it. “Then I will toss up,” said the other; “and if you cry rightly, I shall know you deserve assistance”; and forthwith he spun the coin, and the clergyman cried—“heads” or “tails” as might be. But unluckily for the poor pilgrim, the Kingsman was a skilled manipulator of the coin in hazards of this sort, and the result was never in doubt. The mendicant was proved, on the highest authority, to be undeserving.

But to return to the Classical Tripos. Coached or uncoached, we came at last to that great final examination, a sort of Judgment Day in miniature, which, for some of us, would have an important bearing on our later lives. The examination system is in various ways open to criticism, and critics have by no means been lacking, but it need not be denied that intellectual benefit in many cases may result from the sustained effort to prepare oneself for a very searching test, necessitating a thorough study of the chief Classical writers. But the weightiest charge against the University education is the one which least often finds expression—that a learning which would strengthen the intellect only, and does not feed the heart, is in the main but barren and unprofitable, a culture of the literæ inhumaniores. Except from F. D. Maurice, I never heard, during my four years at Cambridge—from preacher or professor, from lecturer, dean, or don—the least mention of the higher social ethics, without which there can be no real culture and no true civilization.

I remember, with shame, that I was once so moved by the florid rhetoric of Dean Farrar, in a missionary sermon preached before the University, that I made a contribution to the offertory which I could ill afford. A day or two afterwards, with the return of sanity, I felt the force of the adage that “fools and their money are soon parted,” and I saw that it was worse than folly to send missions to other countries, when we ourselves were little better than pagans at home. The mischief of this spurious religionism was that it lessened the chance of any genuine awakening of conscience to the facts that stared us in the face. We were made to study Paley’s fantastic “Evidences,” while the evidence of nature, of the human heart, and of actual life, was sedulously hidden away.

In the Tripos of 1875 the Senior Classic was Mr. Peskett, who belonged properly to the preceding year, but owing to illness or some other cause had “degraded” into ours, and thus robbed my friend Mr. Arthur Tilley of an honour which should rightly have been his. Dr. J. Gow, Headmaster of Westminster School, was third; the fifth place was shared by Mr. Gerald Balfour and myself.

It was the custom in those days for headmasters of Eton to draw largely on King’s College for their supply of assistants: thus a King’s Scholar of Eton, after taking his degree at Cambridge, would often return to the school as a Classical assistant master, and so complete the academical round. The process might, perhaps, have been likened to the three stages of butterfly life, but with the first and the last phase transposed. We began as the gay Eton insects, whose ignorance was bliss; and then, after passing through the chrysalis period by the Cam, reappeared on Thames’s bank, metamorphosed into the caterpillars locally known as “beaks,” and usually content thenceforth to crawl soberly along on a wingless but well-nourished career. But even a worm, as we know, will turn; and, as the next chapter must relate, some of the grubs would at times be so unconscionable as to take new and unsettling notions into their heads.

IV

THE DISCOVERY

To be summoned as an assistant by Dr. Hornby, and at a few days’ notice (his arrangements were frequently made in desperate haste), was to be thrown very suddenly upon one’s own resources; for, an appointment once completed, he showed no further interest in the matter, and did not even trouble himself to provide a school-room in which his latest lieutenant should teach: that the number of Divisions exceeded the number of rooms was a trifle which did not engage his attention. A novice had therefore to consider himself rather lucky when he was able to secure, for his first term or two, even an apartment so ill equipped for educational purposes as a sort of cupboard, situated under the stairs that led to the headmaster’s room, and popularly known as “The Dog-Kennel.” Here, with a class of about forty boys, a pleasant summer school-time had to be spent.

It was a curious sensation, which I suppose all teachers of large classes must have felt, to be confronted by serried ranks of boys whose faces were entirely strange, though their names were entered on the list which lay, like a map, upon the desk. Some time was required before each name could be correctly fitted to the face; and in this process any abnormality of feature or size in individuals, which might constitute a landmark, was a great help. A red-haired boy, or a fat boy, served to punctuate a row; and that classification of boys (I forget who made it) into the beef-faced and the mealy-faced was a thing to be kept in mind.

