HARROW-ON-THE-HILL.*

The sunny humour rippling on the lips 'Mid pleasant tales of ancient strife and stress; And hope that knew no languor nor eclipse,

And clear, calm eyes, and gallant tenderness."

WERE these lines written of a great statesman or of a mighty orator ? were they the clear, calm eyes of the poet or the

gallant tenderness of some romantic lover ? or was it the pleasant humourist dreaming of literary or of artistic success? Not at all The subject was a distinguished cricketer and amateur comedian, who liked nothing so well as to come back to his old school and coach the boys over the beloved bat and ball. It was the delight in a long score or a sharp catch (rhyming to " watch," according to his Harrow poet, one "E. E. B.") which lighted the calm eyes; and the wholesome hope of " better luck next time " which forbade the shadows of eclipse and languor. We are not quarrelling with the tribute. The subject was known to many friends as a kindly and a pleasant gentleman, and a typical old Harrovian, whose figure deserves to remain a tradition in his schooL But the point to which we have called attention is curiously characteristic of the day. Out of the portentous volume before us—portentous alike in size, and price, and

weight—there is a chapter devoted to cricket which occupies eleven pages. Eleven more are assigned to the "Eton and

Harrow Match" on its own account, and a farther nine to the memory of two old cricketers,—thirty-one pages in all.

To Harrow football are assigned five pages, to rackets three, to bathing eight. To " The Intellectual Life of the School" six. We suppose that is about the proportion ; at all events, so the compilers of the work have decided, and as they are masters at Harrow they ought to know. We do not quarrel with their judgment, as it is no affair of ours; but commend to the consideration of anxious parents these aspects of education at the close of the eventful century.

The allowance of intellect to athletics is rather like Falstaff's bread and sack ; but as supply is always based upon demand, probably the parents wish it. We do not doubt that the boys do. The girls are for making Latin and Greek their

own, for what good use or purpose we confess that we cannot quite see. They make a delightful study, but not more. Indeed, we doubt if Latin and Greek had not been strained so much too far, if the rebound in the direction of athletics would have

been quite so strong with the boys. In spite of feminine rivalry—partly perhaps because of it—they are giving a lead in another direction, and leaving off much of the classical

work which their new competitors are taking up. We believe ourselves as clearly the present phase of cricket-worship is but transitory, as that in the general process of evolution a new form and body of teaching, more practical if less attractive than the old, is likely to arise for a generation more fortunate than this. It is the " transitoriness "—if there be such a word —of everything which is really the distinctive mark of the period now drawing to its close. Morally and physically, everybody is on a bicycle. But let us part with Harrow cricket with the best wishes upon our side. We are of those who have not forgotten the delightful days of the " public- school week" when, unless memory plays us false, Eton once beat Winchester in one innings, Harrow beat Eton in one innings, and then Winchester beat Harrow in one innings— when a hundred runs meant a hundred runs, and not stopping quietly at the wickets on fine days, and playing some twenty-

five billiard-strokes for four to a given distance—when the "chaffing-gallery" was a point of vantage for sound-lunged boys (it is not so much as mentioned, by the way, even in all

the cricket-talk of the book)—and V. E. Walker (greatest of all the all-round players before the star of Grace arose) was

the hero of Lord's, of Harrow, and of Middlesex. Some such memory as this may have been in the minds of our VIM,

• .• Harrow School. Edited by E. W. Howsen and G. T. Warner. Illustrated by Herbert M. Marshall. London : Edward Arnold. LES 38.1

pliers when they selected Mr. Herbert Marshall to provide the illustrations which are the best part of the book.

Famous for his studies of London, Mr. Marshall was just the right man. But he was not a Harrow boy ; and that no Harrovian could be found with sufficient qualifications for the work is not to the credit of Harrovian art. Indeed, the chapter on Harrow's art is less than the chapter on its intel- lect. For there is none. But Mr. Marshall once hit up seventy runs and more in brilliant fashion for Cambridge in the University match; and that may have been enough for his editors.

The chapter on the life of Dr. Vaughan is that to which we turned with the greatest interest ourselves. It is sympa- thetically and pleasantly written, but while describing the Dean of Llandaff as the restorer, and in some sense the re• creator, of Harrow, the writer scarcely succeeds in bringing sufficiently to mind the qualities of the man and the features of his career which made him so eminently remarkable. Strikingly the master of what was once known at Oxford as the "Rugby manner," supposed to be typical of the iron hand in the velvet glove, he brought with him from Rugby the traditions and the lessons of Arnold, who divides with him the distinction of having been the greatest Head-Master of

the century. He created his Harrow ; he did not recreate it. It was his great influence with his favourite pupils,— whom he made his friends by his affectionate interest in them ; his inflexible and kindly justice even against too eager young masters when they meddled with his "monitors;" and most of all perhaps the delicious sense of humour and fun which rippled all over him in private intercourse,—that

were the principal causes of his immense success at Harrow, which he found with some fifty pupils after the weak rule of Longley and Wordsworth, and left with some five hundred. He carried his humour with him everywhere afterwards, as a shield, but never as a sword; and the present writer has not forgotten the chuckle with which he told him how he was accused of pluralism and greed of wealth when he accepted the deanery of Llandaff while holding the Mastership of the Temple, and made merry over the united incomes of the two posts, as compared with the bishoprics which he had twice refused—did anybody else ever do it ?—without even asking an Archbishop or a Lord-Lieutenant if he had a " call" or not.

