present and future rather than with the past, and if we were to investigate the question how the Eton of the present came to be what it is, or indulge in the speculation what the Eton of the future is likely to be, it is the history of English society, and not the history of Eton, which we should have to narrate. There was indeed in recent years one instance of direct contact between Eton and the civil power, which, as it is curious in itself, and not likely to recur, we may be allowed briefly to describe. In 1840 Provost Goodall died, and as the Crown, which claimed the appointment, was minded to select an ineligible person, the fellows thought it a favourable opportunity to assert their independence, and proceeded to elect a provost of their own. Acting in conformity with their statutes, they assembled in the college chapel and invoked the Divine aid in the choice of a candidate. Thus fortified in their responsible task, they chose the Reverend John Lonsdale, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. Meantime Lord Melbourne had advised Her Majesty to bestow the post upon Mr. Hodgson, and in due time came a royal mandate directing that Mr. Hodgson should be elected. The fellows, having since their previous devotions adopted the

more mundane course of taking counsel's opinion, again proceeded to the chapel, again supplicated supernatural assistance, and after this impressive ceremony loyally, wisely, and providentially elected the Reverend Francis Hodgson. Since 1840 the right of the Crown to issue a congé d'élire has not been questioned by the fellows. The fellows are a curious and interesting body of men. They have all been masters, and in this respect they differ for the better from the fellows of Winchester, who are perhaps the purest specimens of concrete abuses now in existence. But to return to the fellows of Eton, of whom there are six besides the vice-provost, but of whom there are happily to be no more. They are all clergymen, their average emoluments are believed to be a thousand a year, and they almost all hold livings besides. The duty of a fellow is to live in handsome apartments at Eton for two months in the year, and to preach about half a dozen times in the College Chapel. He may also have a voice in auditing the college accounts, and in dismissing the head master or a boy on the foundation. His position was sometimes justified on the ground that there ought to be retiring pensions for masters, and if it was replied that a master

might be a layman, the most obvious and conclusive rejoinder was that he ought not to be, and that it served him right. However, we have changed all that. In future a fellow is to receive no payment as such, and all masters are to have retiring pensions. People with rational and symmetrical minds will be pleased, but there was some not altogether unwelcome amusement felt by more frivolous natures in the spectacle of an old gentleman neither wiser nor better nor more learned than his neighbours, provided with a good library, for which he cared nothing, luxurious rooms for which he cared a good deal, and the privilege of preaching to nine hundred boys, who, according to a witness before the Royal Commission, 'could not hear him, and would not have attended if they could.' Such as the fellows were, they have clung round Henry the Sixth's Foundation for four hundred and thirty-nine years. During those years the changes in the world outside the school have been far greater than the changes in the school itself, but the history of the school has been a history of constant vicissitudes compared with the history of the fellows. Of the school as it is now, with its virtues, its faults, its anomalies, its curious idiosyncrasies, we propose, having thus

cleared the ground, to speak briefly in these pages.

To describe Eton as a school is apt to mislead. It is analogous in many respects to a university, the head master representing the vice-chancellor and proctors, and the masters' houses standing in the place of the colleges. The head master of Eton is by no means an absolute despot, like the head master of Harrow and Rugby. One of the ablest men who ever taught at Eton recommended that the position of head master should be that of a 'senior tutor,' and thus described his actual status: 'The head master at Eton is little more than primus inter pares. The difference is not nearly so great at Eton between one of the senior masters and the head master as it is at some other schools, or as one not acquainted with the subject might expect.' It is a significant fact that though a head master was dismissed in 1611 on the strange ground of being a pluralist, yet there was no instance on record before 1876 of an assistant master's dismissal from Eton. The abrupt removal of Mr. Browning reminded all whom it might concern that the head master's powers had been previously restrained by a tacit understanding

rather than by any positive ordinance, but the state of things described to the Royal Commission of 1862 by the witness already quoted has probably not been materially altered since that time. If, however, the independence of the assistant masters has not been much diminished, the independence of the head master has certainly been increased Before the appointment of the new governing body in 1872 the provost had a veto on any change which the head master might propose, and he very frequently exercised his obstructive power. The provost has now become merely the chairman of the governing body, and the head master is probably as little restrained by superior authority as if he were at Harrow or Rugby. An Eton master in his own house is almost as absolute as the captain of a man-of-war, and he rarely applies to his chief except when he wishes to employ him as a flogging agent. In this capacity the head master's duties are almost wholly ministerial, and thus the head of the greatest school in the world can be made use of by his own assistants as an instrument for the performance of services from which they would themselves shrink. The isolation of a master in his house involves a correspond