Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography | Page 8

Link cannot be a very rare one.
2. My second Link is more remarkable. My father (1807-1894) remembered an old Highlander who had been "out" with Prince Charles Edward in 1745. Of course, this "linking" took place at the extremes of age, my father being a little boy and the Highlander a very old man. My grandfather, the sixth Duke of Bedford, was one of the first Englishmen who took a shooting in the Highlands (on the Spey), and the first time that my father accompanied him to the north, Prince Charlie's follower was still living near the place which my grandfather rented. Your obedient servant, Sept. 6, 1910. GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL.

II
HARROW
Not to River nor Royal Keep, Low Meads nor level Close, Up to the sturdy wind-worn steep, Levavi oculos; To four red walls on a skyward climb, Towering over the fields and Time. E. MILNER-WHITE.
When Dr. Vaughan re-created Harrow School, after its long decadence under Longley and Wordsworth, he wished that the number should never exceed five hundred. Of late years the school has been greatly enlarged, but in my time we were always just about the number which, in Vaughan's judgment, was the largest that a Head-master could properly supervise. That number is embalmed in Edward Howson's touching song:--
"Five hundred faces, and all so strange! Life in front of me, Home behind-- I felt like a waif before the wind, Tossed on an ocean of shock and change."
Some of those faces I shall presently describe; but, in reviewing my life at Harrow, my first tribute must be paid to my Head-master--for forty-five years the kindest, most generous, and most faithful of friends. Henry Montagu Butler, youngest son of Dr. George Butler, Dean of Peterborough and sometime Head-master of Harrow, was born in 1833, and educated at Harrow. He was Head of the School, made the cock-score in the Eton match at Lords, was Scholar and Fellow of Trinity, and Senior Classic in 1855. He was elected to the Head-mastership of Harrow, in succession to Dr. Vaughan, when he was only a few months over 26, and entered on his reign in January, 1860. It is not easy to describe what a graceful and brilliant creature he seemed to my boyish eyes, when I first saw him in 1867, nor how unlike what one had imagined a Head-master to be. He was then just thirty-four and looked much younger than he was. Gracefulness is the idea which I specially connect with him. He was graceful in shape, gesture, and carriage; graceful in manners and ways, graceful in scholarship, graceful in writing, pre-eminently graceful in speech. It was his custom from time to time, if any peculiar enormity displayed itself in the school, to call us all together in the Speech-Room, and give us what we called a "Pi-jaw." One of these discourses I remember as well as if I had heard it yesterday. It was directed against Lying, as not only un-Christian but ungentlemanlike. As he stood on the dais, one hand grasping his gown behind his back and the other marking his points, I felt that, perhaps for the first time, I was listening to pure and unstudied eloquence, suffused with just as much scorn against base wrongdoing as makes speech pungent without making it abusive. It should be recorded to Butler's credit that he was thoroughly feared. A Head-master who is not feared should be at once dismissed from his post. And, besides being feared, he was profoundly detested by bad boys. The worse the boy's moral character, the more he hated Butler. But boys who were, in any sense or degree, on the right side; who were striving, however imperfectly, after what is pure and lovely and of good report, felt instinctively that Butler was their friend. His preaching in the School Chapel (though perhaps a little impeded by certain mannerisms) was direct, interesting, and uplifting in no common degree. Many of his sermons made a lifelong impression on me. His written English was always beautifully pellucid, and often adorned by some memorable anecdote or quotation, or 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