The personal influence he exerted on the boys who lived in his House was quite as remarkable as his "form-teaching." Stoicism and honour were the qualities it was mainly directed to form. Every boy was expected to show manliness and endurance, and to utter no complaint. Where physical health was concerned he was indulgent; his House was the first which gave the boys meat at breakfast in addition to tea with bread and butter. But otherwise the discipline was Spartan, though not more Spartan than that he prescribed to himself, and the House was trained to scorn the slightest approach to luxury. Arm-chairs were forbidden except to sixth-form boys. A pupil relates that when Bowen found he was in the habit of taking two hot baths a week the transgression was reproved with the words: "Oh boy, that's like the later Romans, boy." His maxims were: "Take sweet and bitter as sweet and bitter come" and "Always play the game." He never preached to the boys or lectured them; and if he had to convey a reproof, conveyed it in a single sentence. But he dwelt upon honour as the foundation of character, and made every boy feel that he was expected to reach the highest standard of truthfulness, courage, and duty to the little community of the House, or the cricket eleven, or the football team. Some have begun to think that in English schools and universities too much time is given to athletic sports, and that they absorb too largely the thoughts and interests of the English youth. Bowen, however, attached the utmost value to games as a training in character. He used to descant upon the qualities of discipline, good-fellowship, good-humour, mutual help, and postponement of self which they are calculated to foster. Though some of his friends thought that his own intense and unabated fondness for these games--for he played cricket and football up to the end of his life--might have biassed his judgment, they could not deny that the games ought to develop the qualities aforesaid.