We have no evidence as to what methods were employed, or what arguments adduced, by the excellent preceptor in order to carry out the purpose indicated in the concluding lines of his letter. Bute himself never referred to the matter afterwards, but the result was in all probability nugatory. It is not within the recollection of the present writer, who was an inmate of May Place a year or two later, that any serious effort was ever made there to impress religious truths on the minds of the pupils, or indeed to impart to them any definite religious teaching at all. The views and opinions of the young Scot, although only in his fourteenth year, were probably already a great deal more formed on these and kindred subjects than those of his worthy schoolmaster. In any case the time available for detaching his sympathies from the "Romish" priesthood and ritual was short. The boy had come to school very poorly equipped in the matter of general education, as the term was then understood. In the correspondence between his rival guardians, when he was just entering his 'teens, allusion is made to the boy's "precocious intellect," also to the fact that he knew little Latin, no Greek, and (what was considered worse) hardly any French. Mathematics he always cordially disliked; and it is on record that all the counting he did in those early years was invariably on his fingers. His natural intelligence, however, and his aptitude for study soon enabled him to make up for much that had been lost owing to the haphazard and interrupted education of his childhood; and it was not long before he was pronounced intellectually equal to the not very exacting standard of the entrance examination at Harrow. A final reminiscence of his connection with May Place may here be recorded. He revisited his old school not long after his momentous change of creed; and being left alone awhile in the study took up a blank report that lay on the table, and filled it up as follows[[6]]:—
MONTHLY REPORT OF THE MARQUESS OF BUTE.
LATIN CONSTRUING . . . . . . Partially preserved.
LATIN WRITING . . . . . . . Ditto.
GREEK CONSTRUING . . . . . . Getting very bad from disuse.
GREEK WRITING . . . . . . . Ditto.
ARITHMETIC . . . . . . . . . Entirely abandoned.
HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . So-so.
GEOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . Improved by foreign travel.
DICTATION . . . . . . . . . Ditto by business letters.
FRENCH . . . . . . . . . . . Ditto by travelling.
DRAWING . . . . . . . . . . Grown rather rusty.
RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . Unhappily not to the taste
of the British public.
CONDUCT . . . . . . . . . . Not so bad as it is painted.
[[1]] Charles MacLean, to whom he referred more than thirty years later, in his Rectorial address at St. Andrews (p. [188]).
[[2]] During Bute's travels with Lady Elizabeth Moore, in the course of her efforts to retain the custody of her little ward, his most trusted retainer was one Jack Wilson. The pertinacity with which the child was pursued, and the extent of Wilson's devotion, are attested by the known fact that on one occasion he knocked a writ-server down the stairs of a Rothesay hotel where Bute was staying with Lady Elizabeth. Wilson was accustomed always to sleep outside his young master's door. He rose later to be head-keeper at Mountstuart, and died there on May 23, 1912.
[[3]] It seems right to mention that Bute had another reason, apart from his attachment to Lady Elizabeth Moore, for his apparently unreasonable hostility to his other guardian. One of his strongest feelings at this time was his almost passionate devotion to the memory of his mother; and he never forgot what he called General Stuart's "gross disrespect" in not accompanying her remains from Edinburgh, where she died, to Bute, where she was buried. "He left her body," wrote Bute to an intimate friend from Christ Church, Oxford, "to be attended on that long and troublesome journey, in the depth of winter, only by women, servants, and myself, a child of twelve."
[[4]] Hon. Walter Stewart, afterwards colonel commanding 12th Lancers (died 1908). He was about eighteen months younger than Bute.
[[5]] Hon. Fitzroy Stewart (died 1914). He was at this time just five years old.
[[6]] This anecdote was communicated to a weekly journal (M.A.P.) soon after Lord Bute's death, by the son of the master of his old school.