At nine years old, with his favorite brother, Frederick, be was carried in a grand equipage to Eton, and placed under the charge of a private tutor, the Rev. Richard Godley, who lived at the "Wharf," about half a mile from the college buildings. Mr. Godley's rule was a severe but blessed one, and young Spencer owed four years of marvellous innocence to its restrictions. "Egyptian bondage" he thought it, poor little fellow, that several times a day, summer and winter, be must run across the playgrounds to report himself to the tutor. He lived between two fires: the wrath of elder boys who called upon him to fag for them as he rushed through the cricket-ground, and the terror of Mr. Godley's awful countenance if he and Frederick arrived a few minutes late. "As might be expected," he says, in his autobiography, "the more we were required to observe rules and customs different from others, the more did a certain class of big bullies in the school seem to count it their especial business to watch over us, as though they might be our evil geniuses. A certain set of faces, consequently, I looked upon with a kind of mysterious dread, and I was under a constant sense of being as though in an enemy's country, obliged to guard against dangers on all sides. Shrinking and skulking became my occupation beyond the ordinary lot of little schoolboys, and my natural disposition to be cowardly and spiritless was perhaps increased. I say perhaps, for other circumstances might have made me worse; for what I was in the eyes of the masters of public opinion in the school I really was--a chicken-hearted creature, what in Eton language is called a _sawney_. It may be that had I been from the first in free intercourse among the boys, instead of being a good innocent one I might have been, what I suppose must be reckoned one of the worst varieties of public school characters, a mean, dishonorable one."