Koran, printed at Pavia, under the authority of Pope Innocent XI., a Chinese map of the city of Pekin, Egyptian manuscripts on papyrus, and some beautifully illuminated missals. The entrance-hall of the library is adorned with two curious maps on canvas, one displaying the arms of all the cities and borough towns of England and Wales, with a brief account of their foundation and remarkable circumstances connected with them; the other emblazoning the armorial bearings of the several dioceses, and giving concise accounts of their several histories. The remaining portion of the inner quadrangle is devoted to the apartments of the Provost and Fellows. The Provost's apartments contain half-length portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Sir Robert Walpole. There are also portraits of several of the more eminent among the Provost's predecessors in office, including Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Henry Saville, and Sir Henry Wotton. Here is also a female portrait on pannel, said to represent Jane Shore. The forehead is large, the hair auburn, but the features are small, and not remarkably prepossessing. The tradition is that this portrait was preserved by one of the Provosts of the College, who had been confessor to that unhappy woman. Beneath a low ivy-mantled postern, we enter the Playing-fields, to the north-west of the College, an elm-shaded meadow of considerable extent, bordered to the south by the Thames, and watered by a pretty brook called Chalvey Brook, rising near the "little hamlet of Chalvey," from a well called Queen Anne's Spring. These meads are equally calculated for study and recreation. Seated beneath trees, or lolling over the brink of the Thames, are seen, classic in hand, some of the hard-working boys—already almost men, anticipating even now the career of ambition, turbulent and insecure, into which they are about to plunge; already they seem to have lost the careless gaiety of the schoolboy, and to have assumed the cold sobriety of manhood. We encountered in one of our rambles through the playing-fields, the senior boy, or, as he is commonly called, "Captain" of the school: he was about to depart, he said, for the University, where he was loth to go. "I have been an Eton boy ten years," said the captain, "and I only wish I could be an Eton boy all my life; no, sir, I shall never again be so happy as I have been here." While we conversed, the loud laugh of boisterous youth, engaged in various play, struck upon the ear; hundreds of happy little fellows-as yet by the world unbitted, unharnessed, gambolled over the green, joyous as if care and sorrow were dead: we could not help recalling the lines, in which, with exquisite fidelity, one of their quondam playfellows apostrophised the scene of his careless days: Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade ! Ah, fields beloved in vain, Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring." And again, where he describes the happy temper of boyhood: "Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possess'd; The routine of an Eton academic course is too generally known to require repetition in this place; but its fitness for the purpose of the instruction of youth has often been questioned, and its general effect and purport misunderstood. If man were to remain a schoolboy until the day of his death, or if society were disciplined and governed like a regiment of soldiers, then we doubt not that the comparatively man-like boys of Eton would be rather difficult to deal with, and that an austere, conventual system of educating youth might be preferable but since the world is in fact worldly, and since the struggles of life are only hand-to-hand combats, in which the weakest, as the proverb hath it, "goeth to the wall," that system which recognises in the boy the "father of the man," and which, while it represses tendencies to vice, keeps alive a certain freedom of thought and action, tending not to depress, but to invigorate the heart of youth, is surely the best school preparative for the busy struggles of after life, through which, the sooner we know them, the better able are we successfully to fight our way. SS The seclusion of boyhood within four walls, remote from anything like society or life; the severe punishment that awaits their petty quarrels; the initiation into that sort of knowledge only, which makes not the accomplished man of the world, but the ripe scholar; the inculcation of feelings of acute sensibility, which the business of future life tends greatly to suppress, and that philosophic contempt of money, the attainment whereof will be, for most boys, the future employment of life-may, certainly, be the best security for the maintenance of a high tone of moral feeling, but it may be questioned whether it is the best for giving that temper which active life requires, that which will make boys men. The secret of the success of the system pursued at Eton and our great public schools is, that there we find a certain amount of interference and direction, and a certain amount of non-interference and letting alone; the characters of the future men, as regards their social system, are allowed to be developed by collision with their fellows, as they must be, at a later period of their lives; the moral influence of rivalry and emulation, the governing principle of after life, is not repressed, but rather encouraged: there are no desperate attempts here to bring the dunce in classics and mathematics, by dint of flogging, to the level of the forward boy; the presumption that every boy, in the same form, has the same capacity for the same thing, is not carried to excess; something is allowed for the unequal gifts of Nature, and the only object is to point those gifts in the best possible direction. Nor are the minor morals and accomplishments, which form not the least useful and important of the studies of youth, neglected at our public schools; and the