One honourable feature in Westminster history is that theirs was the first school to adopt competition for election into college. Gabriel Goodman was appointed to the Deanery of Westminster the year after the school's refoundation and remained Dean for nearly forty years. "Goodman was his name," says punning Fuller, "and goodness was his nature." He was the reputed introducer of competition, then a novel principle, into school-life. He did at Westminster in Queen Elizabeth's reign what the reformers of Eton, Winchester, Charterhouse and St. Paul's only did in Queen Victoria's. St. Peter's College was by no means restricted to the sons of poor men, and no doubt the stern principle of competition was greatly toned down by favour, yet with every deduction for Court and Chapter influence, it is true that hundreds of poor lads have received an excellent education, first at Westminster and afterwards at Oxford or Cambridge, at a very slight cost to their parents. Thomas Clarke (admitted into College in 1717) was the son of a carpenter; thanks to the education of the old school and the assistance of an Old Westminster1 he rose to be Master of the Rolls. At one and the same time the offices of Lord Chancellor, Lord Chief Justice, and Master of the Rolls were all filled by Old Westminsters. Francis Lynn was captain of the school under Dr. Busby and kept a very matter-of-fact diary. He was a town-boy from 1681 to 1689 and a King's Scholar from 1689 to 1691, when he was elected to Trinity Cambridge. The whole cost of his education for fourteen years, until he took his Bachelor's degree, was £213 5s. Of this the cost of his 8 years' education as a town-boy was only £30 18s., and of his two years on the Foundation £39 75.

The most casual observer must notice that every good thing at Westminster-outside its athletics-is monopolized by the Queen's Scholars. As this is a tradition of the Foundation, a town-boy cannot fairly complain, more especially as all Scholarships have now been thrown open to competition. "The sewer and steamboat," says Blackwood's Magazine, "have strangled one of our nurseries of

1 The Earl of Macclesfield, Lord Chancellor.

oarsmen." In 1884 the alteration of hours introduced by Dr. Rutherford caused the total discontinuance of boating. Both Queen's Scholars and Town-boys rowed in the race with Eton. The most famous match between the two schools took place on May 4th, 1837, when Eton was for the first time beaten. "Hang theology" Rogers, late Rector of Bishopsgate, rowed No. 5 in the Eton boat, and tells us in his Reminiscences that William IV. declared the Eton crew lost, because Dr. Hawtrey was looking on. The Eton legend was that the King was so distressed at their defeat that he took to his bed and died. He did die on the 20th June, 1837. The late Lord Esher (Master of the Rolls) was well known to be a good oar at Westminster, but he was a town-boy, and his name does not occur in the College Water Ledger. He rowed several years in the Cambridge Eight. Westminster won victories over Eton in 1842, '45 and '46. If you remember the numerical difference between the two schools, you cannot fail to be struck with the pluck of the smaller school. Rowing at Westminster is a little book with sketches hy H. M. Marshall, one of the finest athletes that ever left Westminster. He played for the Cambridge Eleven for four years (1861-4).

Westminster owes so much to "Great Eliza's glorious reign" that you are not surprised to hear that two massive tables in the College Hall were made out of the wood of the ships of the Invincible Armada. Dean Stanley did not believe in this tradition. Yet, strange to say, the most brilliant of English historians of the Armada period, as a King's Scholar, ate his meals at these tables. There can be little doubt but that the historical associations of Westminster must have influenced James Anthony Froude. At a few yards' distance from the College Hall he would have entered the Chapter House, where for three hundred years sat the Parliament of England. Froude was not the man on whom such associations would have made no impression, yet it is a singular fact that though he wrote the history of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Invincible Armada-the very period in which his old school was refounded-he makes no allusion to this

Elizabethan Foundation. No one who ever met the historian in his later years could fail to be struck with his entire lack of enthusiasm. The monotony of life seemed to have sunk into his very soul. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! that seemed to sum up his philosophy. Compared to Froude, John Stuart Mill was a wild enthusiast. Yet this Old Westminster could on rare occasions relax. On his visit to Australia, the mayor of Bendigo gave a lunch in his honour, and after eulogizing his distinguished guest to the skies, concluded by proposing the health of "Mr. Fraud." The subject of the toast joined in the general merriment.

