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Funds," said he; and really the remark was considerate.

As for Bella, she could not bear being separated from Skeffy, he was so daring, so impulsive, as she said, and with all this responsibility on him now-people coming to him for everything, and all asking what was to be done-he needed more than ever support and sympathy.

And thus is it the world goes on, as unreal, as fictitious, as visionary as anything that ever was put on the stage and illuminated by footlights. There was a rude realism outside in the street, however, that compensated for much of this. There, all was wildest fun and jollity; not the commotion of a people in the throes of a revolution, not the highly-wrought passion of an excited populace mad with triumph; it was the orgie of a people who deemed the downfall of a hated government a sort of carnival occasion, and felt that mummery and tomfoolery were the most appropriate expressions of delight.

Through streets crowded with this dancing, singing, laughing, embracing, and mimicking mass, the Lyles made their way to the jetty reserved for the use of the ships of war, and soon took their places, and were rowed off to the frigate, Skeffy waving his adieux till darkness rendered his gallantry unnoticed.

All his late devotion to the cares of love and friendship had made such inroads on his time that he scarcely knew what was occurring, and had lamentably failed to report to "the Office" the various steps by which revolution had advanced, and was already all but installed as master of the kingdom. Determined to write off a most telling despatch, he entered the hotel, and, seeing Alice engaged letter-writing at one table, he quietly installed himself at another, merely saying, "The boat will be back by midnight, and I have just time to send off an important despatch."

Alice looked up from her writing, and a very faint smile curled her lip. She did not speak, however;

and after a moment continued her letter.

For upwards of half an hour the scraping sounds of the pens were the only noises in the room, except at times a little low murmur as Skeff read over to himself some passage of unusual force and brilliancy.

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You must surely be doing something very effective, Skeff," said Alice, from the other end of the room, "for you rubbed your hands with delight, and looked radiant with triumph."

"I think I have given it to them!" cried he. "There's not another man in the line would send home such a despatch. Canning wouldn't have done it in the old days, when he used to bully them. Shall I read it for you?"

"My dear Skeff, I'm not Bella. I never had a head for questions of politics. I am hopelessly stupid in all such matters."

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"Ah, yes; Bella told me that. Bella herself, indeed, only learned to feel an interest in them through me; but, as I told her, the woman who will one day be an ambassadress cannot afford to be ignorant of the great European game in which her husband is a player."

"Quite true; but I have no such ambitions before me; and fortunate it is, for really I could not rise to the height of such lofty themes.”

Skeff smiled pleasantly; her humility soothed him. He turned to the last paragraph he had penned, and re-read it.

"By the way," said Alice, carelessly, and certainly nothing was less apropos to what they had been saying, though she commenced thus"By the way, how did you find Tony looking-improved, or the reverse?"

"Improved in one respect; fuller, browner, more manly, perhaps; but coarser; he wants the-you know what I mean-he wants this!" and he swayed his arm in a bold sweep, and stood fixed, with his hand extended.

"Ah, indeed!" said she, faintly.

"Don't you think so-don't you agree with me, Alice?"

"Perhaps to a certain extent I do," said she, diffidently.

"How could it be otherwise, consorting with such a set? You'd not expect to find it there?"

Alice nodded assent all the more readily that she had not the vaguest conception of what "it" might

mean.

"The fact is, Alice," said he, arising and walking the room with immense strides, "Tony will always be Tony!"

"I suppose he will," said she, dryly.

"Yes; but you don't follow me. You don't appreciate my meaning. I desired to convey this opinion, that Tony being one of those men who cannot add to their own natures the gifts and graces which a man acquires who has his successes with your sex

"Come, come, Skeff, you must neither be metaphysical nor improper. Tony is a very fine boy; only a boy, I acknowledge, but he has noble qualities; and every year he lives will, I feel certain, but develop them further."

"He won't stand the 'boy' tone any longer," said Skeff, dryly. "I tried it, and he was down on me at once.'

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"What did he say when you told him we were here ?" said she, carelessly, while putting her papers in order.

"He was surprised." "Was he pleased?" "Oh, yes, pleased, certainly; he was rather afraid of meeting your mother, though."

"Afraid of mamma! how could that be?"

what is it?" cried he, as a knock came to the door.

"A soldier below stairs, sir, wishes to speak to you," said the waiter.

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Ah! something of importance from Filangieri, I've no doubt," said Skeff, rising, and leaving the room. Before he had gone many paces, however, he saw a large, powerful figure in the red shirt and small cap of the Garibaldians, standing in the corridor, and the next instant he turned fully round-it was Tony.

"My dear old Tony, when did you arrive?"

"This moment; I am off again, however, at once, but I wouldn't leave without seeing you." "Off, and where to?"

