THE LATE MASTER OF TRINITY.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sta,—Will you allow me the privilege of paying in your columns a brief tribute of respect—as I have officially known perhaps better than anybody else how much it is due—to one special aspect tf the late Master of Trinity's life ? It is not my wish to reiterate, or even to reinforce, what has been so well said in the obituary notices of him. His varied and refine I scholarship, his love of literature, hia wonderful knowledge of English political history and oratory, above all in the eighteenth century, his culture, his eloquence, his sympathy with many phases of life, his successful administration of a great Public School and of a College still greater in the University of Cambridge, are well known throughout and beyond the wide circle of his personal friends. He was, I have sometimes said, in the present hurrying ago the last surviving correspondent whose every letter might be regarded as a work of art. He was probably the last scholar too whose thoughts spontaneously flowed, as into their natural channels, into Greek and Latin verses. It was said of him by the Earl of Clarendon, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that he was one of the three best after-dinner sPeakers England. If I were at liberty to signalize one ch.aracteristic above all others of his head-mastership, it would, I feel, be the nobility of the ideal which he set before his colleagues and his pupils, and especially before himself. When I succeeded him at Harrow, I was told, whether truly or not I cannot say, that because of this ideal the small everyday faults of school-life were apt to become a little exaggerated in his eyes. But no member of his form, or perhaps of his House, could know him well without being deeply affected by the inspiring elevation of his spirit and language. It was there his peculiar good fortune to win, and all through his life to retain, the affectionate veneration of the best of his pupils.
Dr. Butler's relation to Harrow School was unique. So far as I know, there is no parallel to it in the history of Public Schools. He was the son of a Head-Master of Harrow; he was himself a Harrow boy, the most distinguished among the Harrow boys of his day; little more. thanseven years elapsed between the time when he left Harrow as head boy of the School and when he returned to it as Head-Master; he and his father together ruled the School for half-a-century; his sons were educated there, one of 'them became and is still a well-known Harrow master; his eldest daughter was married to one of the masters; the three sons of his second marriage, the most distinguished of all schoolboys, I suppose, in their generation, shed one after the other fresh intellectual honours upon the School and upon his name; and finally he was chosen, I believe, by the unanimous voice of the masters as their representative upon the Governing Body of the School, and he remained a Governor to the end of his long life. Nowhere then can his memory be more deeply revered, or the sorrow for his death be more acutely and enduringly felt, than at Harrow.
The best and brightest spirits of a Public School, the most accomplished and devoted of its sons, pass away; but the School remains. The Harrow, which I have known so well, bore the traces of many great Head-Masters, but especially perhaps of Dr. Vaughan and Dr. Butler, for Dr. Vaughan enjoyed the rare opportunity of building up an ancient School almost from its foundations, and Dr. Butler was the faithful and favourite dis- ciple of Dr. Vaughan. Stet Fortuna Domus. May the spirit of the late Master of Trinity over abide upon the classic bill of
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