href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@49336@[email protected]#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[1] Yet he still retained in some measure the poet’s vision; and when Rector of Rugby he was famous for the powerful interpretation which he gave to Shakespeare in his reading of the Plays. Him I remember at his rectory in the early ’sixties, a dignified, kindly old man, with a quaint mixture of humour and pathos, of ruggedness and gentleness, in his manner. Many stories were current in Rugby of his eccentricities and absent-mindedness; on one occasion when he had brought a lengthy sermon to an end, he is said to have startled his congregation by substituting for the usual formula the equally familiar post-prandial one: “For what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful.”

It was from this Etonian worthy that I first heard of Eton; and though I little foresaw that nearly twenty years of my life would be spent there as boy and master, it thus came about that in the summer of 1866 I found myself being “coached” for an Eton scholarship by the Rev. C. Kegan Paul, formerly “Conduct” (Chaplain) at Eton, who held the Eton living of Sturminster Marshall in Dorsetshire.

Mr. Paul, afterwards founder of a well-known publishing firm, was then a radical parson of very “broad” views, a friend of Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and many other Liberals. A man of fine taste, he also possessed a large fund of vivacity and spirits, which, with his unvarying kindness, made him very popular among his pupils; indeed, only at Eton itself could there have been a more delightful life, regarded from the boyish point of view, than that which we led in those summer months, fishing, bathing, bird’s-nesting. The one cloud on our horizon was the impending rite of Confirmation, which some of us had to undergo at Blandford, and for which Mr. Paul prepared us. I have always felt grateful to him for the simplicity of his method, which was free from the morbid inquiries then common in schools. I think he asked me only one question: “Is it wrong to doubt?” This was a problem in which I felt no sort of concern; making a bold shot, I replied “No,” and was gratified to find that I had answered correctly.

At Eton my tutor was Mr. Francis Warre Cornish, one of the gentlest and most accomplished of men, the very antithesis of the bullying, blustering schoolmaster of the good old type which even then was not wholly superseded. Much loved by those of his pupils who learnt to know him intimately, Mr. Cornish was a good deal hampered in his dealings with boys by his shyness and diffidence; he lacked that gift of geniality which is essential to a successful teacher. This I discovered at an early date, when, in the course of the entrance examination, I was told to show him the rough copy of my Latin verses. It was to these, as it turned out, that I mainly owed my election; but it somewhat depressed me when my prospective tutor, after reading the lines with a sad and forlorn expression, handed them back to me with no more cheering remark than: “Too many spondees.” Years afterwards, when Mr. Cornish, competing for a headmastership, was described in a testimonial as “trembling on the brink of poetic creation” (an odd certificate for such a post), I remembered his criticism of my youthful verses, and could not help thinking that his own poetic genius would also have benefited by a larger infusion of the sprightly or dactylic element. His nature was decidedly spondaic; but he was a kind and courteous gentleman, in the best sense of the word, and in a less rough environment than that of a public school his great abilities would have found ampler scope.

Much the same must be said of Dr. J. J. Hornby, who succeeded the rigid Dr. Balston in the headmastership of Eton in 1868. It was a marvel that a man who loved leisure and quietude as he did, and who seemed always to desire to doff rather than to don the formalities of high office, should have deliberately sought preferment in a profession which could not have been very congenial to him. Not that he lacked the reputed qualities of a ruler: he had a stately presence, a most courteous manner, a charming sense of humour, and the rare power of interesting an audience in any subject of which he spoke. But, behind these external capabilities, he had a fatal weakness—slackness, perhaps, is the proper term—which loosened the reins of authority, and made his headmastership a period of which Eton had no reason to be proud. “Idleness holds sway everywhere,” wrote an Eton boy at that time, “and such idleness! As a man who has never had dealings with the Chinese can have but a faint idea of what swindling is, so a man who has never been at Eton has but a poor conception of what idleness is.”[2] What wonder, when the headmaster was himself as unpunctual as a fourth-form boy?

Hornby was too retiring, too sensitive, to govern a great school. I was in his Division for two years, almost at the beginning of his headmastership; and I can see him still as he sat at his oak table in the middle of the sixth-form room, toying with a pencil, and looking at us somewhat askance, as if to avoid either scrutinizing or being scrutinized, for he was not of the drill-master kind, who challenge their class and stare them down. We liked him the better for it, but divined that he was not quite at ease; and it occurred to one of us that he was aptly described in that terse phrase which Tacitus applied to a Roman emperor: Capax imperii nisi imperâsset (“Every inch a ruler—if only he had not ruled”). There was a certain maladroitness, too, about him which at times set us wondering; until some one suggested that we should look up the cricket records, and see how he had acquitted himself in that supreme criterion of greatness, the Eton and Harrow match. We did so, and found that he had hit his own wicket. Thus all was explained, our worst misgivings confirmed.

The want of discipline in some of the classrooms was appalling. My first term was spent in the “lag” Division of Fifth Form, a very rowdy one, then taken by a most accomplished classical scholar known as “Swage,” or “Swog,” and a more unpleasant introduction for a new boy could hardly have been devised. So great was the uproar, and so frenzied the attempts of the unfortunate “Swage” to suppress it, that it was as dangerous to be a member of the class as it is for a well-disposed citizen to be mixed up in a street-riot; for among so many tormentors there was no security against being mistaken for a ringleader. “Swage’s” schoolroom was on the ground floor and close to the road; and one of the first scenes I witnessed was a determined attempt on the part of some of the bigger boys to drive a stray cow into the room; they got her to the doorway, but there she was met and headed back by “Swage” himself, shouting at the top of his voice and flourishing his large door-key. That was the sort of game that went on almost daily. It was currently reported, and I believe with truth, that “Swage” once set a punishment to a bird. To sing and to whistle were common practices in his Division; and when a bird perched near the window and chirruped in an interval of the din, he rounded on it blindly with a cry of “A hundred lines.”

There was a story, too, that a letter which he once wrote to the headmaster, complaining of one of his private pupils who persisted in knocking loudly on his study door, bore a brief after-cry more eloquent than many words: “P.S. He is knocking still.”

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