The English are a sentimental people. It is not only school-boys who detest the master they suspect of being a cold-hearted cynic, the English reading public demand of their favourite authors that they too should be free from all taint of cynicism. The author of Waverley deserves to be read by our remote posterity, yet the fame of his blameless life will rival that of his novels. The great historian of Westminster is Edward Gibbon, but if you wish to hear his work properly appreciated, you must turn, not to English, but to German and French critics. They appreciate the Decline and Fall at its proper value. His countrymen seem never to forget that unfortunate epigram-"I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." Though Gibbon was a miracle of knowledge, and though he never wrote a sentence that was either slovenly or dull, his master-piece is, I fear, more praised than read by the English public. It must be admitted that the historian of the Roman Empire left both Westminster and Oxford a self-taught man. He is a proof that a man may be an omnivorous reader, and yet no smatterer, that he may cover an immense extent of ground, and yet dive into the heart of the matter. He was a great stylist and (in foreign opinion) the first of our historians, as Shakespeare is of our poets.

We now approach one of the most ancient and honoured institutions of Westminster, but one in which it is safe to say that neither of her historians had any part or lot. The "milling" ground, like everything else of good report in this famous school, is closely linked with the Abbey. It

was a square plot of grass bounded on all sides by the cloisters. No place more peaceful and few more beautiful can be conceived. O happy school, where even the fighting green is associated with all that is best in English history! The Poets' Corner where Ben Jonson, Cowley and Dryden sleep, is only a few yards removed from the spot where they may have fought as boys. A "mill in the green" is now no more the fashion with boys than duelling with their elders, though whether the discontinuance of "milling" is as much a reform of school-life as the abolition of duelling was of social life is a matter of doubt. Duelling begat bullying and cut short many a life of promise; schoolboy "milling" checked bullying and sowed the seed of many a lifelong friendship. It has, however, gone for ever, and could no more be revived than stage-coaching. We live in an age of steam and soft speech. One at least of His Majesty's Judges would not now be on the Bench, had he not fought on that quiet green. He was so knocked about by his opponent that the army, the profession for which so brave a fighter seemed destined, was closed to him. However, the army is not the only career where pluck and determination carve a road to success, and our Old Westminster would have risen to the top of any tree he chose to climb.

During the installation of Dean Turton there was a "mill" in the Green, and the shouts of the boys could be heard above the swell of the organ. On another occasion Dr. Wordsworth in full canonicals, as Archdeacon of Westminster, interrupted a fight. Dr. Wordsworth was no milksop, but he did not understand boys. The Archdeacon was listened to with respect, but as soon as he had retired, the fight was continued.

A milling-ground nestling under the walls of a cathedral is unique, but it is not more unique than all that goes to make up the life and fame of this great Foundation.

1 Bishop of Lincoln, 1869-1885 (resigned).

CHAPTER XXI.

WESTMINSTER-(continued).

WESTMINSTER School is a Grammar School, formerly attached, as is the case in many Cathedral Establishments, to the Collegiate of St. Peter's Westminster. There may have been and probably was a school on the Isle of Thorns or Thorn Ey from the time of Edward the Confessor, but so far as authentic records go, the history of the school cannot be carried back beyond the dissolution of the monastery. Westminster School, unlike Winchester, Eton, and St. Paul's, is a creation of the Reformation, and unlike them, for more than 300 years it possessed neither revenues nor local habitation. In 1540 the monastic house was dissolved, while a bishopric was founded out of its confiscated revenues, and a school for forty scholars, with an upper and under master, established by Charter of Henry VIII. Of the first Head Master, John Adams, nothing is recorded, but the second Head Master, Alexander Nowell, was the author of the Catechism. Just as Osbaldeston fled before the wrath of Laud, so Nowell fled before the wrath of Bonner. Happily, they alone of English Head Masters have been threatened with stake or pillory.

Dean Nowell rendered services to the cause of education almost as great as those of Dean Colet. He introduced the reading of Terence at Westminster, and on one day of every week read St. Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles in Greek with the elder scholars. The successor to Nowell at the School, under Queen Mary, was the dramatist, Nicholas Udall, schoolmaster to the household of the Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Westminster. This notorious flogger had been dismissed some years before from the post of Head Master of Eton on a very