In politics and diplomacy we could claim our fair share of Cabinet Ministers, Ambassadors and Envoys Extraordinary. Our great president of Pop, Edmond Wodehouse, and his inseparable friend Reginald Yorke were as great in the cricket and football fields as they were in Library, born leaders of boys. Even when he was a lad Wodehouse’s speeches, models of the purest English, delivered with a gentle musical voice, were very attractive; he was afterwards, as member for Bath, a prominent Liberal Unionist—prominent rather in spite of himself, for he sought no office; and it was a matter of universal opinion that his platform oratory at the time of the split in the Liberal party was second only to that of Mr. Chamberlain. A breakdown in health robbed the State of a great servant—Eton of the fame of an illustrious son. Yorke, after a brilliant outset, gave up public life much too early; he lacked ambition, which, had he possessed it, must have driven him into very high places. He, alas! is no more. When he died I lost a friend of more than sixty years. But when I first went to Eton the idol before whom all we small imps prostrated ourselves was the great Chitty, afterwards Lord Justice of Appeal. He was indeed an Admirable Crichton. Wicket-keeper in the eleven at Eton, he twice played at Lords in the University eleven, the second time as captain. Then he took to the river, and stroked the University eight for three years; took a first class and the Vinerian Scholarship, and was for many years umpire to the boat-race of the Blues. Long after he had left we spoke of him with bated breath as fitted to be one of the chosen guests at the banquets of high Olympus. Should we not in the same category, as another Admirable Crichton, place Dr. Warre, scholar, athlete, Head Master—Provost? He was in the same division as myself. Of all the boys of my time who made a name for themselves in the world by far the most remarkable was my cousin Algernon Charles Swinburne, that wayward child of the Muses. I am glad to know that his life is being written by a brother poet, a foremost man of letters, who knew him intimately in his most brilliant days, a man who is possessed of all those qualities which Dr. Johnson deemed to be indispensable in a good biographer. Mr. Gosse, knowing my relationship to Swinburne, asked me to furnish him with some particulars as to the poet’s schoolboy life; this I did in a letter written partly in answer to some foolish misstatements which appeared in a letter from another schoolfellow written to the _Times_.