Such were the auspices under which an Eton master was in those days started on his career—shut up in the Dog-Kennel with a horde of young barbarians, whom, in the circumstances, it was hardly possible to instruct, and not very easy to control. There were a few masters at Eton, as doubtless at other public schools, who had a real gift for teaching; also a few, like our friend “Swage,” who were unable to maintain any semblance of authority. Between these two extremes were those, the great majority of us, who, while courteously and respectfully treated by the boys, and having pleasant relations with them, could not in strict truth flatter themselves that, except in special cases, they had overcome the natural tendency of boyhood to be idle. So much has been written about the defects of the Eton system that it suffices here to say that while a reputation for cleverness was maintained by a few of the boys, mostly King’s Scholars, the bulk of the school was inflexibly bent upon other activities than those of the mind.

Nor were the masters themselves unaffected by the general tone of the school. There were some fine scholars, it is true, on Dr. Hornby’s staff, experts not in Classical literature only, but in various branches of learning; yet in not a few cases these gifted specialists seemed as artless in their outlook on life as they were skilled in their particular department. “A d——d fool, with a taste for the Classics,” was the too unceremonious description given of one of them by a sarcastic acquaintance; and the epigram, however reprehensible in expression, hit the mark. Knowledge is not wisdom; and this academical learning often went together with a narrow and pedantic spirit which blindly upheld the old order of things and resented every sign of change. For example, there was one learned master who used to assert, in those years of peace, that what England most needed was a war—a grim, hard-fought war; and this was the sort of reckless talk often indulged in by the mildest-mannered of men, who themselves were in no danger whatever of exchanging the gown for the sword.

New ideas were under a ban at Eton; notwithstanding the specious invitations given to some distinguished men to lecture before the school. Gladstone, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris and Lowell were among those who addressed the boys in the School Library; and it was instructive to note the reception which they severally obtained. Lowell was the most popular; his cheery contention that this world of ours is, after all, “not a bad world to live in,” being delightedly received by an audience which had good personal reasons for concurring in such a sentiment: William Morris, on the other hand, having ventured on the then dangerous ground of Socialism, was hissed. Gladstone discreetly kept to the unimpeachable subject of Homer; and Matthew Arnold’s staid appearance, with his “mutton-chop” whiskers and mechanical bowing of the head in accord with the slow rhythm of his sentences, was sufficient to lull to sleep any insidious doubts of his respectability. As a speaker, Ruskin was by far superior to the rest; his lucid train of thought and clear, musical voice could hold enchanted an audience, even of Eton boys, for the full space of an hour.

Science lectures formed another branch of the intellectual treats that were provided for the school; but Science was still rather under a cloud at that date. I recollect the title of but one discussion, and that only because I happened to be able to throw some light on the geological problem with which it dealt. I was living in a small house (once famous as “Drury’s”), which had a much higher one on either side; and as it was the practice for the boys in neighbouring houses to bombard each other with any missiles or minerals that might be handy, my garden became a sort of “no-man’s-land” between the two rival fortresses, and its surface was enriched with a very varied deposit. When, therefore, a lecture was announced on the question, “Will coal be found in the Thames valley?” I was able to solve the problem affirmatively by the production from my own premises of some remarkably fine samples.

It would doubtless have shocked Dr. Hornby if any one had suggested that there was a lack of religious instruction in that most conservative of schools. Chapel services there were in plenty; and a Greek Testament lesson on Monday morning; and “Sunday Questions” to be answered in writing; and “Sunday Private” to be attended in the Tutor’s pupil-room; and Prayers every evening in each House. Yet the general tone of Eton was far from being religious, even in the conventional meaning of the term; for the many superficial observances did not affect the deep underlying worldliness of the place. It was Vanity Fair on Sundays and week-days alike. There was an Eton story of a servant in a private family who, when the bell was rung for evening devotions, was overheard to cry in a weary voice: “Oh, dear! Why do gentry have prayers?” The reference to “gentry” shows the light in which such ceremonies are regarded downstairs. In the same way, the religious teaching in schools is looked upon by the boys as imposed on them for purposes of discipline.

