Note 22 — Chapter III · ETON

There can be very few people now living who have seen and talked with the famous Dr. Keate, who was nailed in his desk during the great rebellion and flogged eighty boys in one day. My father, on one of his visits to Eton, took me up to see him in the cloisters at Windsor, where he was canon. In appearance he was exactly like the many caricatures that one used to see of him, but the truculent hero of the birch and block, so faithfully painted by Kinglake in “Eothen,” had grown into a gentle, mild, little old man, of whom it was difficult to believe that he had ever flogged a boy or uttered a harsh word. He had abandoned “the fancy dress, partly resembling the costume of Napoleon and partly that of a widow woman” (“Eothen,” p. 276, Ed. 1896), and was now garbed as a commonplace Early Victorian parson.