ordinance, containing in embryo the modern public school system, provides that "the Schoolmaster may receive over and above the youth of the inhabitants within the parish, so many Foreigners (i.e., strangers) as the whole number may be well taught and applied, and the place can conveniently contain, by the judgment and discretion of the Governors. And of the Foreigners he may take such stipends and wages as he can get, except that they be of the kindred of John Lyon, the Founder. So that he take pains with all indifferently, as well of the Parish as Foreigners, as well of poor as of rich."* Clearly John Lyon did not intend that the "foreigners," the sons of the aristocratic and clerical barbarians, should extrude the poor. Certainly he did not anticipate such consummation!

Harrow, like Rugby, was thus founded for the free education of the children of the district, as well as of the founder's kin; but as these schools grew fashionable, every subterfuge of dishonesty, all possible disingenuous tactics and chicanery were employed to ignore the spirit whilst keeping the letter of the foundation statutes. If the scholar were required to be "poor," then, of course, what was meant was that he himself was poor, not his parents or friends. On this basis, all the children of our brethren of the upper-middle and upper classes can be proved to be in the direst poverty. If the school were intended for the benefit of the real indigent of the locality, then, by a singularly felicitous ratiocinative process, the conclusion was arrived at that any parent of the "higher classes" might, by long or short residence in the neighbourhood, be qualified to send his son to participate in the founder's bounty. And, finally, if, as in the case of Harrow, the school happened to be in close proximity to London, it retained a few free places for town boys; and as for the obvious reasons of class distinction, the inevitable stigma of social inferiority attached to the holders of

* Our italics.

these free places," they were not in demand, so the school gradually developed into a fashionable boarding seminary.

Until 1660 Harrow appears to have been in a very languishing state-no grant appears to have been made for maintenance, although instruction was gratuitous; but about that year, one, the Rev. William Horne, Master of Harrow, decided, with the full concurrence and permission of the governing body, to attract "foreigners" (referred to above) as boarders from " many of the leading families of England." Henceforth, there were continual strivings to break the spirit of the statutes whilst holding by the letter. The extrusion of the poor boy had commenced.

To-day Harrow salves its not over-tender conscience by maintaining a cheap day school founded by Dr. Vaughan, a former master of Harrow (1845-59), for the benefit of the children "of the humble parishioners of Harrow." Designated the "English Form," this school gives its pupils a "good commercial education for £8 from each boy." For the most part, these boys are the sons of tradesmen in the village and its neighbourhood, and they have no communication, either in school or chapel or in the playing-ground, with the boys composing the great school. Somehow, the "English Form" reminds us of "Lycurgus House Academy," and all its glory, presided over in state by the immortal Archimedes Silverpump, Ph.D. (see Matthew Arnold's Friendship's Garland, pp. 52-53).

The charter granted to John Lyon in the fourteenth year of Elizabeth's reign, recites "That John Lyon had purposed in his mind a Grammar School, with one Schoolmaster and one Usher, within the village of Harrow, to found and for ever to establish for the perpetual education . . . of children and youth of the said parish, and two scholars within the University of Cambridge, and two scholars within the University of Oxford." The property of the founder consisted of several small estates at Harrow

and the neighbouring hamlets of Alperton and Preston; at Barnet; at Malden in Bedfordshire; and at Paddington and Kilburn in Marylebone parish, London, W. These lands he conveyed to the governors by separate deeds, directing the whole profits of the lands at Paddington to be applied towards repairing the highway from London to Harrow. The profits of his other estates were dedicated to the school, and to the maintenance of two scholars at Oxford, and the same number at Cambridge. The rental of the lands devoted by him to the purposes of Harrow Free School appear to have been about two-thirds of the value of his estates-the other third being apportioned to the repair of the roads. Those proportions were, even as late as 1875, reversed; the entire income of the School Charity Trust Estate being £1,100, while that of the road estates was £3,500 yearly. By aid of various legislative enactments, the ratepayers of Paddington were thus, in spite of the vigorous protests of the Harrow governors, being relieved of part of their burden.

The Harrow governing body exercise the privilege of electing or admitting "free scholars" on the foundation of the school, and of electing to the John Lyon's Scholarship at the two Universities. They are entitled to no emoluments other than the statutable 13s. 4d. prescribed by Lyon, annually, "for their pains." By the statutes they are to meet once annually, and are empowered to fill up vacancies in their own body by the election of "honest and substantial inhabitants" within the parish of Harrow. The net emoluments of the headmaster, free of deductions of all kinds, are stated to amount to about £6,275 yearly. According to the Clarendon Report (1864), there is no building fund at Harrow; the revenues of the foundation are very limited, and it has been customary for the Headmaster to subscribe largely to those new buildings and improvements which the growth of the establishment demands, while the cost of supporting them falls on him alone."

G.E.S.

The old schoolroom at Harrow, with its battered panels carved with the names of boys subsequently famous men, is much the same as the founder left it. Sheridan, the dramatist, Palmerston, Peel, Spencer Perceval, Byron, and a host of other names, with dates, may be discerned thereon. In accordance with the requisition of the founder that parents should allow their children "at all times, bow-shafts, bow-strings, and a bracer," there was held, until 1772, at the bottom of a picturesque tree-crowned knoll which backed on a turf imitation of an amphitheatre, an annual archery contest. At these butts six to twelve boys, habited in a silk and satin fancy dress spangled, white and green or white and red in colour, "with sashes and silken caps to match," competed for a solid silver arrow. This seems to have been the equivalent of the Eton Montem, and, like it, has long been extinct. The boy who shot within three circles of the target was saluted with a flourish of French horns; he who hit the bull's-eye obtained the coveted arrow.

From the foundation of Harrow School until about 1650 few but parochial children were educated within its walls. The poets of Harrow are the famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Lord Byron, and the exquisite "prince of parodists" and versatile musician, caricaturist, athlete, but unfortunate Charles Stuart Calverley, of the "Verses and Translations" (1862), and "Fly Leaves" (1877). Numbered among men of letters educated at Harrow School are Dennis, the critic, contemporary with Pope and the "Augustan Age" of English literature; Dean Merivale, who wrote a fine introduction to Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"; Archbishop Trench, the well-known and versatile philologist who had the faculty of putting his erudition into a readable shape; Anthony Trollope, whose really great novel, "Barchester Towers," ought to have saved him from obscurity, for all time in English literature; J. A. Symonds, the writer and critic on Renaissance subjects, who gave us a fine translation of the renowned Florentine, Benvenuto