It was not the boys only who found the Chapel services very tedious; for most of the masters were laymen, many of them unorthodox, and for these it was no agreeable duty to be victimized both on Sundays and on Saints’ Days for the sake of keeping up appearances before the school. Calculations are sometimes made of the number of years spent in prison by some hardened criminal or “gaol-bird.” Why does no one tell us how many hours, amounting to how many years, some zealous church-goer, or pew-bird, has spent on such devotions? Without claiming that distinction, I calculate that during some twenty years spent in connection with public school and University I passed several thousands of hours in church and chapel.

Human nature could not but chafe under the fearful dulness and length of the sermons in Eton College Chapel. Dr. Goodford, the Provost, was a sort of personified Doom; when once he mounted the pulpit he was in the saddle, so to speak, and rode his congregation well-nigh to despair with his merciless homilies, all uttered in that droning voice, with its ceaseless burr and inevitable cadence, which became to generations of Etonians as familiar as the Chapel bell itself. Scarcely less fearsome were some of the elder Fellows, retired masters, such as Bishop Chapman and the Rev. John Wilder, who were often let loose on us on Sunday mornings and blithely seized the opportunity: it was their field-day, and they were out to enjoy themselves, quite unconscious that what was pious sport to them was death to their unwilling audience. Small wonder that some assistant masters used to dread the weeks when they were on duty (“in desk” it was called); but providentially there were others who, disliking still more the labour of correcting Latin verses, were willing to barter “verses” for “desks”; that is, they would take so many of a colleague’s desks, while he in return would look over a stipulated number of exercises. Thus did the Muse come to the aid of her devotees:

Perhaps the strangest form that religion took at Eton was that of missionary zeal; we used to have sermons periodically about carrying the gospel to “the heathen”; though if ever there was a benighted spot on earth, it was that pleasant school by the Thames. Some of the boys were at times infected by the passion for making proselytes: on one occasion an extremely dull and idle youth, who had lately left Eton, wrote to tell me, as his former tutor, that he had decided to become a missionary “to the poor perishing heathen”—in his case, the Chinese, a people much less ignorant and barbarous than many of their self-appointed rescuers.

“Divinity” was one of the studies most encouraged and fostered at Eton; one would have thought the place was a training-school for theologians, from the prominence that was given in examinations to this particular branch of learning. The result, as might have been expected, was the same as in the writing of Latin verses: a few boys became adepts in the Bible Dictionary, while the bulk of the school scarcely advanced beyond that stage of biblical knowledge exhibited by a certain Etonian who, when invited to write an account of St. James the Elder and St. James the Less, was able to give a brief description of the Elder, but was reduced, in the case of the Lesser saint, to the rather inadequate, though so far correct, statement that: “The other was another.”

We were perhaps somewhat overdone with the Saints at Eton: the masters who had to set the Sunday Questions were nearly as tired of asking about St. Peter and St. Paul as the boys of answering; and in the Chapel sermons we suffered, year after year, under the whole Hagiology, until some of us, it must be confessed, sighed in secret for the time:

But if Christianity was the nominal religion at Eton, the real creed was Respectability. To do the “proper thing”; not to offend against any of the conventional canons; to dress, walk, speak, eat and live in the manner prescribed by “good form”—this was the ever-present obligation which neither boy nor master could disregard. Any slip in matters of etiquette was regarded as deadly. There was a dark rumour about one of the masters, a good and worthy man, but very shortsighted, that by a tragic error in the High Street he had taken off his hat to his cook: it was only less dreadful than if he had failed to perform that act of courtesy in some case where it was required.

As is usual in barbarous societies, the number of things that were “taboo” was considerable. In the early ’eighties the bicycle and tricycle were frowned upon, not for boys only but for masters; and a lady living in Eton once received from Mrs. Hornby, who of course, was at the head of the Fashions, a message that to ride a tricycle was “not a nice thing to do.” Yet for the boys it was considered a nice thing to hunt and “break up” hares. I once witnessed the virtuous indignation of one of the masters, a clergyman, and a follower of the Eton hounds, when some rather “shady” incident of the hunt was reported to the headmaster; but Dr. Hornby soon set matters right by explaining that, as all hunting was cruel, he obviously could not take notice of any particular malpractice. That was the sort of reasoning with which any attempts to humanize Eton customs were parried and thwarted.

