incomprehensible to be believed. I do sympathise with you, ever dear friend, and with you all most deeply. I can scarcely turn to the rest of your last letter, but I think that you will be wishing to hear for the sake of other people's arrangements. I have considered the matter well over as you desire-and must thank you and Jeremie very much for the honour of your request. Pray say so to Jeremie for me. You know my feebleness and my dilatoriness. You remember Plato and the Biblical Dictionary, and the Hippolytus and the Monastic Orders. If you think I am to be trusted; and if you think I can do it; I shall be glad to undertake, and rejoiced if I perform anything to your satisfaction. I think the Thessalonians would be an Epistle which I should like to work at. But I am sorry that none of you greater lights and possessors of greater leisure have undertaken Romans or Corinthians. You or Jeremie, you, I should say ought. The Corinthians would be a glorious field for you. Of course Westcott would do them beautifully if he had time, but I suppose this is why he chooses a small Epistle. However I have yet to learn all about the work, if I undertake it-viz. the length and style of note-whether continuous or broken notes-whether paraphrased-is it to bear any resemblance to Pusey's Minor Prophets? There are of course other matters in connection with it on which I must look for inspiration to the Editor-or you as his Προφήτης Λοξίας. I wish for many reasons you could come and stay with us a little. Can't you and won't you? Our little girl' is to be christened on Sunday and my wife will be about again, I trust. After Tuesday next we shall have an unoccupied room for you. Come and let me see you that we may talk face to face, and that I may have joy of your fellowship, and that we may be strengthened by the mutual comfort one of another. None needs it so much as Your affectionate, E. W. BENSON. And it will do you good, in all troubles and trials, to try to make one who sinks and slips, stand upright and look at Heaven a little. 1 Interpreter-a phrase applied to Apollo, in his capacity as Interpreter of the mind of Zeus. See Aesch. Eum. 19. 2 Mary Eleanor Benson, born Oct. 1863. CHAPTER VI. WELLINGTON COLLEGE. "Where thou, through glad laborious days, To be the sires of hero sons." SOME of the Newspapers at the time of my father's death, speaking of his tenure of office at Wellington, wrote of him as a courtly enthusiastic young Headmaster, but as possessed of sweetness rather than strength. There could not possibly be a more singular and palpable error than this. As a schoolmaster my father was, I suppose, one of the sternest and severest disciplinarians that ever ruled a school: he could inspire devoted admiration-it was admiration even more than love-but he could and largely did rule through fear. There is no exaggeration in saying that boys and even masters were greatly afraid of him, feared his censure, and consequently set great store on his praise. The admiring awe with which he was regarded throws light on a curious trait in character, and especially the youthful character-the undoubted admiration which boys have for severity liberally bestowed. This severity was partly deliberate; one of his assistants has told me that the boys were originally somewhat rough, the sons in many cases of widowed mothers, who had never known paternal discipline but had not unfrequently inherited paternal wilfulness; the masters too were young, inexperienced and inclined to confide in their own methods. It was also partly unconscious. I do not know that my father ever quite realised what an extraordinary personal ascendency he possessed; he was one of those people whose displeasure or depression necessarily affect the whole of his immediate circle. He used to regret in later years that he had thought it necessary to be so stern a ruler; in a long walk which I once had with him in Switzerland, he spoke to me first of the life-long struggle he had fought with a naturally violent temper, and he went on to say that sternness was not the right attitude for a schoolmaster, "it can drive a character over an immediate obstacle, but what you want is to lead-it is that which educates character." It is a curious thing that he, who was extraordinarily sensitive to the sight of suffering, especially in animals, to whom cruelty was so odious a vice, and who did not like to see plants struck with a stick, could have been so firm an advocate of punishment and so stern in the infliction of it. Some old pupil has said that it was an awful sight to see the Headmaster fold his gown round him and cane a liar before the school. Awful no doubt it was; but the reason of his extreme severity to that particular fault lay, I believe, in the fact that it had been his own boyish temptation, and was therefore to be relentlessly combated in others. his severity had in it something painful, because it was with him, though he did not fully realise it, so unnecessary: he could have ruled by the tongue, and yet he did believe in and use corporal punishment to a conspicuous degree. But There was a peculiarly weighty quality in his anger, due perhaps to his forcible personality, which, when exercising what appeared to be a just displeasure, was unwilling for the moment to take into consideration any extenuating circumstances. Real candour, which he made very difficult, entirely disarmed him. He used to say in later life that he thought anger hardly ever justifiable, and that in his younger days he had fallen back on it as an effective, though disagreeable, method of achieving a desired object. Certainly on ourselves as children my father exercised a powerful effect, but our feeling was almost as much awe as love; he did not always clearly remember the rules he had laid down, so that there was an element of uncertainty about his justice. He never punished us, but his displeasure was frightful to bear. I shall never forget how when once as children we were in his study, waiting while he finished a letter before he showed us pictures, my eldest brother, whom my father idolised, knocked down and broke a large ivory-handled seal. All that my father said was, "Martin, you naughty boy, you must forfeit your allowance to pay for mending that." Apart from the consequences of the deed-for the seal appeared to us of priceless value, and my own idea was that my brother would sink into an indigent old age with his allowance still going to pay for the damage-the terror of the incident is even now indelibly stamped on my memory. We always had a Bible lesson on Sunday from my father, we walked with him and were often sent for in the evening to look at pictures or photographs. Still, all these things were then almost more of an honour than a pleasure. To me personally, the father I knew in later years, sympathetic, patient, devotedly affectionate, outspoken and valuing frankness in suggestion or criticism, seems to me a different person from the stately severe father of my youth, who blew his nose so loudly in the hall, and whom it was almost a relief to see departing in cap and swelling silk gown down the drive. The following story is of course ben trovato, but it illustrates amusingly the feeling of awe that he inspired, or was supposed to inspire. My father did not approve of his masters smoking, and many were the devices that the tobacco-loving were obliged to resort to, to enjoy their luxury. It is true that their rooms were so much mixed up with the boys' premises that it was unseemly and perhaps created difficulties of discipline if they smoked much by day. But it is said that a master once, lighting his pipe behind a hay-rick near the College on a summer afternoon, found a boy already employed there in precisely the same manner; the culprits stared at each other, and entered into a mutual vow of secrecy, instinctively and instantly, because each was in the power of the other, each exposed to the danger of the Headmaster's disapproval. I may mention as an instance of my father's severity the rule that he made for his Prefects that, as setting an example, they were not to be late for early school: it was simply not to be. The punishment propounded was-the first time nothing; the second time 1000 lines to write out ; the third time turned down for a week into the Fifth Form; the fourth time turned down for the rest of the half. The second punishment was inflicted about three times, the third once, the fourth never. He had a genius for the detection of offences. Some boys once robbed an orchard of a neighbouring farmer-the farmer could not catch them, but impounded a cap, which he gave to my father. Boys were supposed to have their names in their caps, but all that this contained was "Old Bones." My father sent round a notice that the offenders were to give themselves up-they remained perdus. He then assembled the school to announce a general punishment: as he stood watching the boys come |