Lieutenant-Colonel Hodge, who steered the Victory in his boyish days on the river, and his Dragoons to victory in the Crimean Valley. 'There used to be a terse order which came to his lips as often as the boat crossed the river; and now when he had come to be so favoured by Fortune as to find himself at the head of his regiment with no more than a convenient reach of fair galloping ground between him and the flank of the enemy's column, the remainder of the business before him was exactly of such a kind as to be expressed by his old Eton word of command. What yet had to be done would be compassed in the syllables of "Hard all across!" (the direction given by the steerer to the crew of an Eton longboat when about to cross the Weir).' Scarlett's three hundred have a fascination for us Eton fellows; surely his was an artistic performance, and would have passed muster with Charley Wise. Cardigan's ride with his six hundred was magnificent, but it was not war'; they were 'all over the place' according to Charley.

Lord Cardigan was at Harrow-for a short time. We naturally prefer our own man, 'qui coatum Scarlet habebat.'

The Duke of Beaufort, amongst patricians,

was not alone in his loyalty and kindness to Eton underlings, tradesmen, 'cads at the wall,' i.e., the low broad wall west of the Upper School, who have no successors, I am sorry to see. Spankie (of whom more anon) was a prime favourite with Jack Savile,' before he became Lord Mexborough, and one evening, at a large dinner-party given to old Etonians in Yorkshire, the old 'sock' provider was specially retained for the surprise and amusement of the assembled guests. No one ever dreams or dreamt of Spankie without his tin and the inferior tarts inside it, so J. S. served him with a subpæna to bring himself and his inevitable appendage all the way from Eton to the North of England. None of the invited guests were in the secret of the entertainment until the time of dessert, when folding-doors were thrown open, and Spankie was discovered with the old tin under his arm, as if on the point of starting on one of his fraudulent crusades in Upper Club, of a match-day. He called out the old familiar challenge: Any tarts, cakes, sweets, strawberries, gentlemen?' Roars of applause. Spankie's health drunk with Kentish fire ad lib. This Yorkshire feast was Spankie's apotheosis; he was very proud of it.

CHAPTER VII.

ETON CHAPEL-ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL.

THE religious teaching in my schooldays was not a strong point, either in or outside Eton Chapel. Sermons so inaudibly delivered as to be, in some instances, little more than dumbshow, a hebdomadal dose of Secker in school, varied with the meagre commentaries of Burton and Valpy on the Greek Testament in pupilroom, were a spiritual diet not robust enough for intended divines or Christian heroes. Eton was near enough to Oxford to be affected by mutterings of the great Church upheaval, and the phases of the Oxford movement were absorbing topics of interest to more than one of the assistant masters. Hodgson, our Provost, formerly Archdeacon of Derby, a high and dry divine, with no taste for controversy or faction,

whether dominated by Newman or Arnold, kept rigorously aloof from the vexed questions which agitated many at Oxford and some few at Cambridge; and our headmaster, Dr. Hawtrey, a man of letters, and the friend of literary men, was indifferent as Gallio to the 'Credo in Newmanum' watchword which awoke the suspicion of some alarmed Protestants in the cloisters of Eton. We boys had no Goulburn or Vaughan, still less a Lightfoot or Westcott, to keep us straight. Plain expositions and lectures on the Greek Testament would have been a more wholesome study for some of us than Archdeacon Manning's sermons, which were too frequently substituted, in my tutor's pupil-room, for the ordinary subjects of private business. These sermons, with all their beauty of style and language, veiled but imperfectly the restless and dissatisfied mind of their author, and I am persuaded that, at a time when the

Tendimus in Latium' cry was at its loudest, they were perilous reading for boys of an emotional turn. We attached a dangerous importance to them, and when the Archdeacon 'went over,' his flag followers saw their mistake. The future Cardinal bought up the four volumes

which had made the Chichester Cathedral pulpit so justly famous, and we were taught too late to discover the elements of slow poison in teaching for some time warranted sound by our guides and instructors.

Eton, like other places, caught the contagion of church restoration, and the old chapel, offered a fine field for transformations of all kinds.

Many years elapsed before the chapel, 'in the decent manner in which it now appears very (such was the quaint formula applied to King's College Chapel, and annually repeated by our Provost, on Founder's Day), emerged, free of the old wood panelling, the hideous reredos, and the great boxes set apart near the east end for the male and female servants of the College. It was never known whether the gift of a new East window was the spontaneous suggestion of some of the upper boys and leading spirits in the school, or the result of some hint dropped by one of the tutors or authorities. It would have required but a spark to kindle into a blaze such devotional minds as Marriott's and Patteson's, but there ought to have been more foresight and care in the initial stages of the enterprise, before the authors of it bound their