CHAPTER III. Schooldays At Eton

SCHOOLDAYS AT ETON

“Where the Provost at that time was Sir Henry Wotton, a person that was not only a fine gentleman himself, but very well skilled in the art of making others so.”—ROBERT BOYLE’S Philaretus.

In December 1634, after nearly seven years’ absence, the Earl of Cork and his family returned to the House of Lismore. They had not been gathered there, as a family, since the April of 1628, when the Earl and his wife and daughters set out on their journey to London. But Parliament was adjourned, and Dungarvan and his wife were with them, and everything pointed to their spending Christmas in their home of homes: “And there, God willing, wee intend,” wrote the Earl the day before they left Dublin to Lady Clifford at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire—“to keep a merry Christmas among our neighbors, and to eate to the noble family of Skipton in fatt does and Carps, and to drinke your healthe in the best wyne wee can gett....” His new daughter-in-law, he says, “looks, and likes Ireland, very well.” She was every day winning the affection and respect of the “best sort of people”—her husband’s and her father-in-law’s most of all. Incidentally—for he was treading on delicate ground owing to the family connection between Wentworth and the Cliffords—the Earl mentions that he is being “sharply persued” in his Majesty’s Court of the Star Chamber about his titles to the college and lands of Youghal; and he is only sorry that “this attempt” should be made upon him just at the time of his daughter-in-law’s arrival in Ireland.

It is not two hundred miles by rail from Dublin to Lismore; but in those days travelling was slow and difficult; and the Cork cavalcade—the family coach and the gay company of horsemen surrounding it—were four days upon the road. Robert Boyle never forgot that eventful journey. The English daughter-in-law and her attendant lady, and the old Earl and all his five sons, were of the party, the youngest, Robert, not eight years old. Each night they “lay” at hospitable houses on the road, and all went well till, on the fourth day after passing Clonmell, as they were crossing the “Four Miles Water”, their coach was overturned in mid-stream. Robyn remembered every detail of the adventure: how he had been left sitting alone in the coach, “with only a post-boy,” and how one of his father’s gentlemen, “very well horsed,” recognising the danger, rode alongside and insisted on carrying the little fellow—very unwilling to leave the apparent safety of the inside of the coach—in his arms over the rapid water; how the water proved so much swifter and deeper than anybody had imagined that horses and riders were “violently hurried down the stream,” and the unloaded and empty coach was quickly overturned. The coach horses struggled till they broke their harnesses, and with difficulty saved themselves by swimming.

So much for the memory of a little sensitive eight-year-old. The Earl’s diary record is brief and to the point. His coach was “overthrown”, his horses were “in danger of drowning”, but they all, God be praised, arrived safely at Lismore, and the journey had cost him £24.

Christmas was kept at Lismore, and the last two days of the old year at Castle Lyons, where the Earl’s son-in-law, Barrymore, feasted them most liberally. He could scarcely have done less, after that eighteen-months’ visit to the Earl’s town house in Dublin. And so this year ended.

With the New Year 1635 came the Claytons from Cork, bringing Mary and little Peggie on a visit to their father. A week or two later the Earl went back alone to Dublin for the last session of Parliament, leaving Dungarvan and his wife to keep house at Lismore; and the four boys—Kynalmeaky, Broghill, Frank and little Robyn—were all left under the charge of their tutor, Mr. Wilkinson, who was also the Earl’s chaplain.

It was a severe winter: the very day after the Earl set out from Lismore there began to fall at Clonmell “the greatest snow that ever any man now living did see in Ireland.” The House of Lismore must have stood, very white and quiet, looking down over the precipice into the swirling Blackwater below it. All about it, white and silent too, lay the gardens and orchards, the fishponds and park lands, and the wooded wildernesses; and the mountains beyond were hidden in falling snows. The roads could not have been easy riding between Clonmell and Dublin, but the Earl and his servants reached Dublin in safety, and he sent back by Dungarvan’s man “two new books of Logick” for the versatile Kynalmeaky’s further education.

