Both were under Dr. Drury and both were Whigs. Woodford was aide-de-camp to Sir John Moore during his retreat to Corunna, and ended his long and honourable career in command of the Foot Guards. He was one of the earliest advocates for the abolition of Purchase, and to carry his principles into practice sold his own commission to the Government for half its market value. He would not allow flogging in the battalion under his command, and devoted his useful life to improving the lot of the private soldier. Sir John Woodford was a son of the Hill we may all be proud of. His elder brother Alexander, who led the second battalion of the Coldstream Guards at Quatre Bras and Waterloo, was at Winchester. The first holiday task set by Dr. Wood to the Sixth Form was Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. Strange to say, the sage did not himself approve of holiday tasks. His own childhood had not been bright, and therefore he was the more anxious to brighten the lives of others. He tells us he never ceased representing to all the eminent schoolmasters in England "the absurd tyranny of poisoning the hour of permitted pleasure." "Bob Sumner I have at length prevailed upon: I know not indeed whether his tenderness was persuaded, or his reason convinced, but the effect will always be the same." Poor Dr. Sumner died, however, before the next vacation. 1 The untimely death of Dr. Sumner (1771) was followed by a School Rebellion. The boys supported the election of Dr. Parr as Sumner's successor; the Governors elected Dr. Heath. Like all school mutinies, it was a game from which both sides-masters and boys-rose losers. The masters lost the two senior assistants, Parr and Roderick, while the boys lost forty scholars, "the flower of the school," who followed Dr. Parr to Stanmore. One may admire the boys who thus showed their detestation for what they regarded as "an act of glaring injustice", but one cannot 1 Johnsonian Miscellanies (Birbeck Hill Edition), Vol i., p. 161. 2 These words are quoted by Mr. Field in his Life of Dr. Parr, from the Memoirs of T. Maurice, the Oriental scholar and one of the Forty. so easily forgive Dr. Parr for attempting to ruin John Lyon's Foundation of which he had been both a free scholar and a teacher. However, it was Parr's school at Stanmore, and not Harrow school, that died. It is something more than a coincidence that within three years there should have been two serious rebellions at Eton and Harrow. In 1768 the whole body of the Sixth Form, supported by many of the Fifth and some of the Fourth, marched out of Eton to Maidenhead. They were 160 in all, and their day's outing cost them £55 18s 3d, not to mention the floggings. The next day they returned to school, and a sauve qui peut became the order of the day. On this occasion the Etonians do not seem to have supported their cause with the manliness and the determination shown by the Wykehamists in 1793. One of the boys who took part in the rising was William Grenville, afterwards Prime Minister. 1 The concurrence of such émeutes clearly points to a lax state of discipline at both schools. It is also significant that T. Maurice speaks of the democratic spirit prevailing at Harrow under Dr. Sumner, though he adds "to no culpable extent." To us our rebellion was all loss, to Eton it proved a gain, for the Marquis Wellesley was taken away from Harrow and sent to Eton. The love of the Marquis Wellesley for his second almamater proved the passion of his life. In his 79th year he writes: "To Eton I owe and ascribe every gift of honour and happiness." This Old Harrovian was buried in the College Chapel of Eton in 1842, and the following lines formed a part of the epitaph written by himself and are inscribed on his grave: Si qua meum vitæ decursu gloria nomen, The Marquis Wellesley was an ideal public-school boy, and had it not been for our foolish rebellion he would have remained on the Hill. 1 Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte's Eton College, PP. 346–349. I f 130 OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. There is something resembling the Marquis Wellesley's The last Silver Arrow was contested for in July 1771. The Company that the shooting drew from London was not Dr. Benjamin Heath was a reformer, but he was also a 1 Bibliomania, by Thomas Frogual Dibdin (1842), p. 460. Dr. Heath was not the only lover of books among the residents of Harrow. The Rev. Henry Drury and Mr. James Edwards, who lived in the old manor-house, had both fine libraries. It was Mr. Edwards who, by his particular desire, was buried in a coffin made out of some of his library shelves. In striking contrast to the fine libraries of some of the masters was the "Monitor's Library," which was all that the school possessed until 1862, when Lord Palmerston laid the foundation-stone of the Vaughan Library. 1 1 When in 1785 Dr. Heath retired to his books at Walkerne, his mantle fell on his brother-in-law, Dr. Joseph Drury. Mr. Nicholas Carlisle states that on the elections of Dr. Heath, Dr. Drury, and Dr. George Butler, the votes of the Governors were evenly divided between the candidates, and that the casting vote was in each case given by the Archbishop of Canterbury. I was not aware that the Archbishop ever nominated any Head Master except Dr. George Butler. The family of Drury belong to Eton and Harrow, but the Hill can claim to have had as many Drurys as its rival. Dr. Sumner was famous among Harrow Head Masters for his brilliancy; Dr. Joseph Drury for his calm wisdom. He served the school for thirty-six years. He came as an Assistant Master in 1769, just in time for the rebellion, and just in time to decline Dr. Parr's offer of a mastership at Stanmore. He lived to recommend Edmund Kean, then an obscure provincial actor, to one of the trustees of Drury Lane theatre, and to be hailed as "Probus" by Harrow's poet. 2 The School Library of Winchester was founded in 1834. CHAPTER X. HARROW (continued). IT is the hope of every loyal Harrovian that the twentieth century, now dawning on the Hill, may bring to John Lyon's Foundation all manner of good. That a school which has been preserved and grown in so wonderful a manner has a great future, none of us doubt. In one parti. cular, however, the glories of Harrow lie in the past. We are not likely to see a Byron again upon the Hill, not because the fruit of our old tree is growing crabbed and sour, but because no Public School (with the possible exception of Eton) has yet produced more than one genius of the first order in poetry. Harrow claims her Byron, Merchant Taylors' her Spencer, St. Paul's her Milton, Westminster her Dryden, Winchester her Collins, and Eton her Shelley. How far each school is entitled to use the possessive epithet as applied to her poet is another matter. Shelley, for instance, was not the pariah at Eton that it has been the fashion with some to describe him. The fact that he was a "wet bob" and took an active part in the 4th of June of 1809-that he walked as a full corporal in the Montem of 1808-that his parting breakfast cost him £50-that he received so many books on leaving, all militate against this view. But Capt. Medwin, who was his cousin, his schoolfellow (at a private school), and his biographer, tells us that he never heard Shelley in his life mention one of his class-fellows, while Byron never forgot those in his own form or even the order in which the boys in a lower form stood. One day Capt. Medwin told Byron that Procter ("Barry Cornwall") had written him that he had been at Harrow with the author of The Giaour. “Ay," said Byron, "I remember the name; he was in the Lower School, in such a class. They stood Farrer, Procter, |