In later days the Christopher became a great social centre of local life. All the coaches stopped at its door, and before Dr. Hawtrey abolished the Eton Market there was a weekly ordinary for farmers, and occasionally a hunt dinner, with noise enough to have driven the Muses back to Greece. Its rooms were in great request with parents come down to see their promising or unpromising offspring, whilst old Etonians revisiting Eton made the old place their headquarters as a matter of course.
“Lord! how great I used to think anybody just landed at the Christopher!” wrote Horace Walpole when he returned to his old school in 1746. The place recalled many memories of boyhood to his mind, and he declared that he felt “just like Noah, with all sorts of queer feels about him.”
Horace Walpole had passed some happy days at Eton, where one of his greatest friends was the studious and quiet Gray, who read Virgil for amusement out of school. The writer of the famous letters had a great affection for Eton, and Cambridge, as he said, seemed a wilderness to him as compared with the “dear scene” he had left. In after life the recollection of his school-days was ever keen. When, for instance, he first saw a balloon he declared that he was at once reminded of an Eton football. Though fond of reading, like many other Eton boys, the writer of the famous letters showed little enthusiasm for the school work.
“I remember,” says he, “when I was at Eton, and Mr. Bland had set me on an extraordinary task, I used sometimes to pique myself upon not getting it, because it was not immediately my school business. What! learn more than I was absolutely forced to learn! I felt the weight of learning that, for I was a blockhead, and pushed above my parts.”
Spending much of his time in the playing fields musing, he retained the recollection all his life.
“No old maid’s gown,” said he, “though it had been tormented into all the fashions from King James to King George, ever underwent so many transformations as these poor plains have in my idea. At first I was contented with tending a visionary flock and sighing some pastoral name to the echo of the cascade under the bridge. As I got further into Virgil and Clelia, I found myself transported from Arcadia to the garden of Italy; and saw Windsor Castle in no other view than the Capitoli immobile saxum.”
In Horace Walpole’s day Kendall, himself an old Etonian, presided over the Christopher. Later came Garraway and Jack Knight.
The rattling of coach wheels over the cobblestones outside the old inn was a never-failing source of excitement and interest to the boys. Most of them knew the drivers, whom they delighted to hail with volleys of chaff.
STAGE COACHMEN