to shed light upon current institutions and events. The notion of citizenship as a subject for education never occurred to any teacher and would have been dismissed as unmeaning. Modern languages consisted of a little French, but no German. Sport was encouraged as a means of bringing us into the company of more reputable public schools on a basis of equality. “Speech days,” presided over by some carefully netted celebrity, conduced to the same end. The head master’s most signal achievement was the presence at the speech day in 1873 of the Prince of Wales, who happened to be a guest of “the Duke” at Chatsworth. My memory of that event is registered in a prize for “Divinity” bestowed by the royal hand. It was long before the full humour of this proceeding came home to me. The great literature of my native land was confined to a linguistic study of a play or two of Shakespeare, forced upon us by the requirements of the Cambridge Junior or Senior Certificate examination, and a bit of Milton, or of Tennyson, set for a “holiday task.” My fairly large private reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and my favourite Pope, with Bacon’s Essays and Boswell’s Johnson, was a blend of genuine appreciation and personal “swank,” how much of each it is difficult to judge, as I look back upon my early “education.”
Not until my later schooldays in the mid-seventies did my mind touch any economic or other social study. Somehow occasional essay-writing was intro-
