leybury without any preparation for such a task, never having resided on his fellowship at Cambridge, and the great distinction which he had won, and probably justly, for pulpit oratory at Camberwell, and afterwards at St. Paul's, was not of a kind likely to attract or greatly to help public-school boys. "He always seemed in the pulpit of the chapel to preach in fetters.' 'It is remarkable, too, that the few who were in the habit of listening to the College preacher preferred the sermons of Le Bas and Jeremie, possibly because of their more quiet delivery and comparative brevity.' It is evident that both students and Professors found Melvill's sermons long and unpractical.

6

I myself confess,' admits Sir M. Monier-Williams, that after hearing Melvill's sermons for many years I found myself obeying a well-known psychological law [why psychological?] by the operation of which it happens that the constant repetition for long periods of time of the same truths from the same lips, in the same voice, makes,'

in fact, even a Professor go to sleep.

The list of Professors at the College is a very distinguished one, though by no means all of the great men were even moderately competent teachers. Many interesting reminiscences of most of these, from 1840 onwards, are given, but the best known perhaps of all, T. R. Malthus, died in 1836, before Sir M. Monier-Williams's time. He was one of the original Professors, holding the Chair of Political Economy from its foundation. The celebrated and very much misunderstood work by which he is almost exclusively remembered was written when he was only thirty, before his Haileybury days. A late porter of the College, when pointing out some of the famous sites, was asked who was Mr. Malthus. The porter, however, knew at least as much as most people do now. He was the gentleman, sir,' he replied, 'what wrote against the population'! Some reminiscences from Miss Martineau's Autobiography (i. p. 327) are included here. Of the famous Professor himself she says:

'Of all people in the world, Malthus was the one whom I heard quite easily without my trumpet,-Malthus, whose speech was hopelessly imperfect from defect in the palate. I dreaded meeting him when invited by a friend of his, who made my acquaintance on purpose. He had told this lady that he should be in town on such a day, and entreated her to get an introduction and call and invite me; his reason being that whereas his friends had done him all manner of mischief by defending him injudiciously, my tales had represented his views precisely as he could have wished. I could not decline such an invitation as this, but when I considered my own deafness, and his inability to pronounce half the consonants in the alphabet,

and

and his hare-lip, which must prevent my offering him my tube, I feared we should make a terrible business of it. I was delightfully wrong. His first sentence-slow and gentle, with the vowels sonorous, whatever might become of the consonants-set me at ease completely.'

Again (p. 211), she says:

'Mr. Malthus, who did more for social ease and virtue than perhaps any other man of his time, was the "best-abused man " of the age. I was aware of this, and I saw in him, when I afterwards knew him, one of the serenest and most cheerful men that society can produce. When I became intimate enough with the family to talk over such matters, I asked Mr. Malthus one day whether he had suffered in spirits from the abuse lavished on him. "Only just at first," he answered.'

We cannot reconcile Miss Martineau's statement that when she next went to Haileybury Mr. Empson lived in the pleasant house where she had spent such happy days,' with Sir M. MonierWilliams's-which we believe to be correct-that Malthus lived in the house under the clock-turret, afterwards occupied by Professor Richard Jones, and then by Sir James Stephen, while Empson certainly lived in the old Hailey House. Behind the Clock-house is a fine spreading medlar-tree, supposed to be a remnant of Malthus's garden, under which the sixth form of the later Haileybury have been able to read Plato in the summer term, amid surroundings more suggestive of the gardens of Academus than most public schools possess.

It is curious that Miss Martineau-writing her recollections presumably long afterwards-speaks of Haileybury as the nowexpiring College'; whereas when she visited Malthus it had scarcely reached the midmost of its career. She sketches the interesting life of the place excellently in few words :—

The College itself, abolished by the new Charter of the East India Company, will soon be no more than a matter of remembrance to the present generation and of tradition to the next. The subdued jests and external homage and occasional insurrections of the young men, the archery of the young ladies, the curious politeness of the Persian Professor, the fine learning and eager scholarship of Principal Le Bas, and the somewhat old-fashioned courtesies of the summer evening parties, are all over now, except as pleasant pictures in the interior gallery of those who knew the place, of whom I am thankful to have been one.' (i. p. 327.)

The Persian Professor here named was the Mirza Mohammad Ibrahim, a man remarkable for many reasons, among which we should scarcely have supposed his curious politeness' to be

pre-eminent.

pre-eminent. He is described as 'a very able, clever, and resolute man, with an iron will and a vindictive temper, qualified by much latent good nature, which occasionally showed itself in an unexpected manner.' The impression of power held in reserve is, as all schoolmasters can bear witness, one of the greatest secrets of discipline. Accordingly while Professor Francis Johnson, the most hopeless of the lecturers, was endeavouring or at least professing to expound Sanskrit amid scenes of disorder which no verbal description would enable an outsider who had never been present adequately to picture to himself,' the most rowdy students were like lambs' in the presence of the Mirza in the adjoining lecture-room. He came from Persia as an exile under suspicion, knowing little of English, and yet in a short time he mastered our language so thoroughly that he was able to speak it correctly and fluently, and with scarcely any accent.' He even appears to have taken a special delight in the practice of playing upon words, or as it is commonly called, "punning." The instances that are here given are scarcely likely, we confess, to add much to the gaiety of nations. But the Mirza must have been a very interesting character, a sort of embodiment of the famous Count Fosco in 'The Woman in White.' One of the points of resemblance between the two was their power of teaching singing-birds. Nightingales abound at Haileybury as much as anywhere in the kingdom, and the Mirza, we are told, had trained them to sing, even in winter, when the sun's rays fell upon their cage.' This remarkable man returned to Persia in 1844, with a pension from the College, having apparently managed to purge the suspicion which the Mollahs had entertained of his orthodoxy, and became the tutor of the present Shah, then thirteen years old. It may not improbably be found hereafter that he was an important agent in the entente cordiale which has since subsisted between Persia and Great Britain.

