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had elected a year or two before. Happily I did not look nearly my age. I was put in a class of about a dozen in the ante-room of the Upper School. It consisted chiefly of those who, like me, had just entered Lloyd's house, and I think it was he who heard us now and then. But there were several new gown-boys amongst them. One of them, I might almost say, now stands before me, so distinct is my recollection of figure, features, colour, and expression. This was Theodosius Anson. I have lately described him to his younger brother, who only knew that he had had such a brother, for he had no recollection of him.

I did not make my appearance in the Under School till after the long vacation, or St. Bartholomew's holidays, as they were called. Now don't come back without knowing the Greek alphabet,' Lloyd had said to me; and this I accomplished. I suppose I should have felt very much ashamed of myself but for the fact of my knowing much more about geography, history, politics, and things in general than even my elders in my house.

I must have been slow and awkward, more so, indeed, than any of my brothers. I was decidedly provincial. Fortunately for me there were Yorkshiremen and Nottinghamshiremen in my house. Charles Childers at once pronounced me a north-country-man when I called the coal-scuttle a 'coal-pan.' Russell, whose ears had been early accustomed to the sweet but rather whiny sing-song of Northamptonshire, at once recognised a more northern utterance, and endeavoured in vain to rectify it.

For the first year or two I had a bad time of it at Charterhouse, all the worse on account of my getting on in the school and rising rapidly. In my own house I was surrounded by fellows who, even if they were not much older, were a head and shoulders taller. I was uppish, conceited, and not always agreeable. This marked me out as the proper victim of an amusement then fashionable in all ranks of society, and leading to sad consequences. Some of the fellows in my house made it their business to get up fights, to persuade boys they had been insulted, and that they were bound to save their honour by a pitched battle. There came two brothers straight from India, the Frenches, overgrown lads of neglected education. The youngest must have been three years my junior, but half as big again. He was set upon me by my persecutors. His way of fighting, which I was afterwards told was regular Indian, was to rush at me with both his fists in my face, turn round, receive my blows on his brawny shoulders, and touch the ground with his knee when he had enough of that. This he did for a dozen rounds. I forget how the point of honour was settled. I got my face well bruised, but did not give in.

We were good friends, unless what I have to say be a disparagement of both his goodness and mine. Finding himself behindhand with a school exercise, he asked me to do it for him, offering the bribe of a pretty Latin cross in red cornelian, the work of some Indian lapidary. I took the bribe, and presented it to a sister, who I believe has and values it still. it lies on my conscience. Often when I have admired

But

some curiosity in a cottage or a farmhouse, have I been pressed to accept it, or to give what I thought its worth, and have declined to rob the family of its heirloom. The only result of my abstinence sometimes has been to see the object destroyed, or passing into strange hands.

I and R. J. A. R. R. Thompson, who added two more names to his long original list, and who became an important personage at the War Office, but who was much my junior, and a very good fellow, were cajoled, or compelled, to believe that we were bound to have it out with our fists. The encounter was in the bedroom. Four beds were rolled together for the platform. Combatants always feel their throats dry after the first round. There was no water in the bedrooms, for we did our ablutions in a washhouse on the ground-floor. But some of the boys were on the sick list, and had gruel. So with this we moistened our throats and breathed. After a dozen rounds, fought without a particle of animosity on either side, it was agreed that the battle should be finished at Middle Briars next day, the usual trysting-ground for the bitterest antagonists. Before the hour arrived we managed to come to an understanding, and cheat the common enemy, who were then ready to demolish both of us. The deficiency of the water-supply in some of our recent wars may possibly have reminded Thompson, or Gwyn, as he came to be named, of our extempore and insufficient substitute.

CHAPTER LVIII.

CHARTERHOUSE ON THE BELL SYSTEM.

I HAVE frequently been made sensible of a certain reluctance to allow to Charterhouse, as it was in my time, the title of a public school—that is, of the right to be classed with Eton, Harrow, Westminster, and Winchester. It is like the question whether Tacitus can be reckoned among the writers of the Augustan era, when his own writings are a continual protest against it. Charterhouse was a protest against the existing public schools. But, however it may be with Nature, which runs into types, human creations are seldom easy to classify, except with some sacrifice of exact truth.

Charterhouse, as I found it early in 1820, was not in a state to resent disparaging comparisons with the schools I have named, for both in aim and in effect it was as unlike them as possible. Their whole idea, their composition, their formation and management, was traditional, prescriptive, almost hereditary, and very select. A boy went to the school which his parents and relatives had gone to. The school in this way was a society continually replenished with like materials, and strong in social unity for good or for ill. The school was in many respects more powerful than the masters, and many a biography of the period records with pride some victory gained over the masters. This social unity was generally aristocratic, and disposed to deal hardly with intruders, as they were deemed, from the mercantile or professional classes. Indeed, there was little law for them, or

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grace either. They were often cruelly persecuted, and the certainty that they would suffer, perhaps beyond their power to bear, kept many parents from sending their sons to a public school.

Dreadful stories were current, exaggerations no doubt, though possibly founded on fact. The story of the boy left suspended before a hot fire while his tormentors were away on a sudden call, and found on their return roasted to death, is told of so many schools and with such variety of circumstances that I trust it is a fiction-as much a fiction as the legendary origin of Dulce Domum. Schools invent, or propagate, stories one of another. In my time it was confidently stated at Charterhouse that the Westminster boys rented a row of ruinous houses, the partition walls of which they had broken through, for the purpose of rat-hunting.

However it might be, it was notorious that a boy could go for many years to one of these schools without bringing home much scholarship, the only thing he was expected to bring. When a boy was asked what he had done at school, and perhaps put to the proof, he would explain that he had never been called on, and that though he had been flogged frequently, he had never said his repetition yet. This the parents thought to prove the system utterly at fault, even though aware that they had never had more success with the young hopeful at home. They forgot, too, if they had ever known it, that the human mind, with the experience of some thousand years, has never yet discovered how to make a boy learn if he is resolved not to learn.