Dunn of Bath and Clifton
This memorial of a great headmaster has been prepared by the piety of several of his old pupils, and will appeal mainly to Cliftonians and Bathonians. But it deserves a wider public ; for Thomas Dunn was a man of a very rare type. The present writer had not the luck to know him, but he recalls the legends that gathered round Dunn's name, and the portentous academic reputation which his school gained in Oxford and Cambridge. The numbers never exceeded 150, and yet its University distinctions were more numerous than those of schools four or five times its size.
What was the secret of this astounding success ? A Bishop is said to have asked Dunn to explain it ; and Dunn replied : "I give the boys good food ; feed their bodies and you feed their minds." He was probably pulling the epi- scopal gaitered leg. He certainly did feed his boys well ; but he gave them much more, and the chief thing he gave them was himself. Unwearied diligence, personal interest, and precept supported by example, these were what the boys found in him. He was unconventional up to, and beyond, the verge of eccentricity ; but he was always natural and unaffected, and his scholars reverenced the man behind the master, even when he limped across the class-room in imitation of the lame Agesilaus, or knelt before the ven- tilator to illustrate a Greek consulting the oracle of Apollo. He was one of the last devotees of the old classical tradition, and when he heard that there was an able boy on the modern side promptly transferred him to the other ; but he showed the vast good of which that tradition was capable.
At sixty he retired, and lived near Cambridge, where for thirty years he was a well-known and venerable figure. There must be few Cambridge men who do not remember hint cycling in to hear a lecture, or coaching in Greek, or conversing in the Combination Room of his old college.
The book is a worthy tribute to him. It is made up in the main from the recollections of distinguished pupils like Sir Charles Firth, Sir Herbert Warren, Professor Garrod, and Mr. J. A. Spender. To have earned the lasting gratitude of such men is in itself a proof of a lofty and commanding character.
E. E. KELLETr.
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