an easy, free, and independent existence in a pretty place and among pleasant companions; he enters into that higher life of moral aims and aspirations which a continual drudgery in distasteful subjects prevents a young boy from enjoying or even comprehending. Those who regard gossip as the peculiar delight of old maids cannot estimate the share which it has in the daily occupation and enjoyment of the idle and intelligent schoolboy; no human being could less truly say with Wordsworth

I am not one who much or oft delight
To season my fireside with personal talk
Of friends who live within an easy walk,
Of neighbours, daily, hourly, in my sight.

Finally-and this, perhaps, is the most distinctive enjoyment of a public school life-the boy, grown older, is now at liberty to form, without suspicion or restraint, those two or three intimate and affectionate friendships which supersede the haphazard acquaintances of a younger age, and which, though sometimes melancholy, are always among the most thrilling and delightful memories of after-life. Whether it is worth while for a boy to go through so much that is dull, irksome, and even painful to

attain at last to these results is doubtless a fair question. We answer that, in our judgment, it is. It may be safely predicated of a boy who has received and profited by the full advantages of a public school education, as contrasted with the home-nurtured youth, that he is

More skilful in self-knowledge; even more pure
As tempted more; more able to endure
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence also more alive to tenderness.

And, if his lot has been cast at Harrow, he has probably learnt as well a firm devotion to duty; a respect for thoroughness and earnestness in work; and a lasting habit of self-control.

We are painfully conscious that the general tone of these remarks may be regarded as carping and cynical by some whom the writer would be truly sorry to distress. In extenuation he would urge that hitherto Harrow, in common with other public schools, has been treated by its historians and delineators with a dead level of eulogy, which is monotonous and often misleading. In attempting to indicate a few points in which the system is capable of being made more liberal, more attractive, and more useful, the writer has never forgotten the

deep debt which, in common with so many others, he owes to those elements of a Harrow life which are generous and elevating. Those elements, he ventures to think, require no fresh praise from him. They have already gathered round themselves a whole literature of gushing encomium. All that inflated rhetoric, rhetorical verse, dark-blue cloth, and gilt arrows could accomplish for their glorification has been lavished with an unsparing hand. Studies and games, discipline and worship, founder and benefactors, boys and masters, have shared equally this effusive approbation. It has reached an even fulsome pitch when applied (to quote the magniloquent dedication of the Harrow Calendar, 1871) to the Rev. H. Montagu Butler, D.D., who, as the son of a previous Head Master, as a former head boy, and as having himself presided over the school during eleven of its most prosperous years, is, of all Harrow men, most emphatically an Harrovian.'

In the general spirit, though not in the letter, of this eulogistic language we concur. It may be

desired for Harrow that her next Head Master should be a man of fuller sympathy with some needs of modern education, less doggedly attached

to his own personal opinions, less a worshipper of 'Chinese exactness' in trivial details, less firmly wedded to obsolete forms out of which the spirit and significance have long since departed. But the best wish that can be expressed for the school is that its next dictator should emulate Dr. Butler in his princely munificence, his large charity and his warm affections, above all in that absorbing sense of moral responsibility in administering the fortunes of a great educational body which (until the Elizabethan Latin was foolishly exchanged for a pointless tag) the old motto of Harrow School so well expressed-Donorum Dei dispensatio fidelis.

WINCHESTER.

JUST five hundred years ago, in the summer of 1379, William of Wykeham obtained the Royal license and papal bull for the foundation of his college of St. Mary Winton in Oxford, more briefly known as New College.

Some seven years later, in the spring of 1387, he laid at Winchester the foundation stone of our first public school. In six years the buildings were ready for the occupation of the new society, consisting of a warden and ten fellows, three chaplains, three clerks, and sixteen choristers; seventy scholars, with a Head Master and usher, whose several duties and privileges are most minutely set forth in the statues drawn up by the founder, as he tells us in his preface, to the praise of God and the blessed Virgin, and the increase of divine service and good learning.

Wykeham's buildings still stand, for the most