Many of those who were leaving must have wondered where the outgoing draft would be in another six years' time. Westminster contains about three hundred boys, drawn chiefly from the professional classes, and in turn sends a steady stream of recruits to the civil service and the learned professions. Barristers and doctors abound; government servants are to be discovered richly distributed through Whitehall, India and the colonies; the school has its share of clergymen and more than its share of soldiers. In less than six years all would have come down from Oxford and Cambridge, unless any had had the good fortune to secure a fellowship; and, while those who were destined for a profession had already decided on their careers, those who dreamed of public life and looked, perhaps, towards the north transept where, in white marble and late-won peace, Beaconsfield and Gladstone stood side by side, may have preferred to keep locked in their own hearts the ideals which they had diffidently set before themselves. The changing and strengthening aspirations of a boy have won as little space in all the crop of analytical school literature as have the vagaries of his religious faith or the evolution of his civic morals. The Victorians, indeed, in strict accordance with formula, loaded their hero with vague disquiet which was only relieved when he recalled that he had ceased to receive the sacraments; a later generation arrested him in full flight to perdition by intervening opportunely with a soul-steadying preparation for confirmation; the Catholic propagandists habitually threw a sympathetic priest across his path in the course of a holiday ramble; and, if there be a school literature of dissent, I doubt not but that some harassed hero found peace in the practice of Congregationalism. It was recognised, therefore, that the faith of childhood is not infrequently discarded at school; it was assumed with less justification that boys undergo spiritual distress at such a time; and, as the hero of a novel is not expected to suffer as long or as acutely as any one in life, one or other of the conventional escapes could always be chosen. It is hard to remember a book in which the hero sheds his belief in super-natural religion as lightheartedly as once he outgrew his faith in Santa Claus; and, even if it be assumed from private knowledge and experience that many schoolboy heroes have passed through this spiritual transformation, it is harder to recall even one who has been described as constructing a new system to take the place of that which has been overthrown.