scholars by the founder; nevertheless, breakfast was omitted and only mutton was provided throughout the year for their dinner, good in quality but insufficient in quantity. Thirteen servitors were originally to have waited upon the officials and scholars in Hall, instead of which the lower boys waited upon the higher, and the higher upon the provost and company, whenever the latter condescended to dine in the college. Under a very strict oath the statutes had ordered that each scholar should be instructed free by the head and lower masters. In direct defiance of this oath, which these masters had of course taken, each scholar was charged £6 6s., with extras. Each fellow by statute was to have had an apartment only, but they had long resided in spacious houses, free from taxes and repairs, and with stables and coach-houses attached. One room should statutorily have been provided for every three boys, free from any charges; but in 1834 upwards of forty boys slept, or tried to sleep, in Long Chamberthe Eton scholars' dormitory-whilst those who slept in the two adjoining rooms paid a master for the privilege. By the ordinances, any scholar during a short illness was to be maintained at the college expense (if ill longer than four weeks to receive a sum of money), nevertheless, this injunction remained totally ignored. And, finally, the statutes themselves were ordered to be read to the scholars, assembled together, every four months. This was never done; moreover, they were never even allowed access to the statute books. So much for this dull and dreary catalogue of abuses, anent which little or no protest was ever raised at Eton itself, until the intervention of the power from without-the State-an intervention of a kind which then, as now, promised to raise no party capital, but a swarm of wasps buzzing around legislative

ears.

Blessed Marie the Virgin at Eton. The original rights are now held by a Cardiff man, but the original deeds are still in the possession of the authorities of Eton College.

In the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century a boy's enthusiasm for learning at his entrance to Eton was quickly cooled by the banks of Father Thames. The longer a boy remained at Eton the lazier he became; indeed, as late as 1870, "E. G. R.," in the Adventurer (a little magazine), said that: "As a man who has never had dealings with the Chinese can have but a faint idea of what a swindler is, so a man who has never been at Eton has but a poor conception of what idleness is." [In Eton as it Is.] A continuity which remains, so it is said, to-day unbroken.

Besides the squalor and filth in which the collegers lived, entirely separated from the paying oppidans who lived apart in commodious and comfortable "houses," much horse-play of the Red Indian type went on, at the expense of bullied and terror-stricken small boys, who had found an inferno figuratively warmer than any of Dante or Milton's imagination. Those who have had any experience of an ill-conducted secondary school are aware that nowhere may one find a worse mob of howling uncivilised savages (not proletarian offspring!) than in boys under an aged or incompetent headmaster, who has allowed a school to get out of hand. Even so was it at unreformed Eton. Initiatory ceremonies for the Spartan benefit of the unfortunate small boy novice consisted partly in the enforced swallowing of an unsavoury mixture of salt and water. Bolsters, shaken down hard at one end, could do a lot of damage, bowling over ink pots and candles stuck through two leaves of a book, or in bringing the unsuspicious to the ground with a well-directed blow at the ankles. A Jew, as the new boy was called, might wake up in the middle of the night to find a rope tied to his big toe, by which he was dragged from bed, unless he had had the foresight to have previously crept under his neighbour's bed.

A truly revolting piece of hideous savagery, known as putting into play," went on. Around one of the large

fireplaces in this dormitory, "Long Chamber," two bedsteads were placed close together on each side, and two at the end forming an enclosure. A boy "put into play" was placed in one corner, next to the captain, a certain number of upper boys being seated on bedsteads. At a given signal the captain started him with a hearty kick, sufficient to propel him to the opposite side. Thence he was immediately flung back. Bandied about like a shuttlecock, bruises very quickly made the poor boy sore all over, and not until it was very obvious that he was in severe pain was he released, for some shivering spectator, another little boy, to take his place. On one of these auspicious occasions a boy, tossed up to the ceiling, fell sideways and was completely scalped, and his scalp, hanging down his neck, had to be sewn on; but, singularly, he recovered.

No wonder then, that, when in 1826 one Dr. Okes, applying for an insurance policy, replied in answer to a directorial question, that "he had slept in Long Chamber at Eton for four years," the chairman of the board said,

We need not ask Mr. Okes anything more!" It was a case of the survival of the fittest in an insanitary environment.

In these "good," rough old days, Etonian scapegraces used to make flogging the excuse for the perpetration of jokes, sometimes of a sort an appropriate setting for which would have a nice, ancient, mediæval fabliau, or the "Sompnour" and "Frere's Tales" of Dan Chaucer. For instance, one boy got an artistic friend to paint a rough portrait of the headmaster on an unconventional portion of the first individual's anatomy, so that when he (the said pupil) was caught bending the headmaster was aghast at being confronted by his own likeness grinning at him from a tasteful and elegant environment. But he rose to the occasion, and, gallantly laying on with two birches, removed, like a Gothic iconoclast, all traces of this work of an old master.

Under the wills of Provosts Bost and Roger Lupton the Eton scholars had been bequeathed 3d. each, traditionally said to have been equivalent to the value of half a sheep. A greatly daring colleger who had heard of this tradition said to one Bethell (bursar in the time of Dr. Hawtrey, about 1849), when he was, one February 27th, receiving from the official the annual 3d. (which is still paid, by the way): "No, thank you, sir, I want my half sheep." Bethell, a man of irascible temper, at once got considerably huffed. "I will mention this matter to the Doctor," said he, " and have you flogged!" And, sure enough, this young scholastic upholder of dead men's wills was borne to the block and whacked.

CHAPTER VII

ETON COLLEGE (continued)

"

PROVOST HODGSON, the VANDAL AND HIS PARTIAL REFORM-FROM FLUNKEYS TO PLUTOCRATS-A MODERN EDUCATIONALIST'S CRITICISM OF ETON-SWINBURNE THE POET-VIRTUES OF THE BIRCH-AN AGITATOR " AT ETON-JACOB OMNIUM and the "Cornhill MAGAZINE -A SUPERNAL "REFORM "-HAIL, MISTRESS Etona!-THE FIRM OF WILLIAM MORris-Burne-Jones and Watts-Old and New DeparTURES-THE OLD SERPENT "-NEW STATUTES-WHERE ARE THE FOUNDER'S "POOR THIRTEEN"? — 'A SHOCKING THING!” FLAGRANT INIQUITY LEGALISED THE MANES OF HENRY VI.—ETON TO-DAY.

PROVOST FRANCIS HODGSON,* who, in 1840, was forced on the college by the Crown, reformed Eton at a cost of £14,000, giving separate rooms to forty-nine seniors and improving the food, while he made admission depend on a limited kind of competitive examination with the result that, whereas the former alumni had mainly consisted of the lackeys of the great and petty tradesmen of the rich, the college was henceforth handed over to the sons of speakers, cabinet ministers, plutocrats, and their kind, thronging in to participate in the founder's charity.

Speaking of the intellectual calibre of the Lowest Division of the Eton of to-day, Dr. A. F. Leach has written :—

"They (the books embodying the curriculum and requirements) are books of a calibre which the Eton boys of the same age of the 16th or 17th century would have regarded as fit only for babes and sucklings, the petits of the Song school, not for

"

*Guilty, under the plea of "superstitious usage," of an act of astounding vandalism in almost wholly destroying some exquisite medieval wall paintings of the fifteenth century, depicting scenes from Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum Historiale, and the "Golden Legend." Workmen, at the "restoration" of 1845, had discovered these frescoes under a coat of sixteenth century whitewash, in the Eton Chapel. Hodgson also removed fine stalls and woodwork, by Christopher Wren, at the same period. Even the Reformation did not "sin," artistically, so greatly!