Much the same must be said of Dr. J. J. Hornby, who succeeded the rigid Dr. Balston in the headmastership of Eton in 1868. It was a marvel that a man who loved leisure and quietude as he did, and who seemed always to desire to doff rather than to don the formalities of high office, should have deliberately sought preferment in a profession which could not have been very congenial to him. Not that he lacked the reputed qualities of a ruler: he had a stately presence, a most courteous manner, a charming sense of humour, and the rare power of interesting an audience in any subject of which he spoke. But, behind these external capabilities, he had a fatal weakness--slackness, perhaps, is the proper term--which loosened the reins of authority, and made his headmastership a period of which Eton had no reason to be proud. “Idleness holds sway everywhere,” wrote an Eton boy at that time, “and _such_ idleness! As a man who has never had dealings with the Chinese can have but a faint idea of what swindling is, so a man who has never been at Eton has but a poor conception of what idleness is.”[2] What wonder, when the headmaster was himself as unpunctual as a fourth-form boy? Hornby was too retiring, too sensitive, to govern a great school. I was in his Division for two years, almost at the beginning of his headmastership; and I can see him still as he sat at his oak table in the middle of the sixth-form room, toying with a pencil, and looking at us somewhat askance, as if to avoid either scrutinizing or being scrutinized, for he was not of the drill-master kind, who challenge their class and stare them down. We liked him the better for it, but divined that he was not quite at ease; and it occurred to one of us that he was aptly described in that terse phrase which Tacitus applied to a Roman emperor: _Capax imperii nisi imperâsset_ (“Every inch a ruler--if only he had not ruled”). There was a certain maladroitness, too, about him which at times set us wondering; until some one suggested that we should look up the cricket records, and see how he had acquitted himself in that supreme criterion of greatness, the Eton and Harrow match. We did so, and found that he had hit his own wicket. Thus all was explained, our worst misgivings confirmed.