Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. ETON AND ITS SCHOOL—READING AND ITS INSTITUTIONS—WALK ALONO THE CHALK DOWNS—WANTAGE, ITS SCHOOLS AND HI8TORY. LYING spent most of the day in the chapel, public apartments and grounds of Windsor Castle, I went over the bridge to Eton of famous reputation. This antique, unique town is to English Boydom what Windsor Castle is to English King-and-Queendom. The rim of population outside of the schools is of no more account in making up the life, character and history of Eton, than the narrow- streeted surroundings of the royal castle are to the celebrity of Windsor. No one hearing the name of Eton ever thinks of anything else than a dozen generations of English boys, of high and turbulent blood, fishing up a little Latin and Greek out of a whirlpool of fun. It is probable that no educational establishment in the world ever sugared its pills of learning with such a thick coating of frolic as thisancient institution has done from the beginning. It is sometimes intimated and suspected that this coating is the thickest of the two, and that, in the most literal sense of the word, the studying-spaces are mere interludes, or breathing moments between outdoor sports, in which the scholars recruit for the practice of " muscular Christianity " at the cricket, foot-ball or oar; and occasionally at some impromptu and vigorous lessons in pugilism. However this may have been, is, and is to be, the memories of Eton are often among the most pleasant souvenirs of a great man's life. The " Eton Boys" have made their mark, often above, by a head, the niche of other institutions which prescribed more study and less play. With considerable cause of suspicion that they are too much on the river, when they ought to be rowing Homer to Troy or tallying angles for Euclid, more than one o...