Kildare had come back to Dublin also, and not too soon; for he and his young wife were to make up their differences over a little grave. Early in March their eldest little girl died under the Earl’s roof in Dublin; and a few days later Lady Kildare’s boy was born—the “young master” of Wentworth’s vindictive letter to Laud.

But spring was at hand, and the Lismore orchards were in blossom. The Earl was busy buying more lands and manors to be settled on Robyn, and writing to his English friends about a “ffrench gent” to accompany his sons Kynalmeaky and Broghill as “governour” on their foreign travels. Great sheet-winged hawks, also, were brought “to fflye for our sports”; and in July Lord Clifford and his suite arrived from Yorkshire on a visit to Lismore. The Earl of Cork was in his element. A great hunting-party had been arranged, and the huntsmen filled the lodge in the park. Dungarvan and his wife—Lord Clifford’s daughter and heiress—the Barrymores, and Katharine and Arthur Jones, were all gathered at Lismore. Lord Clifford was to see this Munster home at its very best; its terraces and rose-gardens aflame with colour, its orchards heavy with fruit, its pigeon-houses and watermills and fishponds and the great turreted walls—all the “re-edifications” in fact, that had been the work of years. And the seventeenth-century interior must have been as imposing; for there was furniture of crimson velvet, fringed with silver, and furniture of black and scarlet velvet brocade. The walls were hung with tapestry, the floors were spread with Turkey rugs. There were high-backed chairs and low-backed chairs, and Indian embroideries, and “long cushions” for the embrasured window-seats. The Earl’s hospitable tables were furnished with fish, beef, venison, and huge all-containing pies—to be washed down by Bordeaux wine, usquebagh, and aqua vitæ; and they groaned also beneath their burden of silver;—flagons and trenchers, “covered salts,” “costerns,” kettles and ladles of silver and silver gilt; while the “ewers and basons” in the bedrooms were of silver, the great gilded beds hung with scarlet cloth and silver lace and the ceilings of the children’s nursery and the Earl’s “studdie” were of “fretwork”—their walls of “Spanish white”.

Katharine and Arthur Jones went back to Athlone early in September. The hunting-party was dispersed, and the House of Lismore was emptying again. It must have been on one of those autumn days before Katharine left Lismore that there happened the little “foolish” incident about Robyn and the plums: an incident which the elder sister would tell, long afterwards, when Robert Boyle had made his world-wide reputation, and she and he were growing old together in the house in Pall Mall.

Dungarvan’s wife had already made a special pet of Francis, who was indeed a lovable and happy-tempered boy. But it was Robyn who was his sister Kate’s favourite. She seems to have felt a special tenderness for this little fellow with a little independent character of his own, so different from all his brothers: a little fellow with a stutter, attributed by his family to his habit of mimicking some children with whom he had been allowed to play; a little fellow who was “studious” at eight years old, and so hopelessly and tactlessly truthful that the old Earl—fond old disciplinarian that he was—had never been able to “find him in a lie in all his life.”

And so with the plums. Lady Dungarvan, in delicate health, was being petted by all the family; and Katharine Jones had given “strict orders” that the fruit of a certain plum tree in the Lismore garden should be preserved for Lady Dungarvan’s use. Robyn had gone into the garden, and, “ignoring the prohibition,” had been eating the plums. And when his sister Kate taxed him, “by way of aggravation,” with having eaten “half a dozen plums,”—“Nay, truly, sister,” answered he simply to her, “I have eaten half a score.”

Mr. Wilkinson and a certain “Mownsier” had between them taught Robyn to speak some French and Latin and to write a fair hand; and now that he was in his ninth year, and Frank twelve years old, they were to be sent to Eton. The Earl had been in correspondence for some time with his old friend Sir Henry Wotton, not only about this matter, but about a “governour” who should take Kynalmeaky and Broghill abroad. Accordingly on September 9, 1635, a few days after their sister Katharine and Arthur Jones had left Lismore, Francis and Robert, with Carew their personal servant, under the charge of the Earl’s own confidential servant, Mr. Thomas Badnedge, left Lismore for Youghal, there to embark for England, “to be schooled and bredd at Eaton.” Badnedge was to carry the purse, with £50 in it, and if he wanted any more was to draw upon Mr. Burlamachy, the Lord Mayor of London. And the Earl gave the boys at parting £3 between them: “the great God of Heaven”, he wrote in his diary, “bless, guyde and protect them!”