He disliked publicity, but he liked the pleasant sense of dignity which he attached to the old Mastership of the Temple, a place which he was the first, through his keen

activities, to turn to a means of good. And his perfect and graceful scholarship was the making of many a scholar's life, —but never of a useless one. Mr. Tollemache once brought a serious charge in these columns against the profundity of his teaching, from the fact that he failed to ground his pupils

in the principles of evolution before Darwin had discovered them ; but it is almost the only occasion on which we have heard it impugned. And Harrow is—or was—the Harrow of Dr. Vaughan. For though he was thoroughly sympathetic and

interested on the subject of school games, we are inclined to think that he would have looked rather gravely upon the athletic extravagances of the day which the work before us so vividly illustrates, and not have felt much disposed to indulge his spirit of fun about it. Speaking of his humour, are there many who remember his prize-epigram at Cambridge, when the new library was anxiously expected, on the subject of "Proximus ipse mihi" ?-

"Area quit spatiis inclusa nigrescit iniquis, Jamque novam expectat Bibliotheca domum, Ecce sedent circum, pleno in certamine honorum, Ardentes animi frigidulreque manus.

'Da mihi,' Florin ait, cubito dum suffodit ulnam Ergophili, cui jam charta repleta nitet-

Da mihi, ne vellar, diagramma problematis =um, Quippe mihi assideas proximus ; ergo juva.' ' Da veniam ' ille inquit, calamumque vel acrius urget, Tu mihi vicious ; proximus ipse mihi."

Much did we love "ne vellar" in our youth, for though we regard the Greek and Latin curricle as practically doomed

and crashed under the car of the centuries, we regard its more graceful sides as a great delight in life which will be

missed in the better pleasures of it. We should have liked, for instance, to have seen it much more vividly illustrated in the big volume before us, and could have dispensed for preference with most of the very modern English verse of their own composition with which some of the contributors have adorned it. " Quod felix faustumque sit" to wind up a preface, " Donorum Dei dispensatio " as the last line of some stanzas, or "Stet Fortuna Domes" (the old school motto) tacked on to a prose chapter without any particular reason, are morsels good enough for the classic Dragon, now that his teeth are no longer what they were.

The chapter on Harrow literature has, as is natural under the circumstances, something of a melancholy tinge, relieved by the glorious " literary " fact that in 1823 Cardinal Manning, Archbishop Trench, Bishop Wordsworth, and Dean Merivale all played cricket together in the sixth form game. The compiler is an Oxford Professor of Poetry, but it is not his fault that he has not anything very new to tell us about Byron, or Sheridan, or Theodore Hook, who hated Greek and shuddered at Hebrew. These men have been the literary stars of Harrow for long years past, and since those times no planet of first-rate magnitude has appeared on the literary horizon of Harrow Hill (where stands the one church visible on earth, as Charles II. called it), unless we except Anthony Trollope, who during his day, at all events, stood in the front rank of letters. His critic in the book opines that he might have been a greater novelist if he had been a better Harrow boy, which is appropriate, but scarcely convincing. But our Harrow critic's views of literature seem curious. He provides us with a long quotation from The Hon. Roden Noel—chosen we know not why—and with specimens of the incomparable Calverley which we all know by heart. Then he winds up with Symonds as the " last of the men of letters " under Dr. Vaughan. He has, we suppose, never heard, for instance, of George Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, which has been by others held to be one of the three best biographies in the language ; or of the poem-play of the White Pilgrim, cited in the Revue des Deux Mondes as containing some of the best poetry of the modern English drama. Essayists like Mr. Tollemache, too, have done their tale of work, and deserve their place amongst Harrow worthies ; and the Professor might even, on a well-known principle, have found a niche for Sir Henry Cunningham, who in his chapter on politicians contributes the best piece of work in the book. These men are surely as much entitled to their humble place in the index as—for in- stance—T. G. Cole, who made 142 runs in 1897. But cricket is a sympathetic subject with the compilers, and we tear that literature is not. Even in the final poem, which one of the editors has composed for the occasion, the main point is that cricket is the "rough nurse of freedom, strength, and forti- tude." All that he can say for the school-rooms is that they are places where "thought marries thought," which is not nearly so tempting. We hope that Harrovian readers may be found for their new Big Book in sufficient numbers to make it pay; but we doubt if it will much commend the famous foundation of stout John Lyon to a cold and unsympathetic outer world.