tt, but only for the battles, and always
skipping when I came to the sections headed 'A Parliament.' Joy had
a taste for classics, and made visions for me of honours at Oxford.
But the subject only danced before my eyes as a will-of-the-wisp,
and without attracting me. I remained stagnant without heart or
hope. A change however arrived about Easter 1822. My 'remove' was
then under Hawtrey (afterwards head-master and provost), who was
always on the lookout for any bud which he could warm with a little
sunshine.

He always described Hawtrey as the life of the school, the man to whom
Eton owed more than to any of her sons during the century. Though not
his pupil, it was from him that Gladstone, when in the fourth form,
received for the first time incentives to exertion. 'It was entirely due
to Hawtrey,' he records in a fragment, 'that I first owed the reception
of a spark, the _divinae particulam aurae_, and conceived a dim idea,
that in some time, manner, and degree, I might come to know. Even then,
as I had really no instructor, my efforts at Eton, down to 1827, were
perhaps of the purest plodding ever known.'

Evidently he was not a boy of special mark during the first three years
at Eaton. In the evening he played chess and cards, and usually lost. He
claimed in after life that he had once taken a drive in a hired tandem,
but Etonians who knew him as a schoolboy decided that an aspiring memory
here made him boast of crimes that were not his. He was assiduous in the
Eton practice of working a small boat, whether skiff, funny, or wherry,
single-handed. In the masquerade of Montem he figured complacently in
all the glories of the costume of a Greek patriot, for he was a faithful
Canningite; the heroic struggle against the Turk was at its fiercest,
and it was the year when Byron died at Missolonghi. Of Montem as an
institution he thought extremely ill, 'the whole thing a wretched waste
of time and money, a most ingenious contrivance to exhibit us as
baboons, a bore in the full sense of the word.' He did not stand aside
from the harmless gaieties of boyish life, but he rigidly refused any
part in boyish indecorums. He was, in short, just the diligent,
cheerful, healthy-minded schoolboy that any good father would have his
son to be. He enjoys himself with his brother at the Christopher, and is
glad to record that 'Keate did not make any jaw about being so late.'
Half a dozen of them m