tual murder. He entered Eton on
April 15, 1842, and was placed in the 'Remove,' the highest class
attainable at his age.

II. ETON

The Eton period[51] had marked effects. Fitzjames owed, as he said, a
debt of gratitude to the school, but it was for favours which would have
won gratitude from few recipients. The boys at a public school form, I
fancy, the most rigidly conservative body in existence. They hate every
deviation from the accepted type with the hatred of an ancient orthodox
divine for a heretic. The Eton boys of that day regarded an 'up-town
boy' with settled contempt. His motives or the motives of his parents
for adopting so abnormal a scheme were suspect. He might be the son of a
royal footman or a prosperous tradesman in Windsor, audaciously aspiring
to join the ranks of his superiors, and if so, clearly should be made to
know his place. In any case he was exceptional, and therefore a Pariah,
to associate with whom might be dangerous to one's caste. Mr. Coleridge
tells me that even the school authorities were not free from certain
suspicions. They wisely imagined, it appears, that my father had come
among them as a spy, instigated, no doubt, by some diabolical design of
'reforming' the school and desecrating the shrine of Henry's holy shade.
The poor man, already overpowered by struggling with refractory
colonists from Heligoland to New Zealand, was of malice prepense
stirring up this additional swarm of hornets. I can hardly suppose,
however, that this ingenious theory had much influence. Mr. Coleridge
also says that the masters connived at the systematic bullying of the
town boys. I can believe that they did not systematically repress it. I
must add, however, in justice to my school-fellows, that my personal
recollections do not reveal any particular tyranny. Such bullying as I
had to endure was very occasional, and has left no impression on my
memory. Yet I was far less capable than Fitzjames of defending myself,
and can hardly have forgotten any serious tormenting. The truth is that
the difference between me and my brother was the difference between the
willow and the oak, and that I evaded such assaults as he met with open
defiance.

My brother, as has been indicated, was far more developed in character,
if not in scholarship, than is at all common at his age. His talks with
my father and his own reading had familiarised him with thoughts lying
altogether beyond the horizon of the average boyish