It was not till September 24 that the little party actually sailed from Youghal, for they waited a whole week for a wind, and then they were “beat back again” by a storm. But at last, “though the Irish coasts were then sufficiently infested with Turkish gallies,” they reached Bristol in safety, having touched at Ilfracombe and Minehead on the way. There was a short stay “to repose and refresh themselves” at Bristol, and then their journey was “shaped” direct for Eton College. It was of course a journey by coach-roads; and their first sight of English scenery was in late September.

They arrived at Eton on October 2; and Mr. Badnedge delivered the two boys safely into the charge of Sir Henry Wotton. Their “tuicon” was to be undertaken by Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster.”

Shortly after their arrival, Francis penned a little letter to his father, the Earl of “Korke,” to be carried back to Ireland by one of their escort. He began on bended knees with hearty prayers, and went on to say that he had no news to tell except some things he had observed on his travels, but these he would leave the bearer of his letter to narrate, “in regard I am incited by my school exercise.” Sir “Hary Wutton” had been very kind to them, entertaining them the first day of their arrival at his own table. He had also put at their disposal “a chamber of his owne with a bedd furnished afore our own wilbe furnished.” The young lords at Eton had also been most friendly, especially the Earl of Peterborough’s son, with whom Frank and Robyn were, for the present, to dine and sup. And there was a postscript to say that Mr. Badnedge had been very kind “in all our travels,” and had sent them a supply of linen from London after their arrival, for which they were “much bound to him.”

A few days later Mr. John Harrison, the “chief schoolmaster,” also wrote to the Earl of Cork, a letter concise, dignified, and satisfactory.

He confirmed the arrival at Eton of the Earl’s two sons, “whoe, as they indured their journeye both by sea and land, beyond what a man would expect from such little ones so, since their arrival, the place seemed to be suiting them wonderfully well”. He tells the Earl that “Mr. Provost” had been so kind as to put the boys under his care, and lets the Earl know, in parenthesis, that he, John Harrison, is at present the “Rector” of the school: “I will carefully see them supplyed with such things as their occasions in the colledge shall require, and endeavour to sett them forward in learninge the best I can.”

But it was from Carew, the boys’ personal servant, that the Earl was to hear all about everything. Carew’s first letter touched lightly on the “long and tedious navigation and great travels by land,” and went straight to the subject of subjects—“my two young masters.” They had been there only a few days, but they were “very well beloved for their civill and transparent carriage towards all sorts, and specially my sweet Mr. Robert, who gained the love of all.” Sir Henry Wotton had been “much taken with him for his discourse of Ireland and of his travails, and he admired that he would observe or take notice of those things that he discoursed off.”

Then followed an account of Sir Henry Wotton’s kind reception of the boys, and the lending of his furnished chamber till their own should be ready: “We injoy it yett,” says Carew, “which is a great favor.” The boys had dined several times already with Sir Henry Wotton. They were very “jocond”, although they showed a “studious desire”, and they had “very carefull and reverend masters.” There is just a hint of home-sickness, a longing for the sight of the old Earl and the brothers and sisters and the roughly splendid Irish life; but Carew quickly goes on to tell the “Order of the Colledge,” especially “touching my young masters’ essence.” The boys dine in hall, with the rest of the boarders; and the Earl of Northampton’s four sons, and the two sons of the Earl of Peterborough, with other “Knights’ sons” are at the same table. “They sitt permiscously—noe observing of place or qualitie”; and at night they supped in their own rooms, Mr. Francis and Mr. Robert supping with the Earl of Peterborough’s sons, providing, of course, their own commons. Carew mentions the “fasting nights” and the fact that the College allows no meat to be cooked on Fridays or Saturdays; and he hints that the College commissariat requires a good deal of supplementing. Master Robert is too busy with his lessons to write a letter, but sends his love and duty: “They are upp every morning at half an hour afore 6, and soe to scoole to prayers.”

Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton of that day, was nearing the end of his eventful, chequered life when Robert Boyle, not yet nine years old, came under his care. He was indeed a contemporary of the old Earl, and a Kentish man as well—one of a fine old Kentish stock; but no two men could have been more unlike. He had taken his B.A. at Oxford, and with a slender purse set out on his seven years’ wanderings in European cities, the very same year in which Mr. Richard Boyle had turned the lucky ring on his finger and landed on Irish shores. But that had been forty-seven years before—back in the mists; and the years between those youthful wanderings and this pleasant old age in the Provost’s lodging at Eton had been years of risky secret missions and ill-paid political intrigue. He had been private secretary to Essex in London, private correspondent abroad, Ambassador at Venice. In those years, many a fine intellect with big ambitions had gone under. Sir Henry had come off better than many, in spite of his slender means and an undeniable weakness for libraries and laboratories and picture galleries in the intervals of diplomacy. It was he who had been sent by the Duke of Tuscany on the secret mission to Edinburgh to tell James VI that he was going to be poisoned, and to carry with him the little packet of Italian antidotes, not known at that time in the Scottish pharmacopœia. He had stayed three months with the Scottish King; and no wonder that when James ascended the throne of England Sir Henry Wotton was one of the men then in London whom the King desired to see. He was a favourite at Court; and his lifelong homage to the Princess Elizabeth, the unhappy Queen of Bohemia, is well known.

He had risen to great things, and might have risen to greater still if it had not been for one brilliant Latin epigram written in an album. Even King James, with pleasant memories of a packet of antidotes and a most delightful guest in Stirling Castle, found it hard to forgive the Latin epigram—“a merriment,” poor Wotton had called it—written in an album in an indiscreet moment many years before, and officiously forwarded from Augsburg to the Court of London: “An Ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” It is said to have ruined Sir Henry Wotton’s diplomatic chances; and when, after some other missions, he came home in 1624, it was as a penniless man still, with plans of literary work and a sufficient stock of memories grave and gay. He had consorted with princes and statesmen, with artists, men of science, and men of letters. He had worked for Essex and known Raleigh, and Francis Bacon was his cousin. Among his friends abroad he had counted Beza, Casaubon, Arminius and Kepler. He had watched Kepler at work in his laboratory, and he had supplied Bacon with facts. And when Bacon sent him three copies of his Novum Organum when it first appeared, Sir Henry sent one of the copies to Kepler.

When Thomas Murray died, and Sir Henry Wotton was selected, out of many candidates, for the Provostship of Eton, he was so poor that he was obliged to borrow money to enable him to settle down there. King James would have granted him a dispensation, but he preferred to conform to the rule that the Provost of Eton must be a man in Holy Orders. He had been duly ordained deacon, and, being a man of liberal views, had steered “a middle way between Calvinism and Arminianism.”

