Not to River nor Royal Keep,
Low Meads nor level Close,
Up to the sturdy wind-worn steep,
Levavi oculos;
To four red walls on a skyward climb,
Towering over the fields and Time.
E. MILNER-WHITE.

When Dr. Vaughan re-created Harrow School, after its long decadence under Longley and Wordsworth, he wished that the number should never exceed five hundred. Of late years the school has been greatly enlarged, but in my time we were always just about the number which, in Vaughan’s judgment, was the largest that a Head-master could properly supervise. That number is embalmed in Edward Howson’s touching song:-

“Five hundred faces, and all so strange!
Life in front of me, Home behind-
I felt like a waif before the wind,
Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.”

Some of those faces I shall presently describe; but, in reviewing my life at Harrow, my first tribute must be paid to my Head-master-for forty-five years the kindest, most generous, and most faithful of friends. Henry Montagu Butler, youngest son of Dr. George Butler, Dean of Peterborough and sometime Head-master of Harrow, was born in 1833, and educated at Harrow. He was Head of the School, made the cock-score in the Eton match at Lords, was Scholar and Fellow of Trinity, and Senior Classic in 1855. He was elected to the Head-mastership of Harrow, in succession to Dr. Vaughan, when he was only a few months over 26, and entered on his reign in January, 1860. It is not easy to describe what a graceful and brilliant creature he seemed to my boyish eyes, when I first saw him in 1867, nor how unlike what one had imagined a Head-master to be. He was then just thirty-four and looked much younger than he was. Gracefulness is the idea which I specially connect with him. He was graceful in shape, gesture, and carriage; graceful in manners and ways, graceful in scholarship, graceful in writing, pre-eminently graceful in speech. It was his custom from time to time, if any peculiar enormity displayed itself in the school, to call us all together in the Speech-Room, and give us what we called a “Pi-jaw.” One of these discourses I remember as well as if I had heard it yesterday. It was directed against Lying, as not only un-Christian but ungentlemanlike. As he stood on the dais, one hand grasping his gown behind his back and the other marking his points, I felt that, perhaps for the first time, I was listening to pure and unstudied eloquence, suffused with just as much scorn against base wrongdoing as makes speech pungent without making it abusive. It should be recorded to Butler’s credit that he was thoroughly feared. A Head-master who is not feared should be at once dismissed from his post. And, besides being feared, he was profoundly detested by bad boys. The worse the boy’s moral character, the more he hated Butler. But boys who were, in any sense or degree, on the right side; who were striving, however imperfectly, after what is pure and lovely and of good report, felt instinctively that Butler was their friend. His preaching in the School Chapel (though perhaps a little impeded by certain mannerisms) was direct, interesting, and uplifting in no common degree. Many of his sermons made a lifelong impression on me. His written English was always beautifully pellucid, and often adorned by some memorable anecdote or quotation, or by some telling phrase. But once, when, owing to a broken arm, he could not write his sermons, but preached to us extempore three Sundays in succession, he fairly fascinated us. As we rose in the School and came into close contact with him, we found ever more and more to admire. It would be impertinent for me to praise the attainments of a Senior Classic, but no one could fail to see that Butler’s scholarship was unusually graceful and literary. Indeed, he was literary through and through. All fine literature appealed to him with compelling force, and he was peculiarly fond of English oratory. Chatham, Burke, Canning, Sheil, and Bright are some of the great orators to whom he introduced us, and he was never so happy as when he could quote them to illustrate some fine passage in Cicero or Demosthenes. One other introduction which I owe to him I must by no means forget-Lord Beaconsfield’s novels. I had read Lothair when it came out, but I was then too inexperienced to discern the deep truths which underlie its glittering satire. Butler introduced me to Sybil, and thereby opened up to me a new world of interest and amusement. When Butler entertained boys at breakfast or dinner, he was a most delightful host, and threw off all magisterial awfulness as easily as his gown. His conversation was full of fun and sprightliness, and he could talk “Cricket-shop,” ancient and modern, like Lillywhite or R. H. Lyttelton. In time of illness or failure or conscience-stricken remorse, he showed an Arthur-like simplicity of religion which no one could ignore or gainsay.

