of them too the head master was supreme. He could dis-niche, so to speak, whom he pleased. On each vigil, just after or before prayers were read-we prayed morning and evening-a respectful, a reverential deputation went up to him to remind himas if he wanted reminding of anything!-of the imminent feast, and pray that we might keep holiday. What agonies of suspense have been endured on such occasions! The entire school would sit with its eyes fastened on the interview, pale and trembling! Sometimes it would see its deputies driven with ignominy from the imperial seat. At other times, and these the more frequent, it would become sensible that the presence was smiling, and all was well; and would, it may be feared, employ itself during the ensuing prayers in devising the most splendid programmes for the spending of the morrow. Ah! delightful morrows! What games, what wanderings on the hills, what bathings in clear brooks, what noises of battling with "louts ”—the local Philistines- -did ye bring us!

But I must not attempt to describe all the vision that I see when I look back at those old days. There were other masters besides the head master, who, in my eyes at least, belonged to a higher race than the human; there were boys, men of but nascent faculties, who were destined to win fame on the Cam or the Isis, in the senate-house or in the schools, if on no broader fields; there were adventures and accidents of a thrilling character. Is it not possible to think of one's earliest affaire du cœur without emotion? Can one ever forget the fervent hope, the profound despair, of the love that made us twice a boy, the tender interchanges of vows and oranges, the sweetness and the light and the gloom of one's primal passion? It is long, O my friends, since Plancus-longer since his predecessor—was consul; but in our bosom live their ancient fires. Still I will not let my pen revert to all these things. I push them from me. Quit me now, I pray you, oh face of my primeval fiancée !— schoolfellows in whose brave company I weathered the storms of that age, ye whom I fought and loved,—even thou, oh Jones, choice friend of my early bosom, sæpe mecum tempus in ultimum deducte, let your memories, howsoever dear, pass from me for the present. I would offer no offence to you, either to those that are now shades, and whose palpable hands I shall never clasp again; or to you whom I may yet again meet and embrace. But of another sort must my thoughts now be. I would fain recall our in-school life, and try to describe the kind of learning we received from the hands (literally, I think) of our instructors, and the manner in which it was administered to us.

And yet I tremble when I think of that in-school life. Joy

summer;

ful were the hours that interrupted it; sweet were the names of the Saints; blessed were the advents of Christmas and Midbut the in-school life cannot be recollected even now without spasms of terror. The firm conviction of the masters of the old grammar school was, that nothing could possibly be taught that was not emphasized with the cane. This was their one sovereign theory, and ay me! their practice. Teaching and flogging were convertible terms. Such was the tradition of the place. The genius loci brandished a birch, I believe, in those days. I do not suppose that throughout the three centuries our school had been founded, any lad had passed through it without serving, in his day and generation, for-what slaves are called in the Latin comediesa whipping-post. The very air seemed resonant with the shrieks of all the generations since our founder Edward's time. Of course, everybody knows this was the great idea of the elder teachers. I might quote the "Paston Letters," and Ascham, and many another authority, to show how intimate the relation between the rod and instruction was generally supposed to be, and how little chances protester against this alliance, as Ascham himself, had of securing a hearing. But I will abstain from airing what information I may have on the condition of our forefathers in this respect. I will only state what the condition of our old school was when we frequented it. I never remember seeing one of the guides and instructors of our youth without an implement of chastisement, or what might serve as one, in his hand. And when I remember the amazing adroitness with which each one of them could use his hands, on occasion, for the same mind-developing purpose, I can only pronounce that implement highly superfluous. They were not cruel-hearted men; to make ears tingle, bones ache, life generally a burden and a misery, was no extreme pleasure to them. Small specimens of humanity leaping and dancing, and hands wringing, and shrieking as if engaged in the worship of some Baal who perchance slept and must needs be awakened, could scarcely have been agreeable objects of contemplation; but they knew not of any other method in which instruction might possibly be imparted. They sincerely believed that if the rod were spared, the child was spoiled. Certainly, they did not spare the rod. Two masters used, besides their hands, which they applied so deftly, and their walking sticks, which were employed on an emergency-and emergencies were frequent-the ordinary cane; and, I think, must have made the fortunes of several vendors of that fatal article. Is there any purist in morals so superfine as to condemn us for destroying any cane that fell in our way? Well, let him condemn us. I dare say many of us would have had

more abundant locks on our heads at this present moment, if we had not sacrificed so many hairs to a belief, that the insertion of one in a cane judiciously nicked at the end ensured that cane's splitting throughout its length, when next it dealt any victim a violent blow. Other canes we hacked in 'pieces sma';' others we burned with fire; But

"Non hydra secto corpore firmior

Vinci dolentem crevit in Herculem,"

than that cane-crop in our faces or on our backs. Still the falling blows resounded: still the victim's squeals re-echoed.

