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,
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