Yet new ideas could not be wholly excluded, even from that stronghold of the antique; there were, in fact, several members of Hornby’s staff who held views too advanced to be avowed in such surroundings. One of the least prejudiced men at Eton was the French Master, M. Roublot, who was a close personal friend of his German colleague, Herr Griebel; and it is pleasant to recall the fact that during the horrors of the Franco-German War, some ten years earlier than the period of which I am speaking, these two “enemies” had kept their friendship unbroken, and might be seen daily taking their walk together, just as if their countrymen were not insanely engaged in cutting each other’s throats.

Among the Classical tutors, two of the most enlightened spirits, men of great personal charm, were Mr. E. S. Shuckburgh, afterwards lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Rev. Duncan Tovey, who a few years later took the Eton living of Worplesdon. Shuckburgh, though himself most impatient of the old traditions, and sympathizing largely with the newer thought, was of a very critical habit of mind, and used to delight, for argumentative purposes, in dwelling on the difficulties and shortcomings of the reforms which some of us advocated. Tovey was a literary man (his works on Gray and Thomson are well known), out of his element in such a place as Eton, but in his happier moods a most delightful talker and companion. Mrs. Tovey, too, had a lambent wit which could play lightly round the anomalies of Eton life. She once wrote a charming list of some imaginary books of fiction, the authorship of which she assigned to various local celebrities: one of the works, the supposed creation of an Eton upholsterer notorious for his big bills, had a title which might make the fortune of a modern philosophical novelist: “Man’s Time; a Mystery.”

Some of the junior masters played a useful part in challenging the old superstitions. Mr. J. D. Bourchier, afterwards a famous correspondent of The Times in south-east Europe, was the first rider of the bicycle at Eton, and incurred much obloquy through his persistence in a practice which no Eton master could then countenance with safety. My brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes, jun., was a still worse offender. He had been impressed by Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and in the summer holidays of 1882 travelled with George in Ireland. By a ridiculous blunder of the Irish Constabulary, the two were arrested and locked up as dangerous conspirators; and, though they were quickly discharged when the magistrates discovered the error, the whole Press of the country rang with amused comments. The Government had to apologize to Henry George as an American citizen; and an account of the fiasco, written by Joynes, and published in The Times, caused great scandal in Etonian circles, where publicity was regarded, not without good reason, as the thing of all things to be deprecated. Great, then, was the horror of the Eton authorities when, a few weeks later, an advertisement announced Joynes’s forthcoming volume, Adventures of a Tourist in Ireland. In hot haste he was informed by the headmaster that he must choose between his mastership and his book: he chose the latter, and resigned his post. That was the result, as a patriotic colleague and friend pointed out to me, of giving heed to “a mouldy American.” Thus fallen from the high estate of an Eton mastership, Joynes became a leading spirit in the Social Democratic Federation; and by him I was introduced to many well-known socialists whose names will be mentioned later on.

During the sixteen years of his headmastership Dr. Hornby dismissed no fewer than four assistants, and was himself involved at times in serious conflicts with the Governing Body. A weak man, he was obstinate to the last degree when once engaged in controversy; as was shown by his determination to get rid of Mr. Oscar Browning, who, whatever the merits of their quarrel, was worth much more to Eton than Hornby himself. It was not generally known that three other assistant masters proffered their resignations as a protest against Mr. Browning’s dismissal; a most ill-judged step, because matters had then reached a point where either Hornby or Browning had to go. The resignations were accepted, and the three mutineers had to ask leave to withdraw them, which they did with as good a grace as they could muster. Thus the headmaster triumphed; but it was a victory that brought him little credit, and it was a lucky day for Eton when, on the death of Dr. Goodford, he was appointed to the Provostship in 1884.

