King’s College, Cambridge, whither my father accompanied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years previously, become an open College; for centuries before that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it followed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he obtained in due rotation, without any further examination, a King’s scholarship, when he went up to the University. After that, often while he was still an undergraduate, he became a fellow of King’s, and for the rest of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year provided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent endowment for the encouragement of learning and the education of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachronisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket-boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parliament. The founder’s idea had been that from year to year the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fineness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely suffered from them. A Fellow of King’s, thus supported for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compulsion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or £400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who might or might not, according to their own inclination, work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his rooms till dusk began to fall: then he would totter, stick in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to