Page:Earl Canning.djvu/32

26 no extraordinary achievements, and not wholly uncheckered by the Olympian wrath of Dr. Keate, was not without distinction. There is evidence of his having attained more than average proficiency in the all-important art of Latin versification.

We have some contemporaneous sketches of the Eton of that day in Mr. Milne Gaskell's letters to his father, to his friend Arthur Hallam, and others, and in one or two from Canning himself. Sir Francis Doyle, who was at Eton from 1822 to 1827, mentions a debating club, of which Arthur Hallam, Gladstone, Selwyn, Lord Arthur Harvey, Lord Elgin, Lord Canning, and Lord Blachford, were the principal members. 'The perfect intellectual freedom,' he writes, 'bestowed on us by the ease and leisure of our idle school, had its good as well as its bad side.' It had, certainly, some rough aspects to the new-comer, not least the portentous figure of the Head Master, shaking his red and shaggy eyebrows, so prominent that Kinglake describes him as habitually employing them instead of arms and hands to point out any object to which he wished to direct attention. Before this awful being, one May morning, little Gaskell was summoned. '' is the fatal word that speaks his doom—a doom that sometimes, in this epoch of flagellation, eighty victims underwent in a single morning. Gaskell waits trembling in the ante-room the arrival of the judge and executioner. 'He first flogged one of the collegers and then called me. I begged him to give me my "first