by the object of his own charity, but, except as having given his name to three of the least read of Shakespeare's plays, Henry VI. is known to most Englishmen chiefly as the founder of Eton, as a 'royal saint' not lightly to be 'taxed with vain expense.' When in 1862 the Royal Commission on Public Schools was hearing the evidence of an Eton master, an interesting discussion arose as to the meaning of the word collegium in the college statutes. The Master of Trinity appeared to think that it applied only to the provost and fellows, while Mr. Halford Vaughan inclined to the less amazing interpretation, which made it at least include the boys on the foundation. However that may be, it is well known that Eton College in its original shape contained no oppidans, but was purely an eleemosynary foundation for the education of poor boys, or, in other words, a charity school. It was constructed on the model of Winchester, and, in fact, the nucleus of Eton was a small colony of five and thirty boys, who came with William of Waynflete from the older school in 1441. When the late Bishop Wilberforce was promoted from the diocese of Oxford (in which Eton is included) to Winchester he gracefully

alluded to the connection between the two schools in the remark that he was going to a beautiful mother from a more beautiful daughter. Eton was scarcely started on its career before it encountered imminent peril of total extinction. Those dismal and useless squabbles known as the Wars of the Roses, the chronology of which the modern schoolboy laboriously studies, and the progress of which contemporary lawyers and men of business appear to have entirely ignored, having landed Edward IV. upon the throne, he was almost induced in his zeal against the grants of a Lancastrian king to cancel the charter which created the most famous school in the world. But Jane Shore proved more absorbing than politics to the new monarch, and Eton was suffered to struggle on in poverty but in security, though the tradition that Edward's mistress procured its preservation is probably only true in an allegorical sense. About the middle of the sixteenth century Eton came into rather curious contact with English literature. The head master from 1534 to 1543 was Nicholas Udall.

'There is every reason to believe (says Mr. Maxwell Lyte, in his valuable if not very lively History of Eton College,') that the earliest English

comedy now extant was written by Udall for his scholars, and the history of its identification is singular. A small piece styled "Ralph Roister Doister" was picked up by an old Etonian-the Rev. T. Briggs-and by him presented to the Eton Library

simply as a literary curiosity . . . It proved (sic) that the volume presented to the Eton Library was in fact the long-lost composition of an Eton master of the Sixteenth Century.'

Whatever be the literary merit of 'Ralph Roister Doister,' it stands in small danger of rivalry. Perhaps the only literary work by any of Udall's successors in the office of head master which any one ever reads is a volume of translations by Edward Craven Hawtrey, containing a copy of English hexameters which Mr. Matthew Arnold in his lectures on the translation of Homer declared to be the best in existence. The same cannot quite be said of Eton's provosts. Sir Henry Savile, one of the most learned men of his age, was almost immediately succeeded by Sir Henry Wotton (1624– 1639), whose beautiful poem beginning

How happy is he born and taught

That serveth not another's will,

is happily too well known for quotation, while his

address to Elizabeth of Bohemia is perhaps unsurpassed among courtly odes. Wotton's diplomatic career, as well as his poetry, was an honour to the school, and if the provostship is to be retained, the suggestion made seventeen years ago by a singularly competent authority that the provost of Eton should always be a man of literary or political reputation, well deserves to be considered. It is curious that when Henry Wotton was elected, Francis Bacon was an unsuccessful competitor. Richard Steward, who succeeded Wotton was deprived by the Parliament of 1643 for contempt of their authority, being apparently the only provost of Eton who was dismissed from his post. The later history of Eton is too well known among all who take an interest in it for recapitulation here. Mr. Maxwell Lyte's book, from which we have taken the few particulars already given, contains much that is interesting, and a good deal that hardly deserves the epithet. Considering how many important actors in public affairs have come from Eton, it seems almost surprising to find how little direct connection the school has with the history of England. It was nearly suppressed by Henry VIII. along with the monasteries, and it

would have been a strange thing if Cardinal Wolsey had destroyed Eton as well as founded ChristChurch, two of the stages in the proverbial course of human life, which beginning with the famous school and continuing through the famous college, finally reaches, it may be through the agency of the guards, a destination which need not be specified here. Growing up in the shadow of the greatest palace in the world, Eton has naturally been loyal, but her loyalty has been to the Sovereign de facto without disturbance from idle dreams of a possible king de jure. She has never been what Oxford has been called, the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties.'

The internal history of Eton is not fertile in particular incidents, nor instructive in general results. There was a rebellion in 1768. What is a school without a rebellion? But rebellions, though doubtless very good fun for the rebels, are dreary food for the 'general reader.' There was a celebrated occasion on which Keate flogged eighty boys in one night, and thereby quelled an incipient insurrection. But are not these things written in Mr. Collins's 'Etoniana '? Our business is with the