Human nature could not but chafe under the fearful dulness and length of the sermons in Eton College Chapel. Dr. Goodford, the Provost, was a sort of personified Doom; when once he mounted the pulpit he was in the saddle, so to speak, and rode his congregation well-nigh to despair with his merciless homilies, all uttered in that droning voice, with its ceaseless _burr_ and inevitable cadence, which became to generations of Etonians as familiar as the Chapel bell itself. Scarcely less fearsome were some of the elder Fellows, retired masters, such as Bishop Chapman and the Rev. John Wilder, who were often let loose on us on Sunday mornings and blithely seized the opportunity: it was their field-day, and they were out to enjoy themselves, quite unconscious that what was pious sport to them was death to their unwilling audience. Small wonder that some assistant masters used to dread the weeks when they were on duty (“in desk” it was called); but providentially there were others who, disliking still more the labour of correcting Latin verses, were willing to barter “verses” for “desks”; that is, they would take so many of a colleague’s desks, while he in return would look over a stipulated number of exercises. Thus did the Muse come to the aid of her devotees: Sic me servavit Apollo. Perhaps the strangest form that religion took at Eton was that of missionary zeal; we used to have sermons periodically about carrying the gospel to “the heathen”; though if ever there was a benighted spot on earth, it was that pleasant school by the Thames. Some of the boys were at times infected by the passion for making proselytes: on one occasion an extremely dull and idle youth, who had lately left Eton, wrote to tell me, as his former tutor, that he had decided to become a missionary “to the poor perishing heathen”--in his case, the Chinese, a people much less ignorant and barbarous than many of their self-appointed rescuers. “Divinity” was one of the studies most encouraged and fostered at Eton; one would have thought the place was a training-school for theologians, from the prominence that was given in examinations to this particular branch of learning. The result, as might have been expected, was the same as in the writing of Latin verses: a few boys became adepts in the Bible Dictionary, while the bulk of the school scarcely advanced beyond that stage of biblical knowledge exhibited by a certain Etonian who, when invited to write an account of St. James the Elder and St. James the Less, was able to give a brief description of the Elder, but was reduced, in the case of the Lesser saint, to the rather inadequate, though so far correct, statement that: “The other was another.”