When the two young sons of the Earl of Cork arrived at Eton, Sir Henry Wotton had been Provost for ten years, and Eton could scarcely imagine itself without him. With a royal pension in addition to his Provostship, and assisted by a strong staff of Fellows of the College—the learned Hales, John Harrison and the rest—he was taking life easily, in the evening of his days, among his books and curios, his Italian pictures, and those manuscripts—biographies of Donne and Luther, and the History of England,—which he always meant to finish and never did. He was not quite so active as when he had first come among them with his new views of teaching, and had put up the picture of Venice, where he had lived so long as Ambassador, and had hung on the wooden pillars of the lower schools his “choicely drawn” portraits of Greek and Latin orators and poets and historians, for the little Eton boys to gaze at with round English eyes; but his familiar figure was still a daily presence, coming and going amongst them in his furred and embroidered gown, “dropping some choyce Greek or Latin apophthegm” for the benefit of the youngsters in class. He was still a “constant cherisher” of schoolboyhood, taking the “hopeful youths” into his own especial care, having them at his own hospitable table, picking out the plodding boys and the boys of genius, and himself teaching best in his own memorable talk. He liked to indulge in reminiscences of Italy—“that delicat Piece of the Worlde”; and he sometimes looked wistfully Londonwards, though in his gentle, deprecatory way he spoke of it, especially in November, as a “fumie citie.” In his last years he nursed hopes that he might succeed to the mastership of the Savoy; meantime, from his Provost’s Lodging, he could look across the “meandering Thames and sweete meadows,” to the great pile of Windsor Castle in its “antient magnificence”; and he read and ruminated and smoked—he smoked a little too much, according to his friend Izaak Walton—and counted his “idle hours not idly spent” when he could sit quietly fishing with Izaak Walton in the river-bend above the shooting fields, then, as now, known as Black Pots. When Robert Boyle went to Eton in 1635, to be an Eton boy meant not only being “grounded in learning” by such men as Hales and Harrison, but being “schooled and bred” under the daily influence of this soft, rich, delightful personality.

The two boys were known in the school as Boyle A and Boyle I: Robert was Boyle I. According to Carew, they must have grown with astonishing rapidity during their first months at Eton. Mr. Francis was not only tall, but “very proportionable in his limbs,” and grew daily liker to his brother, Lord Dungarvan. He was not so fond of his books as “my most honoured and affectionate Mr. Robert, who was as good at his lessons as boys double his age.” An usher, “a careful man”, was helping them with their lessons, and Carew was keeping an eye on the usher. Versions and dictamens in French and Latin filled their time, and Carew could not persuade them to “affect the Irish,” though Robert seems to have shown a faint, intermittent interest in that language. As for Mr. Robert, he was “very fatt, and very jovial, and pleasantly merry, and of ye rarest memory that I ever knew. He prefers Learninge afore all other virtues and pleasures. The Provost does admire him for his excellent genius.” They had acted a play in the College, and Robert had been among those chosen to take part in it. “He came uppon ye stage,” wrote Carew, exultant, to the Earl of Cork; “he had but a mute part, but for the gesture of his body and the order of his pace, he did bravely.”

The little fellow was not yet nine years old, and his stutter must have made it highly desirable that the part should be “mute”; but “Mr. Provost” had already made choice of a “very sufficient man” to teach both the boys to play the viol and to sing, and also to “helpe my Master Robert’s defect in pronontiation.” Carew was afraid the study of music, which “elevats the spirits,” might hinder their more serious lessons; though up to that time the conduct of both boys had been exemplary. They had said their prayers regularly and been equally polite to everybody, and were very neat in their “aparelling, kembing, and washing.” The elder brother had been laid up with “a cowld that he tooke in the scoole,” which Carew attributed entirely to the fact that he had outgrown his clothes; and Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had been “mighty backward” in sending their new suits. Even with a bad cold, Frank was his usual pleasant, merry self; and when Mr. Provost, according to his custom, prescribed “a little phisique,” the boy drank it cheerfully to the last drop—and “rejected it immediately after.” Sir Henry Wotton wrote himself to the Earl, describing the whole episode with an accuracy of detail worthy of Kepler’s laboratory.

Meantime, Sir Henry himself had assured the Earl that the “spiritay Robyn’s” voice and pronunciation had been taken in hand by the Master of the Choristers. Robyn also had caught cold that first winter at Eton. He had “taken a conceit against his breakfast, being alwaies curious of his meat, and so going fasting to church.” But on this occasion, such was the spiritay Robyn’s popularity, that the whole College seems to have risen in protest against Mr. Provost’s prescription of “a little phisique.” And Robert recovered without it, and “continued still increasing in virtues.”

