“I cannot help to this day wondering at the patience and forbearance both of him and my tutor, Cotton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, over my frightful copies of verses, and Greek and Latin prose. As I was head of the eleven at cricket, and of bigside at football, I naturally had but small leisure to devote to such matters, and consequently my copies were notorious for the number of _picture frames_ they were certain to contain,—picture frames being the strong black marks which the Doctor used to make round bad, false concords +--------------------+ | munus hospitalis | +--------------------+ or quantities +--------------------+ | munera stare | +--------------------+ “He used to do it slowly and grimly, his under lip seeming to grow out as the pen went deliberately round the wretched words, and one did not feel good during the operation. But as no boy enjoyed the sausage seller’s buffooneries, or Socrates’ banters more than I, (tho’ I made sad hashes in construing them) I remained in favor, tho’ incorrigible, till the end. “I carried away from Rugby dreadfully bad scholarship, but two invaluable possessions. First, a strong religious faith in and loyalty to Christ; and secondly, open mindedness. It was said (and is still said, I believe,) of Arnold, by way of censure, that to him everything was an open question every morning of his life. And though he never made any direct effort to unsettle any of our convictions that I can remember, we went out into the world the least hampered intellectually of any school of English boys of that time. To this day I am always ready to change an old opinion the moment I can get a better one, and so I think it has been with many of my old school-fellows, though we believed ourselves to be a thorough _true blue_ school. “Perhaps I also owe to Rugby my strong democratic bias, but I don’t think it. I guess I was born so (or _barn-zo_, as Wessex chaw-bacon pronounced it in the famous story). As a little scrap in petticoats nothing pleased me so much as playing with the village children, and I could never understand why they shouldn’t have all the things I had. At any rate it was at Rugby that I first was able to indulge my radical propensities. Up to my time, the school-close (or playgrounds) was kept as sacred ground, no ‘lout’ (as we politely called the neighboring lieges) being allowed to set foot within the precincts, and I had often noticed the insolent airs with which casual intruders in fustian or corduroy had been extruded. So when I became head of the eleven (and so a sort of constitutional monarch in the close) I asked the best cricketers amongst the ‘louts’ to come in and practice with me on summer evenings, and got up matches with their club, to the great advantage, I still believe, of school as well as town.