brought up do in
fact turn out substantially more good-humoured, unselfish, and fit for
the commerce of the world than others who have lacked this training.
And the further question remains whether the games are worth their
costly candle. That they occupy a good deal of time at school and at
college is not necessarily an evil, seeing that the time left for
lessons or study is sufficient if well spent. The real drawback
incident to the excessive devotion games inspire in our days is that
they leave little room in the boy's or collegian's mind either for
interest in his studies or for the love of nature. They fill his
thoughts, they divert his ambition into channels of no permanent value
to his mind or life; they continue to absorb his interest and form a
large part of his reading long after he has left school or college.
Nevertheless, be these things as they may, the opinion of a man so
able and so experienced as Bowen was, deserves to be recorded; and his
success in endearing himself to and guiding his boys was doubtless
partly due to the use he made of their liking for games.

He was never married, so the school became the sole devotion of his
life, and he bequeathed to it the bulk of his property, directing an
area of land which he had purchased on the top of the Hill to be
always kept as an open space for the benefit of boys and masters.

It need hardly be said that he loved boys as he loved teaching. He
took them with him in the holidays on walking tours. He kept up
correspondence with many of his pupils after they left Harrow, and
advised them as occasion rose. To many of them he remained through
life the model whom they desired to imitate. But he was very chary of
the exercise of influence. "A boy's character," he once wrote, "grows
like the Temple of old, without sound of mallet and trowel. What we
can do is to arrange matters so as to give Virtue her best chance. We
can make the right choice sometimes a little easier, we can prevent
tendencies from blossoming into acts, and render pitfalls visible. How
much indirectly and unconsciously we can do, none but the recording
angel knows. 'You can and you should,' said Chiffers,[56] 'go straight
to the heart of every individual boy.' Well, a fellow-creature's mind
is a sacred thing. You may enter into that arcanum once a year,
shoeless. And in the effort to control the spirit of a pupil, to make
one's own approval his test and mould him by the stress of our own
pres