Next to Dr. Butler, in my list of Harrow masters, must be placed Farrar, afterwards Dean of Canterbury, to whom I owed more in the way of intellectual stimulus and encouragement than to any other teacher. I had, I believe, by nature, some sense of beauty; and Farrar stimulated and encouraged this sense to the top of its bent. Himself inspired by Ruskin, he taught us to admire rich colours and graceful forms-illuminated missals, and Fra Angelico’s blue angels on gold grounds-and to see the exquisite beauty of common things, such as sunsets, and spring grass, and autumn leaves; the waters of a shoaling sea, and the transparent amber of a mountain stream. In literature his range was extremely wide. Nothing worth reading seemed to have escaped him, and he loved poetry as much as Butler loved oratory. When he preached in Chapel his gorgeous rhetoric, as yet not overwrought or over-coloured, held us spellbound; and though, or perhaps because, he was inclined to spoil the boys who responded to his appeals, and to rate them higher than they deserved, we loved and admired him as, I should think, few schoolmasters have been loved and admired.

When I speak of masters who were also friends, I should be ungrateful indeed if I omitted Arthur George Watson, in whose House I was placed as soon as the doctors were satisfied that the experiment could be tried without undue risks. Mr. Watson was a Fellow of All Souls, and was in all respects what we should have expected a member of that Society (elected the same day as the late Lord Salisbury) to be. It was said of C. P. Golightly at Oxford that, when he was asked his opinion of Dr. Hawkins, Provost of Oriel, he replied: “Well, if I were forced to choose the epithet which should be least descriptive of the dear Provost, I should choose gushing.” Exactly the same might be said of Mr. Watson; but he was the most high-minded and conscientious of men, a thorough gentleman, inflexibly just, and a perfect House-Master. The days which I spent under his roof must always be reckoned among the happiest of my life.

Among masters who were also friends I must assign a high place to the Rev. William Done Bushell, who vainly endeavoured to teach me mathematics, but found me more at home in the sphere (which he also loved) of Ecclesiology. And not even the most thoughtless or ill-conditioned boy who was at Harrow between 1854 and 1882 could ever forget the Rev. John Smith, who, through a life-time overshadowed by impending calamity, was an Apostle to boys, if ever there was one, and the Guardian Angel of youthful innocence. Dr. Vaughan, no lover of exaggerated phrases, called him, in a memorial sermon, “the Christ of Harrow;” and there must be many a man now living who, as he looks back, feels that he owed the salvation of his soul to that Christ-like character.

During my first two years at Harrow, Dr. Westcott, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was one of the masters, and it has always been a matter of deep regret to me that I had no opportunity of getting to know him. He was hardly visible in the common life of the School. He lived remote, aloof, apart, alone. It must be presumed that the boys who boarded in his House knew something of him, but with the School in general he never came in contact. His special work was to supervise the composition, English and classical, of the Sixth Form, and on this task he lavished all his minute and scrupulous scholarship, all his genuine enthusiasm for literary beauty. But, until we were in the Sixth, we saw Westcott only on public occasions, and one of these occasions was the calling over of names on half-holidays, styled at Eton “Absence,” and at Harrow “Bill.” To see Westcott performing this function made one, even in those puerile days, feel that the beautifully delicate instrument was eminently unfitted for the rough work of mere routine on which it was employed. We had sense enough to know that Westcott was a man of learning and distinction altogether outside the beaten track of schoolmasters’ accomplishments; and that he had performed achievements in scholarship and divinity which great men recognized as great. “Calling Bill” was an occupation well enough suited for his colleagues-for Huggins or Buggins or Brown or Green-but it was actually pathetic to see this frail embodiment of culture and piety contending with the clamour and tumult of five hundred obstreperous boys.

It was not only as a great scholar that we revered Westcott. We knew, by that mysterious process by which school-boys get to know something of the real, as distinct from the official, characters of their masters, that he was a saint. There were strange stories in the School about his ascetic way of living. We were told that he wrote his sermons on his knees. We heard that he never went into local society, and that he read no newspaper except The Guardian. Thus when Liddon, at the height of his fame as the author of the great Bampton Lectures, came to Harrow to preach on Founder’s Day, it was reported that Westcott would not dine with the Head-master to meet him. He could not spare three hours from prayer and study; but he came in for an hour’s conversation after dinner.