"Home-I've taken a passage

to Marseilles in the Messageries boat, and she sails at two o'clock. You see I was no use here till this arm got right, and the General thought my head wouldn't be the worse of a little quiet; so I'll go back and recruit, and if they want me they shall have me."

"You don't know who's there?" whispered Skeff. Tony shook his head. "And all alone too," added the other, still lower. "AliceAlice Trafford.”

Tony grew suddenly very pale, and leaned against the wall.

"Come in; come in at once, and see her. We have been talking of you all the evening."

"No, no-not now," said Tony, faintly.

"And when, if not now? You're going off, you said."

"I'm in no trim to pay visits; besides, I don't wish it. I'll tell you more some other time."

"Nonsense; you look right well in your brigand costume, and with an old friend, not to say- Well, well, don't look sulky," and as he got thus far-he had been gradually edging closer and closer to the door "Oh no, no; this is quite impos--he flung it wide open, and called sible-I can't credit it."

"Some lesson or other she once gave him sticks in his throat; something she said about presumption, I think."

"Well, it might be some fancy of his-for he has fancies, and very queer ones too. One was about a god-father of mine. Come in

out, "Mr Tony Butler!" Pushing Tony inside and then closing the door behind, he retreated, laughing heartily to himself over his practical joke.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS REPORT.-CONCLUSION.

WINCHESTER AND SHREWSBURY.

WINCHESTER COLLEGE had some reason to expect exemption from the Public Schools Inquiry. William of Wykeham's two foundations at Oxford and Winchester, closely connected as they are, had already been dealt with by the University Commission of 1850. It was impossible to remodel New College without introducing some changes into the nursery which supplied it with scholars and fellows-the College of St Mary at Winchester. This latter foundation-the mother and the model of Eton-consisted of a warden, ten fellows, two schoolmasters, and seventy scholars. The University Commissioners reduced (prospectively) the number of fellows to six, increasing, from the proceeds of the suppressed fellowships, the number of scholars to one hundred. They also cut down the seventy fellowships at New College, to which the Winchester boys used to be elected at once as probationers, and which were tenable for life, into thirty scholarships tenable for five years only six of these to be filled up every year by an examination, in which the " commoners" of the school as well as the scholars on Wykeham's foundation were to be allowed to compete.

The present Commission, therefore, found Winchester already passing through a change. No decrease had as yet taken place in the number of fellows, either by death or otherwise; consequently, the proposed increase in the number of scholars had not yet come into operation. But real reforms of much greater importance had been at work for some time. The fixed number of vacancies at New College every year held out a more regular stimulus to the candidates; changes in the mode of promotion through the several forms had made

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the competition for these great final prizes more lively and sustained throughout, and less affected by mere seniority; and, more than all, the opening of the foundation itself-admission into college being made the result of a free election, in which the comparative merit of each boy is tested by rigorous examination, instead of the old system of nomination by a warden or fellow-had raised the standard of scholarship and the reputation of the College as a place of education. This most important reform was due to no Government interference; the Bishop of Winchester, as Visitor, had recommended it, and it was readily adopted by the warden and fellows. Any parent who desires for his son a child's place in William of Wykeham's College which will secure for him, at a mere nominal expense, the highest possible education, with liberal board, and the prospect of a scholarship of £100 a-year at one of the noblest colleges in Oxford-has nothing to do but to send him up to compete at the annual examination. Let him be only under fourteen years of age, a baptised member of the Church of England, and bearing a certificate of good moral conduct, and he has a fair field and no favour. His work at the examination, and that alone, decides the question of his success. The best scholars are invariably elected; the present warden "has never heard anything to the contrary;" and public opinion will fully corroborate his testimony. The competition, however, is severe enough, as ought fairly to be the case when the richness of the prizes is considered. "We are overwhelmed with candidates," says Dr Moberly; "it brings boys of all abilities, of all families, from all parts of the country;" but although the parents

"take it for granted they are all to come in," there are not more than about fourteen vacancies on the average every year, while the candidates at the late elections have considerably exceeded a hundred. There is one qualification which the new ordinances left very much to the discretion of the electors, but which Wykeham evidently intended to have had a considerable weight in the election; that the candidate should not be the son of rich parents, who could well afford to pay for his liberal education. It seems probable from the evidence, that in most cases a proper feeling does keep back most wealthy families from the competition; but it does not appear that the electors have ever exercised the power given them, even by the reformed ordinances, of refusing to admit as a candidate "any one whom they may deem not to be in need of a scholarship" and we cannot help regretting that the present Commissioners, like their predecessors in the Oxford University Commission, decline to recognise any preference in favour of the 'poor scholar."

