The step from the monastic schools to Eton and Westminster is a long one, but the gain not so apparent at first sight as might be supposed. It is hard for the luxurious Etonian of to-day to realize that for many years his predecessors suffered enough from cold, hunger, and barbarous ill-treatment to make life a burden on their hands. The system, while it hardened some into the desired manliness, must have killed many whose feebler constitutions could ill support its rigor. Even as late as 1834, we are told by one who had ample opportunity to study the subject carefully that “the inmates of a workhouse or a jail were better fed and lodged than were the scholars of Eton. Boys whose parents could not pay for a private room underwent privations that might have broken down a cabin-boy, and would be thought inhuman if inflicted on a galley-slave.” Nor is this sentiment as exaggerated as it sounds. To get up at five on freezing winter mornings; to sweep their own floors and make their own beds; to go two by two to the “children’s pump” for a scanty wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine o’clock; to live on an endless round of mutton, potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful or too good; to sleep in a dismal cell without chair or table; to improvise a candlestick out of paper; to be starved, frozen, and flogged,--such was the daily life of the scions of England’s noblest families, of lads tenderly nurtured and sent from princely homes to win their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost. Moreover, the picture of one public school is in all essential particulars the picture of the rest. The miseries might vary somewhat, but their bulk remained the same. At Westminster the younger boys, hard pushed by hunger, gladly received the broken victuals left from the table of the senior election, and tried to supplement their scanty fare with strange and mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory details have been handed down among the melancholy traditions of the past. In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield being very ill at school, his mother came to visit him. There was but one chair in the room, upon which the poor invalid was reclining; but his companion, seeing the dilemma, immediately arose, and with true boyish politeness offered Lady Mansfield the coal-scuttle, on which he himself had been sitting. At Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered “many years of misery and starvation,” while his younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away, in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. “There was never enough provided of even the coarsest food for the whole school,” writes Lady Holland; “and the little boys were of course left to fare as well as they could. Even in his old age my father used to shudder at the recollections of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of the misery of the years he spent there. The whole system, he affirmed, was one of abuse, neglect, and vice.”