All that we saw and heard in Chapel confirmed what we were told. We saw the bowed form, the clasped hands, the rapt gaze, as of a man who in worship was really solus cum Solo, and not, as the manner of some of his colleagues was, sleeping the sleep of the just, or watching for the devotional delinquencies of the Human Boy. His sermons were rare events; but some of us looked forward to them as to something quite out of the common groove. There were none of the accessories which generally attract boyish admiration-no rhetoric, no purple patches, no declamation, no pretence of spontaneity. His anxious forehead crowned a puny body, and his voice was so faint as to be almost inaudible. The language was totally unadorned; the sentences were closely packed with meaning; and the meaning was not always easy. But the charm lay in distinction, aloofness from common ways of thinking and speaking, a wide outlook on events and movements in the Church, and a fiery enthusiasm all the more telling because sedulously restrained. I remember as if I heard it yesterday a reference in December, 1869, to “that august assemblage which gathers to-morrow under the dome of St. Peter’s,” and I remember feeling pretty sure at the moment that there was no other schoolmaster in England who would preach to his boys about the Vatican Council. But by far the most momentous of Westcott’s sermons at Harrow was that which he preached on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1868. The text was Ephesians : “See then that ye walk circumspectly.” The sermon was an earnest plea for the revival of the ascetic life, and the preacher endeavoured to show “what new blessings God has in store for absolute self-sacrifice” by telling his hearers about the great victories of asceticism in history. He took first the instance of St. Anthony, as the type of personal asceticism; then that of St. Benedict, as the author of the Common Life of equality and brotherhood; and then that of St. Francis, who, “in the midst of a Church endowed with all that art and learning and wealth and power could give, reasserted the love of God to the poorest, the meanest, the most repulsive of His children, and placed again the simple Cross above all the treasures of the world.” Even “the unparalleled achievements, the matchless energy, of the Jesuits” were duly recognized as triumphs of faith and discipline; and the sermon ended with a passionate appeal to the Harrow boys to follow the example of young Antony or the still younger Benedict, and prepare themselves to take their part in reviving the ascetic life of the English Church.

“It is to a congregation like this that the call comes with the most stirring and the most cheering voice. The young alone have the fresh enthusiasm which in former times God has been pleased to consecrate to like services.... And if, as I do believe most deeply, a work at present awaits England, and our English Church, greater than the world has yet seen, I cannot but pray everyone who hears me to listen humbly for the promptings of God’s Spirit, if so be that He is even now calling him to take a foremost part in it. It is for us, perhaps, first to hear the call, but it is for you to interpret it and fulfil it. Our work is already sealed by the past: yours is still rich in boundless possibilities.”

It may readily be believed that this discourse did not please either the British Parent or the Common Schoolmaster. A rumour went abroad that Mr. Westcott was going to turn all the boys into monks, and loud was the clamour of ignorance and superstition. Westcott made the only dignified reply. He printed (without publishing) the peccant sermon, under the title “Disciplined Life,” and gave a copy to every boy in the School, expressing the hope that “God, in His great love, will even thus, by words most unworthily spoken, lead some one among us to think on one peculiar work of the English Church, and in due time to offer himself for the fulfilment of it as His Spirit shall teach.” Those who remember that Charles Gore was one of the boys who heard the sermon may think that the preacher’s prayer was answered.