6

The Francis Johnson mentioned above was another character who seems to have stepped straight out of a book—this time from 'David Copperfield.' The description of Professor Johnson, with his absent mind and his unending Dictionary, is exactly like Dr. Strong of Canterbury, only that Dickens sentimentally makes all the boys very good because the doctor was the idol of the whole school,' whereas in real life-as the kind-hearted but incapable Johnson proved-there are no limits whatever to what a boy will do to a master whom he personally likes, except what the master will himself assert. The lecture-room was only a disagreeable interlude, two or three days a week, to the beloved Dictionary of Persian and

Arabic.

Arabic. A student came to Johnson's rooms, which were on the right of the gateway upstairs, to say good-bye on leaving :

There he found him seated as usual in a particular chair, at a particular table, attired in a particular working-day coat, surrounded by a number of huge books of reference, and making entries on the margin of the first edition of his Dictionary-now with black ink, and now with red-in preparation for a revised edition. He went to India, and came back on a visit to Haileybury, after more than ten years' service, to find Johnson seated in the same chair, at the same table, in the same coat, occupied in revising exactly the same Dictionary, poring over identically the same enormous books of reference, and dipping his pen into precisely the same bottles of black and red ink.'

Time flies fast at work, and it flew so fast for the lexicographer that as he could not, of course, spare any of it to get married until the revised edition was out, he was-again like Dr. Strong about sixty when he was led (for he certainly could never have led anybody else) to the altar.

Hailey House, which stands a little outside the great quadrangle at the south-east corner, may be looked on as the Stammhaus of the institution. It was the manor-house of the Hailey estate, and was made into two Professors' houses. One of these was occupied for nearly thirty years by William Empson, a man of high literary position, who held the Chair of Law in succession to a still more distinguished predecessor, Sir James Mackintosh. The latter unfortunately died before the period covered by Sir M. Monier-Williams's reminiscences, so that little is told of him in connexion with Haileybury. Hailey House was once an important literary centre, Empson being Editor of the Edinburgh Review.' His selection for this post, after the death of Napier, who succeeded Lord Jeffrey, was, no doubt, largely due to his marriage with Jeffrey's only daughter. accepted the post, says Miss Martineau,

He

' rather to the consternation of his best friends. His health had so far and so fatally failed before he became Editor, that he ought not to have gone into the enterprise, and so his oldest and best friends told him. But the temptation was strong, and unfortunately he could not resist it.'

Miss Martineau also tells a pretty story of Empson's scrupulous delicacy:

From the time of my becoming acquainted with the literary Whigs, who were paramount at that time, I had heard the name of William Empson, and it once or twice crossed my mind that it was odd that I never saw him. Once he left the room as I entered it unexpectedly; and another time he ran in among us at dessert, at a dinner-party, to deliver a message to the hostess, and was gone,

without

without an introduction to me, the only stranger in the company. When his review of my Series in the "Edinburgh " was out, and he had ascertained that I had read it, he caused me to be informed that he had declined an introduction to me hitherto, because he wished to render impossible all allegations that I had been favourably reviewed by a personal friend; but that he was now only awaiting my permission to pay his respects to me.'

Empson was a man of singularly endearing character, as might be inferred from his attractive portrait. Lord Jeffrey, his father-in-law, was naturally a frequent visitor to the College, and Empson's literary position brought many celebrities as visitors to Hailey House, among whom Lord Brougham, Lord Cranworth, Lord Campbell, Sir John Herschel, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis may be named. Empson is buried in the neighbouring churchyard of Amwell, in which parish the College stands, but the tablet to his memory, with the words hujusce Collegii, was evidently once in the College chapel.

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6

The Professor, however, around whom the most and best anecdotes cluster is Richard Jones, the successor of Malthus in the chair of Political Economy and History. His admirable portrait would in itself inspire an anecdote. Sydney Smith is said to have remarked that he carried a vintage in his countenance,' and another writer remarks that any sketch of Jones would be lifeless and insipid, unless it were boldly coloured with port-wine'; but it must not, therefore, be supposed that he was incapacitated by his habits for steady business. Richard Jones. was a man of much greater ability and practical energy than the stories about him would tend to show. His 'Essay on Rent,' though a mere fragment, was an important work, which even now is not entirely forgotten, and he did much useful service both as a Tithe and a Charity Commissioner, while as lecturer he was far ahead of all the other Professors put together. But his face and figure and burly ways must have been irresistibly predominant in the memory of old Haileyburians. Certainly the most racy piece of writing in this volume--it is good enough to be compared with the famous sketch of Keate in Eothen-is an obituary notice of Professor Jones from the 'Delhi Gazette,' traced by Sir M. Monier-Williams to Mr. J. W. Sherer, who as Magistrate at Cawnpore had almost as much to do as Havelock with the famous relief of Lucknow. We are not surprised to find that Mr. Sherer showed early promise with the pen by twice carrying off the Essay Prize when he was at Haileybury, and that he was an editor in his teens.

a

'There are few Haileybury men in this country who will read without emotion the announcement in the present mail of the death

of