ected by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans had
begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.

Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist
that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards
developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits
were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions
from our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover,
four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the
old Big Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school.
Gates used to come and talk to us older fellows about these things.

"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. "But we ought to get
in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men will be
wanting it some of these days."

He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the
lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he achieved it,
and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at
which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety
inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings."
And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced,
morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in
the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters'
Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it,
dear soul! to the power of the sword....

I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that
is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his
thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant
prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that
what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoided
altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short
arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us
towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness
in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to
indicate in those transitional years.

7

The school never quite got hold of me. Partly