Dr. Warre, succeeding Dr. Hornby, was like King Stork following King Log: it was as if the school, after a long period of “go as you like,” had been suddenly placed under a military dictatorship. Warre had nearly been appointed headmaster in 1868; and though, during Hornby’s reign, he continued to serve loyally as an assistant, it was evident that it galled him to watch the nervelessness and vacillation with which the government of the school was conducted: I have heard him at a “masters’ meeting” appeal to Dr. Hornby in terms which, however respectful in form, conveyed a reproach which could hardly have been unnoticed: “Will the headmaster insist upon his rule being kept? Will you pull us up, sir, if we neglect it?” We listened in amusement, knowing full well that Hornby would himself be the first to break his own rule, if it was one that demanded either punctuality or perseverance.

One of Dr. Warre’s earliest innovations was to visit the different Divisions in person while a lesson was going on; a very right and proper course to take, but one which came rather as a shock to the assistant masters of that time, who had been accustomed to consider their class-rooms, like the proverbial Englishman’s house, as their “castles.” We each wondered, not without anxiety, when his own turn would come. When mine came, I was spared a lengthy inspection owing to an incident which was as amusing as it was unforeseen. The next room happened to be occupied that day by a colleague who was entirely unable to keep order; and as neither the unfortunate man, nor his rowdy Division, was aware that the headmaster was so near them, I had hardly begun my lesson when there rose a terrific din from next door—shrieks, catcalls, peals of laughter, stamping of feet, all the noises of a madhouse. With a wave of his hand to me, the headmaster slipped swiftly from the room; and a moment later I knew what had happened, not by hearing, but by the instant cessation of sound, for that wild uproar stopped as suddenly as if it had been cleft with an axe, and was succeeded by a deep silence more eloquent than words.

A few days later, Dr. Hornby, the new-made Provost, came up to a small group of masters who were standing near the school-yard, and smilingly asked us if we had been “inspected” yet. “I’m glad,” he added, with a sigh of relief, “that they didn’t inspect me.”

Dr. Warre was in every way a contrast to Dr. Hornby. Far less sensitive and refined, he had much more real sympathy, if not with the masters, at any rate with the boys, and under a rough exterior showed on many occasions a practical kindness which was quite wanting in his predecessor. For example, the setting of “Georgics” (i.e. the writing of 500 lines of Virgil), one of the most senseless punishments in vogue at that time, was always encouraged by Hornby. When Warre heard an assistant master remark that he was “looking out for an opportunity” to set a “Georgic” to a troublesome boy, he interrupted him with: “You should look out not to set him a ‘Georgic.’ ” He had that kindly understanding of boyhood which is of great value to a teacher; and from the point of view of those who believe that Eton is an ideal school, and the “hub” of the universe, it is difficult to see how a better headmaster than Dr. Warre could have been found; but he was a Tory of the strictest type, and his appointment meant the indefinite postponement of reform.

Enough has now been said to show why a ten-years’ sojourn as a master at Eton was likely to bring disillusionment, even if outside influences had not quickened the process. Socialism was even then “in the air”; and to have become personally acquainted with Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, H. M. Hyndman, Henry George, William Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion, Belfort Bax, and other apostles of what was then termed “revolution,” was not calculated to strengthen a waverer in the pure Etonian faith. Still earlier, in the winter holidays of 1878-79, I had met at Coniston, in the Lake District, an ardent disciple of Ruskin, Mr. William Harrison Riley, who held communistic views; and in the course of some long walks with him on the mountains, in which I acted as his guide, he more than repaid the obligation by opening my eyes to certain facts which I had previously overlooked. He brought me a message from another world.

