to celebrate the Fourth of June and even Founder's Day all over the world. We do insist on this testimony and on the great value of this affection. It arises from happiness and a reverence for which no scientific improvement would be compensation. What we want is to get the latter without risk to the former.

Finally, the Headmaster at Eton is not saddled with a boarding-house. His relations with both boys and masters are impartial, his pecuniary position fairly assured, and he has time for governing his kingdom and also keeping in touch with the public life of the country. Mr Clutton Brock in an excellent handbook (Eton'; Bell, 1900) rightly urges the limitation of the excessive numbers of the school, but would wrongly measure it by the possible extent of the Headmaster's acquaintance with the individual. The numbers should be limited, but the space in Chapels and the accommodation of the boarding-houses and school-rooms seem more to the point than the Headmaster's knowing all the boys. A bishop should rule his diocese through archdeacons and incumbents, a vice-chancellor his university through heads of houses or senate, a viceroy his realm through council and officers. To know every boy may be right for what is called the Arnold tradition; it is outgrown at Eton and neither possible nor particularly useful. The influence of Dr Warre and Dr Lyttelton has been, and that of Dr Alington will be, very great, but the Headmaster's government should not come between the tutor and his pupil or between the parent and the boy, but should be exercised through the house-masters, his assistants, the sixth form of his division, and the house captains, or by edict from school office, or by his use of the pulpit. This position of the Headmaster-his independence of boarders and his relation to the tutors and the boys-is a palladium of the school.

So much for the more peculiar features of the system which has made Eton what it is. It is certain, however, that much less depends on system than on the men who work it. The boys, we said, are much better taught now than fifty years ago. Well-furnished critics like Dr A. C. Benson have insisted that far too many left Eton ignorant of Physics and Mathematics, unable to

read Latin or Greek, and with no power of self-expression, no pleasure in literature. It was too true. It can hardly be true now. Changes of curriculum, of course, leave loopholes and it must take years to fit the modern requirements into a twenty-four hour day, yet the edifice is being built up and new modifications ever introduced. Some impenetrable Philistines there will always be from idle and fashionable homes; and indeed it may be doubted whether in our leisured classes there has been any great advance in intellectual interest. Take the railway bookstall and compare the proportion of tawdry ephemerals to standard works. Look at the suggestive covers of blatant magazines. Take the theatre whence plays are ousted by revue and revue by cinema; smudged pictures prevail over letterpress in many newspapers. Rapidity of change attracts, and everything must be fast and loud and easy. Intellectual effort is to be avoided. The reprints of English classics are for a different public, and it is the workman that begins to care for education. In the face of this tendency it is not to every home that we can look, for extending to the schoolboy a serious pleasure in learning.

More depends on the home, but at school one help might be the training of the teachers, although sometimes it has been said that trained nurses lose humanity. In teachers humanity is far more important even than skill, but we see with pleasure that in his able Defence of Classical Education' so good an advocate as Mr R. W. Livingstone urges the need of training for Public School teachers. We have heard some of the staunchest Old Etonians contrast the difference between our material and that for secondary teachers in the County Schools. They point to the ability and success of the latter, and think it strange that no Headmaster at Eton has yet required his young assistants to come to him trained for their work. Some of these have had experience of other school methods or foreign travel; others have not, and learn their business by rule of thumb not without difficulty and failures. Yet it is on the quality of the staff that nearly everything depends. The appointments and the control remain the Headmaster's most important function. The worst harm done to any school is to allow the rise or continuance of a bad house.' Removal

is rare, dismissal a dreadful responsibility. But that is why Headmasters are carefully chosen and highly paid. This most formidable of duties is further embarrassed nowadays by the difficulty of bringing the best men into this rather than into more lucrative or more brilliant professions. The consequence is well put by Mr Ainger. Again, the newer type of boarding-house requires an establishment and style of living even in time of peace quite beyond the mundus victus non deficiente crumena,' which ought to set the example of 'plain living and high thinking' to a rising generation.

As regards the social life of the boys there is the most absolute appearance of their general happiness (and what a value is a happy boyhood!) and their love of the place. Fagging and bullying are no longer any trouble. Sometimes, in cleverer circles, an eccentric is worried by pin-pricks of chaff or by want of friends. Shelley's trials, though real, were partly self-invited and have been grossly exaggerated. Swinburne, less provocative, had by no means a bad time. And now few things are more cheering than the contentment and pleasure of the new boy in his big little world.