The great master of the art of flogging, as of all other arts, was the Archididasculus himself. It is impossible to convey to one who has not suffered from it any adequate notion of his proficiency in this didactic faculty. Ordinarily, or in the earlier passages of a lesson, he would content himself with ear-boxing, either with the hand or with a book, or would find his walking-stick freely applied to any legs or arms that presented themselves sufficient for his needs. Little attentions of this sort meant little with him. They were merely gentle hints that he was amongst us. A box on the ears was but synonymous with a pleasant pat on the shoulder from a teacher of a different kidney. Rapping on the knuckles with the ferule of his stick was, in fact, his way of shaking hands. Besides, he wanted exercise-could we grudge it him? Perhaps we did so, but I mean ought we to have done so? The school-room was his gymnasium. A little boy was a kind of dumb-bell for him; a big one was as good as a pair of clubs. And then, as I hinted before, all their painful actions seemed to him to give the proper emphasis to what he had to say. Many great teachers raise their hands in teaching to excite attention, to add force, to relieve their feelings; our old master did so too, but he took care that the raised hand should fall on somebody. In this way whatever advantage there may be in raising your hand is considerably enlarged. But I have spoken so far only of what may be called his caresses. To be sure, the small signs of kindly recognition that have been mentioned were at times overpowering; they reduced the recipient, albeit no tenderling, to much distress, and demanded all his powers of Spartan endurance. But these, I say, were but his caresses, his merry toyings, his playfulnesses. There were times when our ignorance, or stupidity, or some other deformity, excited him into a far different mood. Ah! those were terrible times. He would then unlock his desk, and produce from it his own peculiar cane -a knotted thing, reported to be loaded with lead at the end. There is a passage in the "Iliad" called by the scholiasts,

"the handing down of the sceptre "-a sort of pedigree of a sceptre that there is occasion to mention-which I should parallel here, if only I could. Legends said that the head master's cane was of unknown age. Perhaps it was cut off the Tree of Knowledge itself-who can say?-and was familiar, to their cost, to the boyhood of the Patriarchal age. There can be no doubt that it had flogged many and many a generation-that it had elicited the youthful roarings of many a long century. I warrant it had excited more terror in its time than any other conceivable thing. The biggest embryo magnate of the county had trembled at the sight of it; nascent poets had been subdued to an awful silence or an awfuller outcry by it; future athletes, giants of mighty bone and bold emprise, had wept copiously under its influence. When that cane was drawn forth from its recess, then all the earth grew dark; hope for a season bade the world farewell; our hearts became chill; we huddled close together; we cast wild despairing glances at the ceiling; we felt that our hour was come.

I shall never believe that the Reign of Terror, so called, in the French Revolution deserved the name comparatively.

To show how completely we lay at the mercy of the head master, I perhaps ought to state that we generally sat when up" to him upon one long form, opposite to which stood a chair on which was seated the particular boy who was going on." Our master adopted for himself the peripatetic, or, more strictly perhaps, the ana- or kata-patetic method; his beat was immediately in front of the form on which we sat, so that he could get at the entire class as he paced up and down. He very frequently availed himself of his opportunities; and with the masterly dexterity and quickness which distinguished him, often succeeded in “ touching up" each one of us in the course of a single promenade. But most pitiable was the position of the poor boy on the chair on the other side of the master's line of walk. That chair was a sort of altar on which boy-sacrifices were offered. There the youth sat exposed on every side to the blasts of blows and boxes that might descend on him at any moment, which were sure to descend upon him sooner or later in a hideous hurricane. What scenes of utter terror were enacted on or near that chair? What moving appeals for help when the master's back was turned in the course of his ambulation! How frightful one's future seemed when he was seen returning and bearing down furiously upon one, like a very flying fiery scourge! Sometimes what brains we had, I suppose perfectly addled by the horrors we were going through, and so doing their work worse and worse, the lesson would end in a general rout. The class would be seen flying in all directions,

hotly pursued every way by the ubiquitous rod, which seemed at these times to awake into a fiendish life of its own, and bite and lacerate spontaneously. Who can wonder if one does still exceedingly fear and tremble when one thinks of those days?

I do not think that any one will now expect to hear that the oral teaching of our old school was of a sort that demanded or fostered any high degree of intelligence. The teaching was admirable of its sort; but it was certainly not of a sort that tended to awake or encourage any general intelligence. Learning by rote was the one great established principle of the place. This principle was carried out thoroughly and successfully. The Latin grammar in use was the old Eton one composed by Lily, Colet, and Erasmus. (That familiar example—well, familiar to the risen generations; unknown, I suppose, to the rising"Interest magistratus tueri bonos, animadvertere in malos," refers to the punishment of Empson and Dudley, A.D. 1513. In that other, "Audito regem Doroberniam proficisci," allusion is made to King Henry the Eighth's setting out for Dover to meet Charles the Emperor, A.D. 1520.) How well we knew every word of that famous hand-book! No man knows his own house, to use Juvenal's phrase, better than we did the various parts of that exhaustive and exhausting work. Those spirited poems called from their opening words the "Propria quæ maribus” and the "As in Præsenti" were graven deep upon all our memories.* I feel convinced that "As in Præsenti" and " Propria quæ maribus" will be found written on my heart, as Calais was to be on poor Queen Mary's. With every graceful play of fancy, with every cunning artifice of language, with every harmonious number to be observed in those two works we were only too familiar. Nothing could be more successful than the manner in which what we had to learn was impressed upon our memories. Not a word was neglected. But what was conspicuous by its absence was any attempt at an explanation of what we learned. Facts were, so to speak, deified. They were, it would seem, identified with principles. They formed the very walls of the universe, beyond which there was no passing. There were no more things in heaven and earth to be known or dreamt of. Certainly our learning began and ended with facts. Perhaps this was a somewhat dulling method, but it was an eminently simple one. The course to be pursued was plain. I think the impression left on many a mind that to want to know, you know," was somewhat wicked. Any

* So the Eneid is sometimes designated "Arma Virum."