It is somewhat surprising that the younger brother should have been the favourite, for it was Francis Boyle who had the “quick, apprehensive wit,” and whose delight was in hunting and horsemanship; and it was Robyn who dissuaded him, exhorting his elder brother to learning in his youth, “for,” says he, “there can be nothing more profitable and honourable.” With his “fayre amiable countenance,” this child of nine, according to the ebullient Carew, was “wise, discreet, learned and devout; and not such devotion as is accustomed in children, but withall in Sincerity he honours God and prefers Him in all his actions.”

It is very certain that the spiritay Robyn was not fond of games. There is no enthusiasm for active sports in his Philaretus, not even of a certain sport that the boys engaged in on winter evenings in the hall, for which every recent comer was obliged to “find the candles”; and a very expensive time for candles it was, according to Carew. But Mr. Robert learnt to “play on music and to sing”, and “to talk Latin he has very much affected.” And it speaks very well for both Frank and Robyn that, their tastes being so unlike, they remained such excellent friends. “Never since they arrived,” according to Carew, had two ill words passed between them; which he thought was rare to see, “specially when the younger exceeds the elder in some qualities.” Some of the noble brothers in the College were continually quarrelling; but “the peace of God is with my masters.” It had been noticed even at the Fellows’ table: “Never were sweeter and civiller gents seen in the Colledge than Mr. Boyles.” The only thing in which they do not seem to have excelled was in letter-writing. Master Frank could not write to the Earl because his hand shook; and Master Robyn could not write because he had hurt his thumb.

And so winter and spring passed, and the summer came, and with it “breaking-time” at Eton. Mr. Provost, Mr. Harrison, and everybody else went away. The two boys, and Carew with them, spent their holidays with their sister Lettice in Sussex. It could not have been a cheerful visit, though Carew assured the Earl that there was “nothing wanting to afford a good and pleasant entertainment if my honourable Lady had not been visited with her continuall guest, griefe and melancholy.” So extremely melancholy was the Lady Lettice Goring during this visit that it made the two boys “cry often to looke upon her.” And yet they must have made a pretty pair to gladden the eyes of an invalid woman. For Mr. Perkins, the London tailor, had sent them some fine new clothes—little shirts with laced bands and cuffs, two scarlet suits without coats, and two cloth-of-silver doublets.

Robert Boyle’s own recollections of Eton were written a good many years after he left it. He always remembered with gratitude the kindness of Mr. John Harrison, in whose house, in that chamber that was so long in furnishing, the two boys lived—except for some holidays at “breaking-time,” usually spent in Sussex—from October 1635 to November 1638.

From the very beginning John Harrison must have recognised that in “Boyle I” he had no ordinary boy to deal with. He saw a “spiritay” little fellow, with a fair, amiable countenance, a slight stammer, which the child did his best to amend, and the unstudied civilities of manner of a little prince. According to Boyle himself, Mr. Harrison saw “some aptness and much willingness” in him to learn; and this chief schoolmaster resolved to teach his pupil by “all the gentlest ways of encouragement.” He began by often dispensing with his attendance at school in ordinary school hours, and taking the trouble to teach him “privately and familiarly in his own chamber.”

“He would often, as it were, cloy him with fruit and sweetmeats, and those little dainties that age is greedy of, that by preventing the want, he might lessen both his value and desire of them. He would sometimes give him, unasked, play-days, and oft bestow upon him such balls and tops and other implements of idleness as he had taken away from others that had unduly used them. He would sometimes commend others before him to rouse his emulation, and oftentimes give him commendations before others to engage his endeavours to deserve them. Not to be tedious, he was careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he easily prevailed with him to consider studying not so much as a duty of obedience to his superiors, but as a way to purchase for himself a most delightsome and invaluable good.”

All which means that Mr. Harrison was making a very interesting experiment, and that his system happened to succeed in the case of Robert Boyle. The boy learned his “scholar’s task” very easily; and his spare hours were spent so absorbedly over the books he was reading that Mr. Harrison was sometimes obliged to “force him out to play.” And what were the books that were read with such zest? It was, Robert Boyle says, the accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius that first made him in love with “other than pedantick books”; and in after life he used to assert that he owed more to Quintus Curtius than ever Alexander did: that he had gained more from the history of Alexander’s conquests than ever Alexander had done from the conquests themselves.