Per

Some things might be amended, for instance the vexatious habit of those who can fag, obliging every lower boy at every call to leave his work and race to the caller. The maintenance of a custom so vexatious and wasteful helps one to understand how it was that 'Shirking' went on so long; yet it is possible for the same person to marvel at the latter and maintain the former. haps the history of 'Shirking' has some interest as a Victorian relic. It was originally a point of monkish or Spanish etiquette to show respect by not appearing in the presence of the greater man. It still continued after it had lost all remains of common sense, and it became not only a nuisance to boys and masters alike but a sort of education in falsehood and humbug. Nowadays a decent salute is the most that is expected even from a private soldier to his officer, though he is still forbidden to address the latter except through a N.C.O. A stranger sometimes asks whether the movement of a schoolboy's finger would satisfy Wilhelm Meister's requirements of reverence. It is significant that the abolition of 'Shirking,' attributed by some to Dr Goodford, by

others to Dr Hornby, was really due to the most conservative of Headmasters, Dr Balston.

Some young Belgians lately conducted round the school by an Old Etonian were amazed at three marvels -the absence of any 'bounds' (not quite true), the absence of a chair for their prince in his division (he sat on a form like the rest!), and the power apparently entrusted to the upper boys. This last raises one of the most difficult questions of statesmanship. The authority of the Oppidan Sixth Form has been allowed to decay, partly by the system of promotion introducing into it too many boys of little personal influence; partly by the absorption in games exaggerating the influence of leading athletes often, but not always, more vigorous in character; and thirdly, while in College the ten Sixth Form boys retain all their old power over the sixty below them, the number of Oppidan Sixth Form remains the same (ten) out of all proportion to the increase of that part of the school. Therefore, since Dr Warre always disclaimed a monitorial system, 'Pop' with the leading athletes outbalanced Sixth Form. This must account for much of the inferior position taken by learning in the eyes of the younger boys. It appears to them not unnaturally to be the official appraisement. Many opportunities of readjustment have been lost, not for want of suggestion. Now, when the school is denuded by the elder boys hurrying away to arms, it becomes a still more important object, which needs to be kept in view with much pondering of methods and possibilities. At present the position is unsatisfactory in two ways. There is nowhere any sufficiently recognised responsibility, and the control is apt to be inconstant and inefficient, while in the members of Pop' the privilege breeds an unwholesome self-consciousness with childish affectations or extravagances of dress and bearing.

There is a passage in Dr Edward Lyttelton's sketch of his brother Alfred at school which bears weightily on this subject, when he describes Alfred's attitude towards evil from 1872 onward under Dr Hornby:

'There was much rottenness in the school during the ensuing years. . . . Alfred very rarely reproved rascality. . . . In the midstream of boy life, exposed to all its various elements,

some at that time poisonous, some barbarous, some splendidly healthy, there was a dominating manliness about him which did not exactly rebuke vice, but banished it and all diseased talk about it from his company.' Hence his influence on the tone of the school was extraordinarily wholesome.' But it was a passive influence. He would associate with the baser sort when it was needful, but never scolded them or exhorted them to higher things. . . . It is worth considering whether he would have been so popular if he had been more of a crusader. Probably not. It is not easy for boys at school to be aggressive against rascality without making serious blunders, and at that time there was such an acquiescence in low conduct and talk that popular opinion would never have condoned any slip in a reformer.'

This sketch of the leading boy in the school by the distinguished brother who shared his room, is full of suggestive warning, besides being of great interest to those who knew and admired the most lovable of our statesmen. Others who were then watching the future Headmaster knew that his bolder opposition to evil gave presage of his work in Holy Orders, and that he sacrificed much popularity by his more uncompromising attitude. In some houses it was needed. Compare Mr Murray's 'More than the average share of this taint prevailed at my tutor's,' and 'I tried to work, but a small boy sap often had a bad time of it at my tutor's.'* Would 'public opinion' have been so ready to side with 'beast or blackguardly set' if a boy like Edward Lyttelton had been backed by or associated with a set of leaders brought together by something other than athletics and fashion, however admirable and devoted the best of these have been? Alfred at Eton glowed, as it were, with adolescent gaiety. It was not virility, for he was youth personified. The growth and sunny ripening of that character has lately been so described that hearts are won by the veluti descripta tabella Vita '-alas! not senis,' would it were! Nor less is the versatile charm of George Wyndham expressed in his own selected letters. Though memories of our heroic friends, good, brilliant, dear as they, fallen in these three dreadful years, crowd on our memories now, forms as radiant, faces as winning, prowess and promise

6

'Eton Sixty Years Ago.'