than three or four years. He
never became in any way a typical Etonian. If I am asked to say what
that is, I should say that it is the imbibing instinctively of what is
eminently a fine, manly, and graceful convention. Its good side is a
certain chivalrous code of courage, honour, efficiency, courtesy, and
duty. Its fault is a sense of perfect rightness and self-sufficiency, an
overvaluing of sport and games, an undervaluing of intellectual
interests, enthusiasm, ideas. It is not that the sense of effortless
superiority is to be emphasized or insisted upon--modesty entirely
forbids that--but it is the sort of feeling described ironically in the
book of Job, when the patriarch says to the elders, "No doubt but ye are
the people, and wisdom shall die with you." It is a tacit belief that
all has been done for one that the world can do, and that one's standing
is so assured that it need never be even claimed or paraded.

[Illustration: _Photo by Hills & Saunders_

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

IN 1889. AGE 17

As Steerer of the _St. George_, at Eton.]

Still less was Hugh a typical Colleger. College at Eton, where the
seventy boys who get scholarships are boarded, is a school within a
school. The Collegers wear gowns and surplices in public, they have
their own customs and traditions and games. It is a small, close, clever
society, and produces a tough kind of self-confidence, together with a
devotion to a particular tradition which is almost like a religious
initiation. Perhaps if the typical Etonian is conscious of a certain
absolute rightness in the eyes of the world, the typical Colleger has a
sense almost of absolute righteousness, which does not need even to be
endorsed by the world. The danger of both is that the process is
completed at perhaps too early a date, and that the product is too
consciously a finished one, needing to be enlarged and modified by
contact with the world.

But Hugh did not stay at Eton long enough for this process to complete
itself. He decided that he wished to compete for the Indian Civil
Service; and as it was clear that he could not do this successfully at
Eton, my father most reluctantly allowed him to leave.

I find among the little scraps which survive from his schoolboy days,
the following note. It was written on his last night at Eton. He says:
"_I write this on Thursday evening after ten. Peel keeping passage._"
"Peel" is Sidney Peel, the Speaker's son. The passages are patrolled by
t