Sydney, however, was not silent about Winchester.  In one of the liveliest passages of his controversial writings, he said:—­

“I was at school and college with the Archbishop of Canterbury:[3] fifty-three years ago he knocked me down with the chess-board for checkmating him—­and now he is attempting to take away my patronage.  I believe these are the only two acts of violence he ever committed in his life.”

Now Howley was a prefect when Sydney was a junior, and this game of chess must have been (as a living Wykehamist has pointed out to me) “a command performance.”  The big boy liked chess, so the little boy had to play it:  the big boy disliked being checkmated, so the little boy was knocked down.  This and similar experiences probably coloured Sydney’s mind when he wrote in 1810:—­

“At a Public School (for such is the system established by immemorial custom) every boy is alternately tyrant and slave.  The power which the elder part of these communities exercises over the younger is exceedingly great; very difficult to be controlled; and accompanied, not unfrequently, with cruelty and caprice.  It is the common law of these places, that the younger should be implicitly obedient to the elder boys; and this obedience resembles more the submission of a slave to his master, or of a sailor to his captain, than the common and natural deference which would always be shown by one boy to another a few years older than himself.  Now, this system we cannot help considering as an evil, because it inflicts upon boys, for two or three years of their lives, many painful hardships, and much unpleasant servitude.  These sufferings might perhaps be of some use in military schools; but to give to a boy the habit of enduring privations to which he will never again be called upon to submit—­to inure him to pains which he will never again feel—­and to subject him to the privation of comforts, with which he will always in future abound—­is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in education.  It is not the life in miniature which he is to lead hereafter, nor does it bear any relation to it; he will never again be subjected to so much insolence and caprice; nor ever, in all human probability, called upon to make so many sacrifices.  The servile obedience which it teaches might be useful to a menial domestic; or the habit of enterprise which it encourages prove of importance to a military partisan; but we cannot see what bearing it has upon the calm, regular, civil life, which the sons of gentlemen, destined to opulent idleness, or to any of the more learned professions, are destined to lead.  Such a system makes many boys very miserable; and produces those bad effects upon the temper and disposition which boyish suffering always does produce.  But what good it does, we are much at a loss to conceive.  Reasonable obedience is extremely useful in forming the disposition.  Submission to tyranny lays the