CH. II.] MR. SHAIRP'S REMINISCENCES. 19 house, Dr. Tait told me a good deal of the new life and work that lay before me, and spoke of the colleagues I should meet with. 'I can still distinctly recall the way in which he spoke of Cotton, as one whom it might do anyone good to know, whose whole life and work were a great example. Dr. Tait had at that time been a little more than four years head master, and I could see that he had formed for Cotton a peculiar admiration and affection. 'I cannot quite recall the first impression Cotton made on me. Only I think it was of one who stood calm and self-possessed in the midst of a great whirl of work and many more excitable persons. 'In general he received strangers quietly, and it was not at first sight they were most taken by him. In due time, by our mutual friend Bradley, we drew to each other, and began to have walks together on half-holidays and Saturdays. Having lately left Oxford, I was full of views and thoughts which were then seething there below the surface. In these Cotton was much interested, with firm intelligent desire to know what way the currents were setting in the university, and from kindly sympathy with young men, and whatever engaged their thoughts. In these conversations, two things in him soon struck me: first, the large tolerance and perfect fair-mindedness with which he tried to understand and judge ways of thinking that were different from his own; and, secondly, his stability-while opening his mind to new views he was not carried away by them. He held fast without effort by his old fixed moorings-those truths, few and simple, which were the roots of his being. 'During those early years of our intercourse I remember a characteristic trait of his mingled humour and practical downrightness. Mr. Mill's "Political Economy " had just been published, and several of the masters agreed to read it, and discuss it together afterwards chapter by chapter. Cotton was one of these. In one walk, the early chapters on Productive and Unproductive Consumption formed topics for discussion. The truth was brought out very clearly, that all that was spent in recreation, banquets, &c., beyond what goes to invigorate body and mind for fresh productive labour, is so far wasted and a loss to the community. With most persons it would have stopped there. Cotton, partly from love of a joke, partly from his earnest practical turn, began to press this truth home. Banquets among the masters had at that time in some quarters grown to rather large dimensions; he urged that all banquets should straightway be curtailed within the limits prescribed by political economy. This proposal to square practice by speculation caused much discussion and amusement and gave rise to one humorous incident. "The present Oxford Professor of Political Economy may perhaps remember these things. 'Our intimacy once begun was ripened into friendship by some time spent together abroad, in the summer of 1849. We met at Dresden, where Cotton and Mrs. Cotton were staying, two of his sixth form pupils accompanying them. Together we all travelled to Prague, spent some days there, and returned to Dresden. 'It would be impossible to find a more delightful travelling companion than Cotton was. His entire unselfishness, his perfect temper, placid and even, always interrested, the continued play of his quiet peculiar humour on all the little incidents and traits of character we met with, his unwearied love of things and places historic, the thoroughness, the kindliness that pervaded all he said and did made his society at once calming, strengthening, and exhilarating. 'Prague, I remember, greatly charmed him. He was struck by the Eastern look it had, which was something new to all of us. There was the palace and church of the Hradschin, with its tombs of the Bohemian kings nine 1 CH. II.] MR. SHAIRP'S REMINISCENCES. 21 centuries old; the bridge with its crucifix and everburning lamps supported by a fine laid on the Jews; the mouldy synagogue, one of the earliest in Europe; while in the shattered windows and battered walls of the houses were freshly seen the marks which Winditzgratz and his Austrians had left on the town during last year's revolution. It was the enlargement it gave to his historic sympathies that formed to him the greatest charm of travel. One occurrence at Prague greatly amused Cotton. On the first evening after our arrival we were invited to a party which turned out to be made up of German-hating Czechs, the name of the Sclavonic inhabitants of Bohemia. We had never till that day exactly known of the existence of this small race of Sclaves. But that evening we found ourselves sitting with a number of fierce patriotic Czechs, toasting in German wine "Auf die Bruderschaft der Czech und der Engländer." While Cotton was at Rugby, each summer vacation, sometimes the Christmas ones too, were laid out methodically, not merely for ease and pleasure, but to combine needed relaxation with some increased enlargement of his knowledge of men and of places famed in history. In the summer of 1850, while Cotton and Mrs. Cotton were in Germany, he had a severe attack of rheumatic fever, which prevented him from returning at the usual time to his school duties. As I had then no boardinghouse of my own, Cotton wrote asking me to undertake the charge of his for a time. After some weeks he was so far recovered as to return to Rugby, still quite unfit for work. He and Mrs. Cotton returned for a week or two, and lived in their own home as guests, the name and character he insisted on assuming. After a short stay he left again for the rest of the half year; but I still vividly remember with what consideration and good feeling he carried the whole thing through, so that he converted what might have been an embarrassing situa tion into a most pleasant and friendly visit. During the weeks I took this charge I had an opportunity of seeing what I had always heard, the excellence of Cotton's work as head of a boarding-house. It was a house in all things well ordered, filled with a prevailing spirit of quiet industry and cheerful duty-doing. 'Good as was Cotton's work in his form, it was only in his own house that his full influence was manifest. What Arnold had been to the whole school, that Cotton was to his own house, the boarders in it, and his private pupils out of it. No two men perhaps were ever more different in temperament than the calm, unimpassioned Cotton and the resolute Dr. Arnold; yet notwithstanding this, of all Dr. Arnold's pupils or followers none imbibed more largely his spirit and acted out his system more entirely than Cotton did. The præpostors system, as Arnold conceived and recreated it, he thoroughly adopted and carried out. To get hold of his sixth form pupils, win their confidence, mould their views of life and conduct, and through them to reach and influence the younger boys-on this idea by which Arnold governed Rugby, Cotton threw himself with his whole heart, and by it made his house what it was, one of the best, not only in Rugby, but in any public school. It was his habit to live in great confidence and intimacy with the præpostors in his house, and they with few exceptions returned his confidence and, as far as boys could, entered into his views. And so they were the channels by which his mind and character reached, more or less, every boy under his roof. 'In the routine of his daily work there was "unresting, unhastening industry." Method, orderly but not pedantic, cach duty done punctually and faithfully. Yet he never seemed to be in a hurry, almost always to have leisure. 'If a boy's prose or verse copy was looked over in his CH. II.] MR. SHAIRP'S REMINISCENCES. 23 study, this was done as carefully as a sermon to be preached in the chapel. Some parts of a master's dutyfor instance, the scratching of innumerable copies dailyI knew to be painfully irksome to him. Yet I often wondered with what cheerfulness he did these things; the pupil never knew how irksome he felt it. For when the work was done he would take the opportunity of speaking a few friendly words to the boy, and so getting to know him better. Many men who may try to go through these details with something like the same exactness, find themselves when the long routine is over so wearied out that they have no heart for further intercourse with boys, but must seek leisure or silence. 'It was not so with Cotton. Whether in his study correcting exercises, or afterwards in his drawing-room, he sought every opportunity of conversing with his pupils and showing them that he took interest in them. A laborious life of this kind leaves most men no leisure for reading. But Cotton, even in the busiest times, had generally, besides lighter reading, some solid book on hand. And from his vacations he generally came back having along with his relaxation mastered one or more important works with which he had enlarged his knowledge. The custom of reading or speaking some practical words to the boys assembled for Sunday evening prayers was in most boarding-houses occasional. With Cotton the "sermonette," as he used to call it, was almost invariably given every Sunday night. This way of teaching suited his turn, and he was a great master of it. These were not formal like church sermons, but brief, plain, pithy words. Some part of school life and daily duty was reviewed before the boys in the light of Christian principle, and that with such plainness and directness that there was no getting past it. These I believe had much effect on his pupils-partly with the force with |