With the masters generally I was on the best of terms. Indeed, I can only remember two whom I actively disliked, and of these two one was the absolute reproduction of Mr. Creakle, only armed with “thirty Greek lines” instead of the cane. Some of the staff were not particularly friends, but notable as curiosities; and at the head of these must be placed the Rev. Thomas Henry Steel. This truly remarkable man was born in 1806. He was Second Classic and Twentieth Wrangler, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a master at Harrow under Dr. Wordsworth in 1836; left the School in 1843, to take a country living; returned to Harrow, under Dr. Vaughan, in 1849, and in 1855 became (for the second time) master of The Grove, one of the largest boarding-houses in Harrow, where he remained till 1881. He was a keen, alert, and active old gentleman, with a rosy face and long white beard, like Father Christmas: and he carried, in season and out of season, a bright blue umbrella. His degree sufficiently proves that he was a ripe scholar, but, as George Eliot says, “to all ripeness under the sun there comes a further stage of development which is less esteemed in the market”; and, when I was in his Form, it was chiefly characterized by an agreeable laxity of discipline. As regards his boarding-house of forty boys, it was currently reported that he had never been seen in the boys’ side of it. Perhaps he went round it when they were asleep. But it was on his preaching that his fame chiefly rested. His sermons were written in a most exuberant style of old-fashioned rhetoric, and abounded in phrases, allusions, and illustrations, so quaint that, once heard, they could never be forgotten. I believe that he kept a small stock of these sermons, and seldom added to it; but knowing, I suppose, that if preached twice they must inevitably be recognized, he never preached a sermon a second time as long as there was even one boy in the School who had heard it on its first delivery. This was a very sensible precaution; but he little knew that some of his most elaborate passages had, by their sheer oddity, imprinted themselves indelibly on the memories of the hearers, and were handed down by oral tradition. One such especially, about a lady who used to visit the hospitals in the American War, and left a bun or a rose on the pillow of the wounded according as she thought that they would recover or die, had an established place in our annals; and it is not easy to describe the rapture of hearing a passage which, as repeated by one’s schoolfellows, had seemed too absurd for credence, delivered from the School-pulpit, in a kind of solemn stage-whisper. However, “Tommy Steel” was a kind-hearted old gentleman, who believed in letting boys alone, and by a hundred eccentricities of speech and manner, added daily to the gaiety of our life. For one great boon I am eternally his debtor. He set me on reading Wordsworth, and chose his favourite bits with skill and judgment. I had been reared in the school that derided-

“A drowsy, frowsy poem called The Excursion,
Writ in a manner which is my aversion,”

and “Tommy Steel” opened my eyes to a new world of beauty. By the way, he had known Wordsworth, and had entertained him at Harrow; and he told us that the Poet always said “housen,” where we say houses.

Another of our curiosities was Mr. Jacob Francis Marillier, a genial old gentleman without a degree, who had been supposed to teach writing and Mathematics, but long before my time had dropped the writing-I suppose as hopeless-and only played a mathematical barrel-organ. He had joined the staff at Harrow in 1819, and, as from my earliest days I had a love of Links with the Past, I learned from Mr. Marillier a vast amount about the ancient traditions of the School, which, even in 1869 (when he resigned), were becoming faint and forgotten.

Yet a third oddity must be commemorated; but in this case it is desirable to use a pseudonym. I think I remember in one of Bulwer-Lytton’s novels a family called Sticktoright, and that name will do as well as another. The Rev. Samuel Sticktoright was essentially what is called a “Master of the old school.” He was born in 1808, came to Harrow in 1845, and had a large House for thirty years. I have just been contemplating his photograph in my Harrow album, and he certainly looks “the old school” all over, with his carefully-trimmed whiskers, double-breasted waistcoat, and large white “choker,” neatly tied. By the boys generally he was regarded as an implacable tyrant, and I have heard (though this was before my time) that a special victim of his passionless severity was a pink-faced youth with blue eyes called Randall Thomas Davidson. Personally, I rather liked him; partly, no doubt, on the principle on which Homer called the AEthiopians blameless-namely, that he had nothing to do with them. But there was a sly twinkle in the corner of Mr. Sticktoright’s eye which bespoke a lurking sense of humour, and in the very few words which he ever bestowed on me there generally was a suggestion of dry-very dry-fun. He was, of course, the most uncompromising of Tories, and every form of change, in Church or State or School, was equally abhorrent to him. In local society he played a considerable part, both giving and receiving hospitality; and it was the traditional pleasantry to chaff him as an inveterate bachelor, at whom all the young ladies of the place were setting their virginal caps. These jests he received very much as Tim Linkinwater received the allusions of Mr. Cheeryble to the “uncommonly handsome spinster,” rather encouraging them as tributes to the fact that, though now advanced in years, he was well preserved, and, as most people surmised, well off.