This Riley, with all his fiery zeal, was a man of touching simplicity. He was then working some land of Ruskin’s, at St. George’s farm, near Sheffield, and he had come to Coniston to visit the Master, for whom he felt and expressed an almost childlike veneration. By Mr. Ruskin’s invitation I accompanied Riley to luncheon at Brantwood, and was greatly struck by the meeting between the two—the devotion of the follower, and the geniality of the sage. Early in the morning Riley, who was much surprised by the luxuriance of the verdure at Coniston, as compared with the grey desolation of the Sheffield hills, confided to me his intention of taking as a present to Ruskin a clump of moss from a wall-top near the hotel; but as there was hardly a wall in the district that was not similarly covered, I suggested to him, as delicately as I could, that it might be a case of carrying “coals to Newcastle.” Disregarding such hints, he arrived at Ruskin’s door with a big parcel of the moss, and gravely presented it as soon as the first salutations were complete. The delightful charm of Ruskin’s manner was seen in this little incident: he laughed—for who could have helped laughing?—yet took the gift—and turned the subject—with a graciousness that could leave no hurt. A few years later Riley migrated to Massachusetts, but took with him his quenchless ardour for “the cause.” The last letter I received from him concluded with the words: “My feeble hand still holds aloft the banner of the ideal.”

I remember that one of the subjects on which Ruskin discoursed was the poetry of Tennyson, who was still regarded by most people, certainly by the literati of Eton, as a thinker of extraordinary power. He was an instance, said Ruskin, “of one who, with proper guidance, might have done something great”; as it was, he had written nothing of real value, except, perhaps, In Memoriam. Maud and The Princess were “useless,” Enoch Arden “disgusting”; the hero of Maud “an ass and a fool,” and the war-spirit in the poem “downright mischievous.” Thus, again, was sapped the simple faith of an Eton master, who knew by heart a large portion of Tennyson’s poetry, including the whole of Maud.

In addition to such dangerous doctrines, Vegetarianism was now beginning to be heard of in Eton; and this was in one respect a worse heresy than Socialism, because it had to be practised as well as preached, and the abstinence from flesh-foods could not fail to attract unfavourable attention. There was a distinguished scientist among the Eton masters at that time, Dr. P. H. Carpenter, a son of Dr. W. B. Carpenter; and when he expressed a wish to speak with me on the subject of the new diet which he heard I had adopted, I felt that a critical moment had arrived, and as a novice in vegetarian practice I awaited the scientific pronouncement with some awe. When it came, spoken with friendly earnestness, it was this: “Don’t you think that animals were sent us as food?” I have since heard the same pathetic question asked many scores of times. What can one say in reply to it, except that the invoice has not yet been received?

A book of rare merit, filled with a multifarious store of facts about the food question in relation to the humaner thought, is Mr. Howard Williams’s Ethics of Diet, which was then appearing by instalments in the magazine of the Vegetarian Society. I had the good fortune to make Mr. Williams’s personal acquaintance, which was the beginning of a valued friendship; I also had helpful correspondence with Professor F. W. Newman, then President of the Vegetarian Society, and with Professor J. E. B. Mayor, who afterwards succeeded to that post. Thus equipped, I was not greatly impressed by the proofs which friendly colleagues offered me of the “impossibility” of the humaner diet; nor was I troubled when, of the two medical men with whom I was acquainted at Eton, the one said to me: “Well, I will give you two years,”[12] and the other, a rather foolish person whom the boys used to call “Mary,” inquired with a look of puzzled despair at such incredible madness: “Do vegetarians eat meat by night?” A vegetarian was of course regarded as a sheer lunatic in the Eton of those days. Twenty-five years later Eton had a vegetarian headmaster in Dr. Edward Lyttelton, who was an assistant there in the ’eighties. “Little did I think,” he wrote to me, “when we used to chaff you about cabbages, that it would come to this!”

It happened, in one of those years, that it fell to my lot to set the subject for “Declamations,” a Latin theme on some debatable point, which had to be composed and “spouted” annually by two of the sixth-form boys, who took opposite sides in the discussion; and I chose for subject, rather to Dr. Hornby’s disgust, the question of vegetarianism (An Pythagorei qui carne abstinent laudandi sint). Another channel for vegetarian propaganda was afforded by the Ascham Society, a learned and select body organized by some of the masters, who met periodically to read and discuss papers on ethical and literary subjects. It happened that the members were hospitably invited to a dinner by one of their colleagues, who specially announced a dish of roast veal as an attraction: thus provoked, I could not but decline that treat in the accredited Eton manner, a set of Latin verses, of which the conclusion was obvious: Spare the calf, or let me be excused: