Dr. Butler was eminently a gentleman, extremely suave in manner, gentle in dealing with those under his authority, mild and moderate in his ideas of discipline, a genuinely scholarly man in tastes and pursuits, though probably not what experts in such a matter would have called a profound scholar. But he had not the energetic hand needed for ruling a large school; and his rule was not a success. Mark Drury, though from the old Drury connection his house was always full of pupils, cannot be said to have exercised any influence at all on the general condition and management of the school by reason of the extraordinary and abnormal corpulence which kept him pretty well a prisoner to the armchair in his study. He had long since, at the time when I first knew him, abandoned the practice of “going up,” as it was technically called, _i.e._, of climbing the last portion of Harrow Hill through the village street. On this topmost part of the hill are situated the church, the churchyard, and the school-house, rebuilt, enlarged, beautified, since my day; and this “going up” had to be performed by all the masters and all the boys every time school was attended. But of this climb Mark Drury had been incapable for many years, solely by reason of his immense corpulence. Naturally a small delicately-made man, with small hands and feet, he had become in old age the fattest man I think I ever saw. He used to sit in his study, and there conduct the business of tuition, leaving to others the work of hearing lessons in school.