Out of the six or seven hundred boys present during divine service, should only fifty of them have their minds properly disposed, there would be something to advance in support of the practice; but that even this cannot be urged, I would appeal not only to every old Etonian, but to every boy of the present day. With the exception of Sunday, to which, of course, I am not now alluding, a boy, in my time, would almost as soon think of bringing a cricket-bat into church with him as a prayer-book; and if the prayers attracted our attention at all, it was but momentarily, and that merely to ascertain whether the tedious chaplain had nearly arrived at the conclusion of the service.
I assume the nature of boys of the present day to be similar to that of boys twenty years ago; and if so, I suspect that all these services have added about as much to the growth and strength of their religious principles, as the hundred-and-one paternosters and ave-marias muttered by a monk of Camaldoli for the last half century.
But was the evil merely negative, one would hesitate to object to anything that has been adopted for ages by a foundation so admirably conducted as that of Eton, and which has ever worked so well; but an additional effect of this compulsory attendance is to induce, by the force of early habit, an indifference and callousness of feeling during divine service, which but few in after life have the grace to overcome. But are the tutors of the College sensible of similar effects within themselves? Probably not; for there is little reason that they should, inasmuch as they have been preferred to their present situations, and carefully selected from a multitude, in consequence of their very singularity in this respect.
The promoters of this system seem to be guided, not by how it affects the boys, but by how they wish it would. While attending these services with appropriate feeling themselves, I suspect that they are apt to forget how different was their own conduct on the same occasions in their youth; or if not, they must imagine that the rising generation has become far more immaculate than their predecessors; "but boys will be boys" to the end of the chapter—and here it is.
CHAPTER VII.[ToC]
Six years have now glided away, and my station as an Etonian has experienced a still greater revolution. In place of being a fag, I was now the puissant "captain of my dames," and had six lower boys of my own; but my greatest privilege consisted in being the possessor of rather more than three thousand "old copies."
These are the original copies of verses on various subjects which have borne the correction of their authors' tutors, and which have been reserved and put by, after a fair copy of them has been shown up in school.