He lives in simple obedience to school traditions.  These may compel him, at one school, to speak in a peculiar language, and to persecute and beat all boys who are slow at learning this language.  At another school he may regard dislike of the manly game of football as the sin with which “heaven heads the count of crimes.”  On the whole this notion seems a useful protest against the prematurely artistic beings who fill their studies with photographs of Greek fragments, vases, etchings by the newest etcher, bits of China, Oriental rugs, and very curious old brass candlesticks.  The “challenge cup” soon passes away from the keeping of any house in a public school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated character.  But when we reach aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into hobbledehoyhood.  The bigger boys at public schools are often terribly “advanced,” and when they are not at work or play, they are vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, and all that kind of thing.  Latin verses may not be what conservatives fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking and sacrifice on the altar of the Beautiful.

A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing virelais in playtime is doing himself no good, and is worse than useless to the society of which he is a member.  The small boys, who are the most ardent of hero-worshippers, either despise him or they allow him to address them in chansons royaux, and respond with trebles in triolets.  At present a great many boys leave school, pass three years or four at the universities, and go back as masters to the place where some of their old schoolfellows are still pupils.  It is through these very young masters, perhaps, that “advanced” speculations and tastes get into schools, where, however excellent in themselves, they are rather out of place.  Indeed, the very young master, though usually earnest in his work, must be a sage indeed if he can avoid talking to the elder boys about the problems that interest him, and so forcing their minds into precocious attitudes.  The advantage of Eton boys used to be, perhaps is still, that they came up to college absolutely destitute of “ideas,” and guiltless of reading anything more modern than Virgil.  Thus their intellects were quite fallow, and they made astonishing progress when they bent their fresh and unwearied minds to study.  But too many boys now leave school with settled opinions derived from the very latest thing out, from the newest German pessimist or American socialist.  It may, however, be argued that ideas of these sorts are like measles, and that it is better to take them early and be done with them for ever.