A Harrow boy once said to his master, "I don't know how it is, sir, but if Mr. Bowen takes a lesson he makes you work twice as hard as other masters, but you like it twice as much and you learn far more." He was the most unexpected man in conversation that could be imagined, always giving a new turn to talk by saying something that seemed remote from the matter in hand until he presently showed the connection. So his teaching kept the boys alert, because its variety was inexhaustible. He seemed to think that it did not greatly matter what the lesson was so long as the pupil could be got to enjoy it. The rules of the school and the requirements of the examinations for which boys had to be prepared would not have permitted him to try to any great extent the experiment of varying subjects to suit individual tastes; but he was fond of giving lessons in topics outside the regular course, on astronomy for instance, of which he had acquired a fair knowledge, and on recent military history, which he knew wonderfully well, better probably than any man in England outside the military profession. When the so-called "modern side" was established at Harrow, in 1869, he became head of it, having taken this post, not from any want of classical taste and learning, for he was an admirable scholar, and to the end of his life wrote charming Latin verses, but because he felt that this line of teaching needed to be developed in a school which had been formerly almost wholly classical. For grammatical minutiae, for learning rules by heart, and indeed for the old style of grammar-teaching generally, he had an unconcealed contempt. He thought it unkind and wasteful to let a boy go on puzzling over difficulties of language in an author, and permitted, under restrictions, the use of English translations, or (as boys call them) "cribs." Teaching was in his view a special gift of the individual, which depended on the aptitude for getting hold of the pupil's mind, and enlisting his interest in the subject. He had accordingly no faith in the doctrine that teaching is a science which can be systematically studied, or an art in which the apprentice ought to be systematically trained. When he was summoned as a witness before the Secondary Education Commission in 1894 he adhered, under cross-examination, to this view (so far as it affected schools like Harrow or Eton), refusing to be moved by the arguments of those among the Commissioners who cited the practice of Germany, where Paedagogik, as they call it, is elaborately taught in the universities. "I am unable," he said, "to conceive any machinery by which the art of teaching can be given practically to masters. That art is so much a matter of personal power and experience, and of various social and moral gifts, that I cannot conceive a good person made a good master by merely seeing a class of boys taught, unless he was allowed to take a real and serious part in it himself, unless he became a teacher himself.