[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATO81 Sra,—I hate quoting
from myself; but your readers may like to compare or contrast Mr. Essington's high estimate of Keate (Spectator, December 26th, 1903) with the quaint account of that plagosus Orbilius which was given me by Mr. Gladstone : "I am glad to have been at Eton, and especially to have been there under Keats. Keats was a very short man, and was conscious of thus being at a disadvantage in inspiring the boys with awe. He resorted to two expedients for counteracting this defect. First, he wore a cassock and flowing robes ; and, secondly, he gave the boys the impressionof always being in a passion."— "Talks with Mr. Gladstone," p. 144.
Kinglake's description of Keats in "Eothen " is a little different; but it, too, is on the borderland between damning with faint praise and praising with faint blame :—
"Anybody without the least notion of drawing could still draw a speaking, nay scolding, likeness of Keats. If you had no pencil. you could draw him well enough with the poker, or the leg of a chair, or the smoke of a candle. He was little more (if more at all) than five feet in height, and was not very great in girth, but within this space was concentrated the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble voice, and this he could modulate with great skill; but he had also the power of quacking like an angry duck, and he almost always adopted this mode of communication in order to inspire respect. He was a capital scholar, but his in- genuous learning had not 'softened his manners,' and had ' per- mitted them to be fierce '—tremendously fierce. He had such a complete command over his temper—I mean, over hie good temper—that he scarcely ever allowed it to appear : you could not put him out of humour—that is, out of the ill-humour which he thought to be fitting for a head-master. His red shaggy eye- brows were so prominent, that he habitually used them as arms and hands for the purpose of pointing out any object towards which he wished to direct attention ; the rest of his features were equally striking in their way, and were all and all his own. He wore a fancy dress, partly resembling the costume of Napoleon, and partly that of a widow woman. I could not have named any- body more decidedly differing in appearance from the rest of the human race."
It was, by the by, of Keats that the story is told that, seeing a list of candidates for confirmation, he mistook it for a list of boys sent up to be flogged, and that he flogged them all round. The late Mr. Edward Egerton, formerly M.P. for Macclesfield, told me that he had heard (I rather think in the Don Pacifico debate) a famous speech in which Peel, after severely censuring the policy of Lord Palmerston, ended by saying that the whole country was proud of him. What Englishmen in general, and we Harrovians in particular, still feel about Lord Palmerston somehow reminds me of the sentiments which, on a small scale, even soft-hearted and, so to say, anti-flogging Etonians entertain for the memory of
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