“At the age of ten, February 1834, I was sent on to Rugby with my brother, as, happily for us, Arnold had been a college friend of my father. Here I stayed till I was nearly nineteen, starting from the bottom and ending in the sixth form, though by no means at the head of the school. “It was a very rough, not to say brutal, place when I went there, but much mended during those years. “I was a very idle boy so far as the regular lessons were concerned, and I expect I should have been advised to go elsewhere early in my career but for a certain fondness for history and literature which Arnold discovered in me and which (I fancy) covered a multitude of sins. He first struck it at a monthly examination of the Shell, then the form intervening between the fourth and fifth. He asked the head boy why it was the Romans had so specially rejoiced over the terms of a certain treaty with the Parthians (we were reading Horace, I think). It came all down to the lowest bench where I was, and I said, ‘because they got back the eagles taken from Crassus,’ and sent a gleam of pleasure into the Doctor’s face which was getting rather grim. Up I went to the top of the form, and from that time he often asked me questions _outside_ the text book and specially by way of illustration from Scott’s novels, to which he was fond of referring. I could generally come to the point, having them at my fingers’ ends, and was proud of my consequent recognition. To this day I remember the feeling of grief and humiliation which came across me when I failed him on a critical occasion. It was years after the above event when I was in the sixth, and some distinguished visitor (Bunsen, I think it was) was present at the lesson. We were reading the passage in Aristotle about old age, (is it in the Ethics or Politics? I’m sure I forget) and he asked the head of the school to illustrate from Scott’s novels what Aristotle says about the characteristic of old age, to be absorbed in petty interests and to be careless about great contemporary events. Down came the question, past some very able and some very studious boys, since distinguished one way or another—past John Connington, Matt. Arnold, Sir R. Cross, to me—and then the Doctor paused for several seconds with a confident look. But no response came and he passed on, ‘and I was left lamenting.’ No one answered, and he had to remind us of the old Abbot, pottering away in his garden on the border, when Mary and her defeated followers ride up before Crossing, and the old monk leans on his spade and looks after them, saying, ‘I could pity this poor Queen and these Lords, but what are these things to a man of four score—and it’s a fine growing morning for the young kale-wort’—and so goes to his spading again.