Westminster is so much the embodiment and shrine of English history that even the alien and the iconoclast cannot spend six years in the shadow of the Abbey without becoming steeped in the spirit and associations of the place. It is the influence of such foundations that makes of English life its present compromise between the rational and the traditional. From their places in the stalls could be seen the arches of the triforium which are filled at coronations by the Westminster Scholars: no king, they assert, can be duly crowned unless he is acclaimed by their triple shout of "_Vivat Rex_". It is their privilege to be present in Palace Yard when the soveran opens Parliament; Scholars and Town Boys walk, of unchallenged right, into the gallery of the House of Commons, Scholars--in cap and gown--into the gallery of the House of Lords and, on Sundays, on to the Terrace; when the Courts of Justice were at Westminster, they could wander unchecked into Westminster Hall. Their daily service takes place in the Poets' Corner; they are present at State funerals, their confirmation is held in Henry VII's chapel; and the whole Abbey is their heritage. Is not the school descended lineally from that group of lay scholars whom the monks of Westminster taught? Is not the monks' dormitory their Great School? Among the documents discovered of late years in the Abbey Muniment Room is a record, under the year 1284, of _expensæ_, being provision for the teaching of scholars, and a further record, under the year 1339, of payments for "Westminster School." Already old when Winchester and Eton were founded, with its roots struck deep in the Abbey's earliest history and with its life immemorially intertwined with the life of the Abbey, the two have remained side by side until Westminster is the last of the London schools to resist the pressure which has already urged younger rivals from their seats. Changing slowly with the slow unfolding of English history, the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth on a secular footing; and the monitor of the week, kneeling with his back to Busby's birch-table[1] and facing the school, returns thanks "_pro fundatrice nostra Regina Elizabetha_" on the spot where Robert South prayed "_pro rege Carolo_" on the 30th of January, 1649. It retains, by the Act of Uniformity, its "almost unique privilege of using Latin in religious offices", though--as a concession to the Reformers--the monkish pronunciation was abandoned for that which was the universal English form until misguided empiricists set up confusion where none existed before by introducing a "modern" method.