When the two young sons of the Earl of Cork arrived at Eton, Sir Henry Wotton had been Provost for ten years, and Eton could scarcely imagine itself without him. With a royal pension in addition to his Provostship, and assisted by a strong staff of Fellows of the College—the learned Hales, John Harrison and the rest—he was taking life easily, in the evening of his days, among his books and curios, his Italian pictures, and those manuscripts—biographies of Donne and Luther, and the History of England,—which he always meant to finish and never did. He was not quite so active as when he had first come among them with his new views of teaching, and had put up the picture of Venice, where he had lived so long as Ambassador, and had hung on the wooden pillars of the lower schools his “choicely drawn” portraits of Greek and Latin orators and poets and historians, for the little Eton boys to gaze at with round English eyes; but his familiar figure was still a daily presence, coming and going amongst them in his furred and embroidered gown, “dropping some choyce Greek or Latin apophthegm” for the benefit of the youngsters in class. He was still a “constant cherisher” of schoolboyhood, taking the “hopeful youths” into his own especial care, having them at his own hospitable table, picking out the plodding boys and the boys of genius, and himself teaching best in his own memorable talk. He liked to indulge in reminiscences of Italy—“that delicat Piece of the Worlde”; and he sometimes looked wistfully Londonwards, though in his gentle, deprecatory way he spoke of it, especially in November, as a “fumie citie.” In his last years he nursed hopes that he might succeed to the mastership of the Savoy; meantime, from his Provost’s Lodging, he could look across the “meandering Thames and sweete meadows,”[42] to the great pile of Windsor Castle in its “antient magnificence”; and he read and ruminated and smoked—he smoked a little too much, according to his friend Izaak Walton—and counted his “idle hours not idly spent” when he could sit quietly fishing with Izaak Walton in the river-bend above the shooting fields, then, as now, known as Black Pots. When Robert Boyle went to Eton in 1635, to be an Eton boy meant not only being “grounded in learning” by such men as Hales and Harrison, but being “schooled and bred” under the daily influence of this soft, rich, delightful personality.