MR. TOM HUGHES AT RUGBY.
[To THE EDITOR OF TI1E " SrECTATOR."1 Sue,—I ask for a small space to supplement Lord Aldenlia m's letter in the Spectator of October 30th, with v, ;lich, in the main, I quite agree. How the Arthur of "Toni Brown" could ever have been taken to represent the late Dean Stanley, even in his boyhood, has always been a perfect mystery to me. Thomas Hughes entered Rugby either in the end of 1S33 or in February, 1831, and was placed in the Third Form. I myself entered the school at Easter, 1831, and was placed in the Lower Fourth, or in the form next above Iltuzhes. Arthur Stanley had then been for some time in the Sixth Form ; and gaining his Exhibition at the end of the Midsummer half, left Rugby and went up to Balliol in October, 1834. I do not suppose that Stanley ever spoke to Hughes, or even knew him by sight. There is one slight inaccuracy in Lord Aldenham's letter. Dean Stanley was not at a dame's, but at C. A. Anstey's, the house opposite "the Island," on the Barby Road. There was certainly in the thirties a dame's or boarding house known as "Stanley's," but the Dean, I am positive, was not there. Dean Lake, the late Dean of Durham, was a year junior to Stanley, and gained his Exhibition at the school in 1835, and his first class at Oxford in November, 1838. I knew Tom Hughes (and his brother George) well, and played with him in the eleven at Lord's in June, 1840, on the very first occasion on which the school contended against the Marylebone Club. I verified this fact last summer from the records of the club. I may add that, to myself and to several of my contemporaries the Doctor in "Tom Brown" does faithfully represent more than one aspect of Arnold, his personal influence, his accurate discernment of character, his singular administrative power, his intimate knowledge of what was going on in school and out of school, and as Hughes himself puts it in one passage, the noble use he made of that knowledge.—I am, Sir, &c., November 2nd. WALTER SCOTT SETON-HARE.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPIICT•TOR.”1
SIR,—In connection with your comments on Sir J. Fitch's book in the Spectator of October 23rd, I should like to say that Dean Stanley once told me he had never understood that Tom Hughes had him in mind when he drew the character of Arthur. There are, 1 think, very few points of resemblance between the description of Arthur's schooldays and those of the Dean as recorded in the "Life and Letters," in which Mr. Simpkinson says that when "Tom Brown" came out the Dean remarked : "It is an absolute revelation to me ; opens up a world of which, though so near me, I was utterly ignorant." Mr. Hughes went to Rugby at the age of ten, a few months before the Dean, who was nearly eight years older, left the school.—I am, Sir, &c., GERALD HARPER.
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