ETON IN THE 'SEVENTIES.*
OLD Etonians are already familiar with A. D. Coleridge's Eton in the 'Forties. Here is another decade of Eton life and another Coleridge—a writer who, living his school life at a later date, has not so much that is quaint and unusual to tell us as his predecessor, but whose reminiscences form a valuable permanent record. It is a record to which others Might well be added. Indeed, separate books dealing With the intervening decades of the 'fifties and 'sixties would fill in and complete a biographical chronicle such as no school at present possesses. The value of the series, of course, would be the personal reminiscence of an institution which is always changing, and is yet, to old and young who have spent their youth with it, always the same. Mr. Coleridge was at Eton under Hornby; and in many Ways that was a very interesting and a very difficult period in the school's development. Hornby Was a reformer, bat he found so much waiting to his hand that be may well have doubted whether ten years was enough in-which to hasten slowly to his ends. It is enough, perhaps, that he altered much for the better. Mr. Coleridge does not write from a _Very seriously Critical point of view of the education provided by the Eton of his day, but he does his old school gdod service in drawing a, picture of a set of high-spirited, honest, innocently careless boys, who may not, most of them, have done.much work, but who knew what and whom to look up to, and who certainly admired and trusted their headmaster.. It is a far pleasanter, and plainly a far truer, picture of the school than was lately -given to the world by " O. E.," in Eton under Ifornby. The schoolboy escapades of which we read are amusing and daring enough : two-boys attending Windsor races as nigger minstrels; another, at the Same classic rendezious, thrashing a pickpocket, another (the antbor)`riding to Ascot in. a moustache and on a high " hog-wheel." We get an authentic account of the only just prevented ducking of " Stiggins " in Baines Pool, That adventure of heroic- days ; of " Mad 'tint," the schoolboy naturalist, who swam Ditton Pond to look 'for ducks' eggs, had his clothes confiscated, and ran back to school naked, pursued-by a keeper ; we are told hovi Hornby knew how to ignore a prying master's unnecessary accusation, and through a medley of pleasant gossip and reminiscence of boys and masters we catch the spirit of a gay and generous personality.
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