and of classical books, dully and leisurely construed.  I do not think I ever attempted to attend to the work in school; and there were few stimulating teachers.  I needed strict and careful teaching, and got some from my private tutor; but otherwise there was no individual attention.  The net result was that a few able boys turned out very good scholars, saturated with classics; but a large number of boys were really not educated at all.  The forms were too large for real supervision; and as long as one produced adequate exercises, and sat quiet in one’s corner, one was left genially alone.  It was not fashionable to “sap,” as it was called; and though a few ambitious boys worked hard, we most of us lived in a happy-go-lucky way, just doing enough to pass muster.  I took not the faintest interest in my work for a long time; but I read a great many English books, wrote poetry in secret, picked up a vague acquaintance, of a very inaccurate kind, with Latin and Greek, but possessed no exact knowledge of any sort.

Gradually, as I rose in the school, a faint idea of social values shaped itself.  Let me say frankly that we were wholly democratic.  There were many wealthy boys, many with titles; but not the faintest interest was taken in either.  I was surprised to find later on in my career at school, that boys whose names I had known by hearsay were peers, though at first I had no idea what the peerage was.  Whatever we were free from, we were at all events free from snobbishness.  Athletics were what constituted our aristocracy, pure and simple.  Boys in the eleven and the eight were the heroes of the place, and the school club called Pop, to which mainly athletes were elected, enjoyed an absolute supremacy, and indeed ran the out-of-doors discipline of the school.  In fact, on occasions like big matches, the boys were kept back behind the lines, by members of Pop parading with canes, and slashing at the crowd if they came past the boundaries.  All the social standing of boys was settled entirely by athletics.  A boy might be clever, agreeable, manly, a good game-shot, or a rider to hounds in the holidays, but if he was no good at the prescribed games, he was nobody at all at Eton.  It was wholesome in a sense; but a bad boy who was a good athlete might and did wield a very evil influence.  Such boys were above criticism.  The moral tone was not low so much as strangely indifferent.  A boy’s private life was his own affair, and public opinion exercised no particular moral sway.  Yet vague and guileless as I myself was, I gratefully record that I never came in the way of any evil influence whatever at Eton, in any respect whatever.  Talk was rather loose, and one believed evil of other boys easily enough.  To express open disapproval would have been held to be priggish; and though undoubtedly the tone of certain houses and certain groups was far from good, there yet ran through the place a mature sense of a boy’s right to be independent, and