Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography | Page 9

by some telling phrase. But
once, when, owing to a broken arm, he could not write his sermons, but
preached to us extempore three Sundays in succession, he fairly
fascinated us. As we rose in the School and came into close contact
with him, we found ever more and more to admire. It would be
impertinent for me to praise the attainments of a Senior Classic, but no
one could fail to see that Butler's scholarship was unusually graceful
and literary. Indeed, he was literary through and through. All fine
literature appealed to him with compelling force, and he was peculiarly
fond of English oratory. Chatham, Burke, Canning, Sheil, and Bright
are some of the great orators to whom he introduced us, and he was
never so happy as when he could quote them to illustrate some fine
passage in Cicero or Demosthenes. One other introduction which I owe
to him I must by no means forget--Lord Beaconsfield's novels. I had
read Lothair when it came out, but I was then too inexperienced to
discern the deep truths which underlie its glittering satire. Butler
introduced me to Sybil, and thereby opened up to me a new world of
interest and amusement. When Butler entertained boys at breakfast or
dinner, he was a most delightful host, and threw off all magisterial
awfulness as easily as his gown. His conversation was full of fun and
sprightliness, and he could talk "Cricket-shop," ancient and modern,
like Lillywhite or R. H. Lyttelton. In time of illness or failure or
conscience-stricken remorse, he showed an Arthur-like simplicity of
religion which no one could ignore or gainsay.
Next to Dr. Butler, in my list of Harrow masters, must be placed Farrar,
afterwards Dean of Canterbury, to whom I owed more in the way of
intellectual stimulus and encouragement than to any other teacher. I had,
I believe, by nature, some sense of beauty; and Farrar stimulated and
encouraged this sense to the top of its bent. Himself inspired by Ruskin,
he taught us to admire rich colours and graceful forms--illuminated
missals, and Fra Angelico's blue angels on gold grounds--and to see the
exquisite beauty of common things, such as sunsets, and spring grass,
and autumn leaves; the waters of a shoaling sea, and the transparent
amber of a mountain stream. In literature his range was extremely wide.
Nothing worth reading seemed to have escaped him, and he loved
poetry as much as Butler loved oratory. When he preached in Chapel

his gorgeous rhetoric, as yet not overwrought or over-coloured, held us
spellbound; and though, or perhaps because, he was inclined to spoil
the boys who responded to his appeals, and to rate them higher than
they deserved, we loved and admired him as, I should think, few
schoolmasters have been loved and admired.
When I speak of masters who were also friends, I should be ungrateful
indeed if I omitted Arthur George Watson, in whose House I was
placed as soon as the doctors were satisfied that the experiment could
be tried without undue risks. Mr. Watson was a Fellow of All Souls,
and was in all respects what we should have expected a member of that
Society (elected the same day as the late Lord Salisbury) to be. It was
said of C. P. Golightly at Oxford that, when he was asked his opinion
of Dr. Hawkins, Provost of Oriel, he replied: "Well, if I were forced to
choose the epithet which should be least descriptive of the dear Provost,
I should choose gushing." Exactly the same might be said of Mr.
Watson; but he was the most high-minded and conscientious of men, a
thorough gentleman, inflexibly just, and a perfect House-Master. The
days which I spent under his roof must always be reckoned among the
happiest of my life.
Among masters who were also friends I must assign a high place to the
Rev. William Done Bushell, who vainly endeavoured to teach me
mathematics, but found me more at home in the sphere (which he also
loved) of Ecclesiology. And not even the most thoughtless or
ill-conditioned boy who was at Harrow between 1854 and 1882 could
ever forget the Rev. John Smith, who, through a life-time
overshadowed by impending calamity, was an Apostle to boys, if ever
there was one, and the Guardian Angel of youthful innocence. Dr.
Vaughan, no lover of exaggerated phrases, called him, in a memorial
sermon, "the Christ of Harrow;" and there must be many a man now
living who, as he looks back, feels that he owed the salvation of his
soul to that Christ-like character.
During my first two years at Harrow, Dr. Westcott, afterwards Bishop
of Durham, was one of the masters, and it has always been a matter of
deep regret to me that I had