And then the Old Speech-Room, so ugly, so incommodious, where we stood penned together like sheep for the slaughter, under the gallery, to hear our fate on the first morning of our school life, and where, when he had made his way up the school, the budding scholar received his prize or declaimed his verses on Speech Day.  That was the crowning day of the young orator’s ambition, when there was an arch of evergreens reared over the school gate, and Lyonness was all alive with carriages, and relations, and grandees,

    “And, as Lear, he poured forth the deep imprecation,
      By his daughters of Kingdom and reason deprived;
    Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation,
      He regarded himself as a Garrick revived.”

Opposite the Old Speech-Room was the interior of the Chapel, with its roof still echoing the thunder of the Parting Hymn; and the pulpit with its unforgotten pleadings for truthfulness and purity; and the organ, still vocal with those glorious psalms.  And, high over all, the Churchyard Hill, with its heaven-pointing spire, and the Poet’s Tomb; and, below, the incomparable expanse of pasture and woodland stretching right away to the “proud keep with its double belt of kindred and coeval towers.”

    “Still does yon bank its living hues unfold,
    With bloomy wealth of amethyst and gold;
    How oft at eve we watched, while there we lay,
    The flaming sun lead down the dying day,
    Soothed by the breeze that wandered to and fro
    Through the glad foliage musically low. 
    Still stands that tree, and rears its stately form
    In rugged strength, and mocks the winter storm;
    There, while of slender shade and sapling growth,
    We carved our schoolboy names, a mutual troth. 
    All, all, revives a bliss too bright to last,
    And every leaflet whispers of the past.”

And while the views of places were thus eloquent of the old days, assuredly not less so were the portraits.  There was the Head Master in his silken robes, looking exactly as he did when, enthroned in the Sixth Form Room, he used to deliver those well-remembered admonitions—­“Never say what you know to be wrong,” and “Let us leave commence and partake to the newspapers.”

And there was the Mathematical Master—­the Rev. Rhadamanthus Rhomboid—­compared with whom his classical namesake was a lenient judge.  An admirable example was old Mr. Rhomboid of a pedagogic type which, I am told, is passing away—­precise, accurate, stern, solid; knowing very little, but that little thoroughly; never overlooking a slip, but seldom guilty of an injustice; sternest and most unbending of prehistoric Tories, both in matters political and educational; yet carrying concealed somewhere under the square-cut waistcoat a heart which knew how to sympathize with boy-flesh and the many ills which it is heir to.  Good old Mr. Rhomboid!  I wonder if he is still alive.