His other recollections of his Eton schooldays are for the most part of accidents that happened to him there. He was not so good a horseman as his brother Frank. Once he fell from his horse, and the animal trod so near to his throat as to make a hole in his neckband, “which he long after preserved for a remembrance.” Another time his nag took fright as he was riding through a town, and reared upright on his hinder feet against a wall; and the boy just saved himself by slipping off. Yet a third time he nearly met his death by a “potion” given him “by an apothecary’s error”; and it is interesting, in the light of what happened and did not happen in Boyle’s later life, to hear that “this accident made him long after apprehend more from the physicians than the disease, and was possibly the occasion that made him afterwards so inquisitively apply himself to the study of physick, that he might have the less need of them that profess it.” The fourth and last of this almost Pauline enumeration of disasters was the falling, one evening, of the greater part of the wall of the boys’ bedroom in Mr. Harrison’s house. The two brothers had gone early to their room; Robyn was already tucked into the big four-post bed, with its “feather bedd, boulster, and two pillows,” and the curtains of “blew perpetuana with lace and frenge”, and Frank was talking with some other boys round the fire when, without a moment’s warning, the wall of the room fell in, the ceiling with it, carrying bed, chairs, books and furniture from the room above. A bigger boy rescued Frank from the debris and dust, the chair in which he had been sitting broken to pieces, and his clothes torn off his back; and Robyn, the future chemist, peeping from the blew-perpetuana curtains, remembered to wrap his head in the sheet, so that it might serve “as a strainer, through which none but the purer air could find a passage.”

It is observable that there is no mention of any of those accidents in the letters to the Earl of Cork from either the Provost or the boys’ personal servant, Carew. Perhaps it was as well that the Earl, much harassed at home, should not be told everything that was happening at Eton. As it was, he knew too much. Some go-between—Mr. Perkins, the tailor, or somebody equally officious—must have told the Earl in what manner Carew—“poor unmeriting me”, as Carew called himself in one of his fascinating letters to the Earl—had been utilising his idle hours by the meandering Thames. Frank and Robyn, and Carew with them, were spending their holidays with Lady Lettice Goring, when one morning Sir Henry Wotton, sitting in his study at Eton, received a letter from the Earl of Cork. The contents came as a thunderbolt. “Truly, my good Lord,” Sir Henry Wotton wrote back to the Earl, “I was shaken with such an amazement at the first percussion thereof, that, till a second perusal, I was doubtfull whether I had readd aright.” For everybody in the college was so persuaded of young Mr. Carew’s discretion and temper and zeal in his charge, and “whole carriadge of himself,” that it would be “harde to stamp us with any new impression.” However, Mr. Provost had somewhat reluctantly put away his pipe and “bestowed a Daye in a little Inquisitiveness.” And he had found that the Earl, in Dublin, was quite right; that between Carew and a certain “yonge Mayed, dawghter to our under baker—” and Mr. Provost could not but own that she was pretty—there had passed certain civil, not to say amorous, language. The old Provost was evidently disposed to look leniently on this particular foolish pair. Had he not himself once, in his youth, written a little poem which began—

O faithless world, and thy most faithless part A woman’s heart! ... Why was she born to please, or I to trust Words writ in dust?

However, Sir Henry told the Earl he was going to talk to Carew on his return from Sussex, and warn him how careful, in his position, he ought to be; and he would write again to the Earl after seeing Carew. But, in the meantime he wished to reserve judgment: “For truely theare can not be a more tender attendant about youre sweete children.”

And after all news travelled slowly. Those little love passages were already six months old: “Tyme enough, I dare swere”—wrote the old diplomatist, sitting alone in his study, with his Titian and his Bassanos looking down upon him—“to refrigerat more love than was ever betweene them.”