with a composition called De Camelo qualis sit.  He alone of created boys could joke in the rarefied air of the Head Master’s schoolroom, and had power to “chase away the passing frown” with some audacious witticism for which an English boy would have been punished.  Longbow was ploughed three times at Oxford, and once “sent down.”  But he is now the very orthodox vicar of a West End parish, a preacher of culture, and a pattern of ecclesiastical propriety.  Then, leaving these heroic figures and coming to my own contemporaries, I discern little Paley, esteemed a prodigy of parts—­Paley, who won an Entrance Scholarship while still in knickerbockers; Paley, who ran up the school faster than any boy on record; Paley, who was popularly supposed never to have been turned in a “rep” or to have made a false quantity; Paley, for whom his tutor and the whole magisterial body were never tired of predicting a miraculous success in after life.  Poor Paley!  He is at this moment languishing in Lincoln’s Inn, consoling himself for professional failure by contemplating the largest extant collection of Lyonness prize-books.  I knew Paley, as boys say, “at home,” and, when he had been a few years at the Bar, I asked his mother if he had got any briefs yet.  “Yes,” she answered with maternal pride; “he has been very lucky in that way.”  “And has he got a verdict?” I asked.  “Oh, no,” replied the simple soul; “we don’t aspire to anything so grand as that.”

Next to Paley in my book is Roderick Random, the cricketer.  Dear Random, my contemporary, my form-fellow and house-fellow; partaker with me in the ignominy of Biceps’s tea-tray and the tedium of Mr. Rhomboid’s problems:  my sympathetic companion in every amusement, and the pleasant drag on every intellectual effort—­Random, who never knew a lesson, nor could answer a question; who never could get up in time for First School, nor lay his hand on his own Virgil—­Random, who spent more of his half-holidays in Extra School than any boy of his day, and had acquired by long practice the power of writing the “record” number of lines in an hour; who never told a lie, nor bullied a weaker boy, nor dropped an unkind jest, nor uttered a shameful word—­Random, for whom every one in authority prophesied ruin, speedy and inevitable; who is, therefore, the best of landlords and the most popular of country gentlemen; who was the most popular officer in the Guards till duty called him elsewhere, and at the last election came in at the top of the poll for his native county.

Then what shall we say for Lucian Gay, whose bright eyes and curly hair greet me on the same page, with the attractive charm which won me when we stood together under the Speech-Room gallery on the first morning of our school life?  Gay was often at the top of his form, yet sometimes near the bottom; wrote, apparently by inspiration, the most brilliant verses; and never could put two and two together in Mr. Rhomboid’s schoolroom.  He had the most astonishing memory