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The College of St Mary at Winchester is not only the oldest, but the least changed of any of our public schools. The prefect-system which has been adopted more or less in all of them, the numbering the forms from the "Sixth" downwards, the scholar's gown which old ecclesiastical foundations still maintain and modern "colleges" affect, the boy-tutor system of Merchant Taylors', the Montem of Eton, all take their origin from Wykeham's ancient constitution. Medieval customs and traditions, which have given way at other schools to the march of modern improvement, still hold their ground at Winchester. The Commissioners at their visit found the boys eating their dinners off trenchers of wood, and sleeping "on oaken bedsteads more than two centuries old," in the ancient chambers which Wykeham built, still warmed (and

but sparingly) with faggot-fires, as they might have been in his day. Until comparatively lately, the choristers made the scholars' beds and waited at dinner. Even the relentless hands of a Royal Commission seem to have shrunk from touching so venerable an institution otherwise than lightly. They seize and confiscate two of the six fellowships left to the College by the University Commission, and enjoin certain qualifications and duties to the remainder; but with the teaching, discipline, and internal regulations of the College as a place of education, they have interfered very gently.

The evidence has more than justified them in their decision. If all our public schools were doing their work as well and as honestly as Winchester, it would have been wiser in all their cases to have let well alone. The scholarship of Wykehamists has always stood high; and some of the most serious drawbacks to the wellbeing of the foundation have been removed by the changes which have already been noticed. Ungrateful as it may seem to say so, the bane of Wykeham's school at Winchester has been that society which, though later in its foundation, he meant to be its elder sister, and linked to it by the closest and most kindly ties,-his "New College" in Oxford. The seventy fellowships which he founded there for his Winchester scholars, instead of serving, as he meant they should, as aids and opportunities for a religious and studious life, became too often temptations to a life of pleasant and respectable idleness. Whatever might have been the case in the founder's day, or for some subsequent generations, a fellow of New College has hardly within present memory been held synonymous, per se, with a learned or devoted student, though, no doubt, there have been such amongst the body. Their statutable exemption from university examinations-which implied exclusion from public university hon

ours-though long and naturally
cherished as an ancient privilege,
and reluctantly resigned, was plain-
ly a disadvantage and discourage-
ment. The Report puts the case
in the mildest way, when it pro-
nounces that "the perpetual fel-
lowships, obtained at the early age
of eighteen, combined with the
certainty of college livings for such
fellows as might become clergy-
men, took away from young men a
valuable stimulus to industry at
a most important period in their
mental growth."* In most other
colleges, a fellowship was at least
the reward of a certain amount of
successful exertion during the un-
dergraduate course, seldom confer-
red until the attainment of at least
a respectable degree; but at New
College the schoolboy came up
into residence as a fellow at once,
-on his "probation," indeed, for
two years, but a probation very
leniently construed, and necessarily
80. But more than this; a Win-
chester boy's succession to New
College, under the old system, was
virtually fixed, so far as it depend-
ed on his own abilities and exer-
tions, before he was fourteen years
old.

"Until about twelve years ago, promotion by taking places stopped on entrance into the senior part of the Fifth; that is, about half-way up the school, and at a point which a boy generally attained when about thirteen or fourteen years old. From that time till he stood for New College his place was never changed, and the examination which he eventually underwent for New College was formerly, we believe, little more than nominal. It used, Mr Fearon says, to be 'almost a farce,' the election being really decided by seniority. Up to that point, therefore, a boy worked very hard. A great number of marks were formerly to be gained in the middle part of the Fifth by 'standing up,' and the quantities of verse and prose learnt for this purpose in that part of the school were enormous. 'I have known,' says Dr Moberly, of a boy repeating a play of Sophocles without missing a word.' The result was that a fellowship for life was the prize of a

struggle which was over at fourteen, and success in which was won in a great measure by a hard strain upon a retentive memory. This system had its natural effect. It produced intellectual languor and idleness in a considerable portion of the Upper School."—Report,

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All this is now changed. The undergraduate fellowships at New College are a thing of the past. The scholarships which have taken their place can only be gained by an examination, strictly competitive, upon leaving the school; and the fifteen fellowships to which Winchester men have still a claim are only gained by another severe competition, subsequent to the B.A. degree, to which not only the Winchester scholars, but all who have been educated for two years at the school, or who have been members of New College for twelve terms, are equally eligible. For this last comprehensive measure of reform, both the credit and the responsibility must rest with the Oxford Commission; but the opening of the Winchester foundation, and the improvement in the competition for New College, were entirely independent motions of the governing body, and were made upon the sound principle which Royal Commissions are apt to disregard-of interpreting the founder's intentions in the most liberal spirit, without contravening the actual letter of their expression. They have been as successful as they deserved to be. Winchester has risen steadily in numbers and repute since their adoption; and if the founder could revisit his cloisters, he would have no cause either to be ashamed of his "children," or to reproach their guardians with any breach of trust.

As at Eton and Westminster, there has grown up round the college of Wykeham's foundation a body of independent scholars, known at Winchester as moners," the conventional English

* Report, p. 150.

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