The house is very old, having been occupied by Sir Henry Savile, the handsome lay Provost whose appointment by Queen Elizabeth in May, 1596, “any statute, act or canon to the contrary notwithstanding,” raised a small storm. Here he set up his printing-press, and in 1613 published his great edition of S. Chrysostom in eight folio volumes. He also printed Xenophon’s “Cyropædia” and Thomas Bradwardine’s “De Causâ Dei contra Pelagium.” With the Provostship of Eton he combined the office of Warden of Merton College at Oxford. Probably no private house can claim such a connection with books and letters. For many years now it has been occupied by the Precentor, Dr. Law—and it seems likely to remain the official home of music. Hawtrey’s reforms would probably have been carried out much sooner—perhaps even Keate might have fathered some of them—but Provost Goodall, a grand and courtly gentleman of the old school, had the faults of his qualities; he was the deadly enemy of change; he was one of those men to whom progress means disaster, and having the might to spoke the wheels of the coach, he used it with such effect that Hawtrey was practically powerless. But in 1840 Provost Goodall died, and after some trouble between the Court and the Fellows, the candidate favoured by Queen Victoria was appointed, and Archdeacon Hodgson, the intimate friend of Lord Byron, became Provost. Lyte’s history shows how keenly the new Provost set to work to improve the position of the collegers, and how ably he was seconded by Hawtrey. The new buildings in Weston’s Yard were the result, and they, with the two red-brick houses by Keate’s Lane opposite upper school, were the only substantial additions made to the College since the early days of the nineteenth century. The two doughty champions worked well together—Hodgson for the much-wronged collegers; Hawtrey determined that Eton should no longer be a mere school of ornamental classical culture for the small minority who could or would take advantage of it, but should march with the times, and give a boy such an education as would fit him to play a practical part in a world which was beginning to be very much on the move. It is almost incredible in these days that, as I have said above, until the year 1851 mathematics were no part of the school work. French, German and Italian were, needless to say, in the same boat. That Frenchmen should exist and have a language of their own was, however deplorable, an admitted fact, but only on condition that one Englishman should be equal to four Frenchmen, or, according to Boswell in his adulation of Johnson, forty. Such were the archaic doctrines in which we were brought up, until wise Dr. Hawtrey swept all the old cobwebs away.