result is obvious. There are no shamefaced clowns nor ungainly louts among Eton scholars; the boys here are not boys, they are young gentlemen, differing chiefly from gentlemen not of Eton in that they are usually short of stature, and instead of wearing coats with tails, wear coats without! "Sir," concluded the captain, when we had finished a comparative review of the various modes of education of youth, "there is at Eton every encouragement, every approbation, every assistance for the hardworking boy; but if a boy cannot learn, or will not learn, after repeated trial, he is left pretty much to himself: if he can make nothing of the classics, he turns his attention to cricket: if the mathematics or algebra are too much for him, he excels at quoits or pulls the bow oar: if he refuses to learn to read, at least he does not leave Eton without learning something, for he learns to swim! As to social intercourse, most of us here are the sons of gentlemen, and we are expected to behave like the sons of gentlemen; when any one forgets himself, there are enough of us to bring him to his senses; and little interference from the masters is required: if, indeed, a boy is incorrigible, he is expelled, and we see no more of him." Eton boys are famous for their athletic sports, of which rowing and cricket matches are the chief: but their grand festival, more prized from its rarity, is the triennial pageant entitled the Montem. The Magna Britannia contains the following account of this curious ceremony: "This procession is made every third year upon Whit-Tuesday, to a tumulus near the Bath road, which has acquired the name of Salt Hill, by which also the neighbouring inns have been long known. The chief object is to collect money for salt, as the phrase is, from all persons present, and it is exacted even from passengers travelling the road. The scholars who collect the money are called salt-bearers, and are dressed in rich silk habits. Tickets inscribed with some motto (mos pro lege, for example), by way of pass-word, are given to such persons as have already paid for salt, which has been in use from time immemorial. The procession itself seems to have been coeval with the foundation of the College, and it has been conjectured with much probability, that it was that of the bairn or boy bishop. We have been informed that originally it took place on the 6th of December, the festival of St. Nicholas, the patron of children: being the day on which it was customary at Salisbury, and in other places where the ceremony was observed, to elect the boy-bishop from among the children belonging to the Cathedral. Such is the traditional origin of the procession ad Montem, of which a description so lively and graphic occurs in the pages of Knight's Quarterly Magazine, that none but an Etonian could have given anything like it. The Montem being a ceremony of unfrequent occurrence, and which we have not ourselves had the good fortune to witness, will we hope, excuse the liberty we have taken of transferring it to our pages. "We reached at length the foot of the mount, a very respectable barrow, which never dreamt, in its Druidical age, of the interest which it now excites, and the honours which now await it. Its sides are clothed with mechanics in their holiday suits, and happy dairy-maids in their Sunday gear. At its base sit peeresses in their barouches, and earls in all the honours of four-inhand. The flag is waved, the scarlet coats and the crimson plumes again float amongst us, and the whole earth seems made for one universal holiday. I love the no meaning of Montem-I love to be asked for salt by a pretty boy in silk stockings and satin doublet, though the custom has been called something between robbing and begging—I love the apologetical 'Mos pro lege,' which defies the Police and the Mendicity Society—I love the absurdity of a captain taking precedence of a marshal, and a marshal bearing a gilt baton at an angle of forty-five degrees from his right hip; and an ensign flourishing a flag with the grace of a tight-rope dancer, and sergeants paged by fair-skinned Indians and beardless Turks; and corporals in sashes and gorgets, guarded by innocent polemen in blue jackets and white trousers. I love the mixture of real and mock dignity; the Provost in his cassock, clearing the way for the Duchess of Leinster to see an ensign make his bow, or the head master gravely dispensing leave till nine, to Grand Seignors, and Counts of the Holy Roman Empire. I love the crush in the cloisters, and the riot on the mount-I love the clatter of carriages, and the plunging of horsemen I love the universal gaiety, from the peer who smiles and sighs that he is no longer an Eton boy, to the country girl who marvels that such little gentlemen have cocked hats and real swords. "I will not attempt to reason about the pleasures of Montem, but to an Etonian it is enough that it brings pure and ennobling recollections-calls up associations of life and happiness, and makes even the wise feel that there is something better than wisdom, and the great that there is something nobler than greatness. And then the faces that come about us at such a time, with their tales of old friendship or generous rivalries. I have seen to-day fifty old schoolfellows of whom I remember only the nicknames: they are now degenerated into scheming M.P.'s, or clever lawyers, or portly doctors but at Montem they leave the plodding world of reality for one day, and regain the dignities of sixth-form Etonians." But it is time to ascend to Windsor, whose ample towers overhang the ground whereon we stand, with majestic elevation. A delightful stroll of two miles through fertile meads by the brink of Thames, in full view of the Castle, brings us to DATCHET, where Shakspeare lays the scene of his "fat Knight's" submersion, "hissing hot" from the "buck-basket" where he lay perdu among the soiled linen "like a piece of butcher's offal in a barrow." In the parish |