These facetious passages were, of course, confined to the society in which the masters moved, and we boys knew them only by hearsay. But what we saw with our own eyes was that the only human being who ever dared to “cheek” Mr. Sticktoright, or to interfere with his arrangements, or to disregard his orders, was his butler, whom we will call Boniface. Everyone who knows school-boys knows that they have a trick of saying things about those in authority over them, which really they do not the least believe but which they make a bold pretence of believing. So in the case of “Sticky” and Boniface. They were of much the same age, and rather similar in appearance; wherefore we said that they were brothers; that they had risen from a lowly station in the world, and had tossed up which should be master and which butler; that “Sticky” had won the toss, and that the disappointed Boniface held his brother in subjection by a veiled threat that, if he were offended, he would reveal the whole story to the world. This tradition seemed to present some elements of unlikelihood, and yet it survived from generation to generation; for not otherwise could we account for the palpable fact that the iron severity which held all boy-flesh in awe melted into impotence when Boniface was the offender.

The solution of the mystery was romantic. Dr. Butler, contrary to his usual practice, was spending the Christmas holidays of 1876-7 at Harrow. One day a stranger was announced, and opened the conversation by saying-“I regret to tell you that your colleague, Mr. Sticktoright, is dead. He died suddenly at Brighton, where he was spending the holidays. I am his brother-in-law and executor, and, in compliance with his instructions, I have to ask you to accompany me to his house.” Those who know the present Master of Trinity can picture the genuine grief with which he received this notification. Mr. Sticktoright had been a master when he was a boy at school, and a highly-respected colleague ever since he became Head-master. That the bearer of the sad news should be Sticktoright’s brother-in-law seemed quite natural, for he must have married a Miss Sticktoright; and the Head-master and the executor went together to the dead man’s house. There, after some unlocking of drawers and opening of cabinets, they came upon a document to this effect: “In case of my dying away from Harrow, this is to certify that on a certain day, in a certain place, I married Mary Smith, sometime a housemaid in my service, by whom I leave a family.”

So there had really been much more foundation for our tradition than we had ever dreamed, and Boniface had probably known the romantic history of his master’s life. The extraordinary part of the matter was that old Sticktoright had always spent the Easter, Summer, and Christmas holidays in the bosom of his family at Brighton, and that no one connected with Harrow had ever chanced to see him basking in their smiles. [N.B.-the names, personal and local, are fictitious.] In the north aisle of Harrow School Chapel, where departed masters are commemorated, you may search in vain for any memorial to the Rev. Samuel Sticktoright.

Yet one more curiosity must be named, this time not a Harrow master. “Polly Arnold” kept a stationer’s shop, and, as a child, helping her grand-mother in the same shop, had sold pens-some added cribs-to Byron when a boy in the school. Here was a Link of the Past which exactly suited me, and, if only Polly could have understood the allusion, I should have said to her-“Ah, did you once see Byron plain?” I happened to have a sister who, though exceptionally clever and lively, had absolutely no chronological sense. I took her to see Polly Arnold one day, when this conversation ensued-“Well, Miss Arnold, I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I have often heard of you from my brother. He tells me you remember John Lyon. How very interesting!” [N.B.-John Lyon founded Harrow School in 1571.] To this tribute Polly replied with much asperity-“I know I’m getting on in life, Miss, but I’m not quite three hundred years old yet”-while my sister murmured in my ear-“Who is it she remembers? I know it’s someone who lived a long time ago.”

But the name of Arnold, when connected with Harrow, suggests quite another train of thought. At Easter, 1868, Matthew Arnold came to live at Harrow, with a view of placing his three boys in the School. The eldest of the three was the invalid to whom his father referred in a letter quoted in my first chapter: I was able to show him some little kindnesses, and thus arose an intimacy with the parents, brothers, and sisters which I have always regarded as-

“Part of my life’s unalterable good.”