CHAPTER II
AT ETON AND OXFORD
There is very little recorded of the boyhood of some great men, and this is true of the childhood of William E. Gladstone, until he leaves the parental home for school, which he does in 1821, at the early age of eleven. He was fortunate in his parentage, but no less so in his early associations, both in and out of school. We refer particularly to his private preceptors, two of whom, the venerable Archdeacon Jones and the Rev. William Rawson, first Vicar of Seaforth, a watering-place near Liverpool, were both men of high character and great ability. Mr. Gladstone always highly esteemed Mr. Rawson, his earliest preceptor, and visited him on his death-bed. Dr. Turner, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, was for two years young Gladstone's private tutor, beginning his instruction when his pupil left Eton in 1827.
Besides these associations of his early life there were Canning, a frequent visitor, as has been mentioned, at his father's house, and Hannah More—"Holy Hannah," as Horace Walpole called her. She singled out "Billy" Gladstone for her especial pet out of the group of eleven children in whom her warm heart delighted, and it has been asked wonderingly if Miss More could preternaturally have lengthened her days until William E. Gladstone's present glory, whether she would have gone on dubbing him "Billy" in undignified brevity until the end.
William E. Gladstone, when very young, gave such evidence of uncommon intellectual ability and promise of future greatness that his father resolved upon educating him in the best schools of England. There are four or five great schools in England in which the English youth are prepared in four or five years for Cambridge or Oxford. "Eton, the largest and the most celebrated of the public schools of England, ranks as the second in point of antiquity, Winchester alone being older." After the preparation at home, under private teachers, to which we have referred, William E. Gladstone was sent to Eton, in September, 1821. His biographer, George W.E. Russell, writes, "From a provincial town, from mercantile surroundings, from an atmosphere of money-making, from a strictly regulated life, the impressible boy was transplanted, at the age of eleven, to the shadow of Windsor and the banks of the Thames, to an institution which belongs to history, to scenes haunted by the memory of the most illustrious Englishmen, to a free and independent existence among companions who were the very flower of English boyhood. A transition so violent and yet so delightful was bound to produce an impression which lapse of time was powerless to efface, and no one who knows the man and the school can wonder that for seventy years Mr. Gladstone has been the most enthusiastic of Etonians."
Eton of to-day is not in all respects the Eton of three-quarters of a century ago, and yet in some particulars it is as it was when young "Billy" Gladstone studied within its walls. The system of education and discipline pursued has undergone some modifications in recent years—notably during the provostship of the Rev. Francis Hodgson; but radical defects are still alleged against it. It is not remarkable, however, that every Eton boy becomes deeply attached to the school, notwithstanding the apprenticeship to hardships he may have been compelled to undergo.