sane. Its authors must not be charged either with panic or a passion for
adventure. All the data of a judgment were in view, and delay could add
no new fact, except one which would make any decision nugatory because
too late. It was wisdom in those with whom lay the cast of the die, to
take their determination while a school remained for which they could
determine anything.

It was a sharp remedy, however. For on the morrow of this resolve the
owners of so many good houses, fields, and gardens, all the outward and
visible of Uppingham School, became, for a term without assignable limit,
landless and homeless men, and the Headmaster almost as much disburdened
of his titular realm as if he were a bishop _in partibus_ or the chief of
a nomad caravan. It was a sharp remedy; but those who submitted to it
breathed the freer at having broken prison, and felt something, not
indeed of the recklessness which inspires adventure, but of the elation
which sustains it:

Why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark;
The storm is up, and all is on the hazard!

There was cited at this time a somewhat similar event in the history of
Rugby School. Dr. Arnold, in a like emergency, had removed the school,
or all who chose to go, in numerous detachments under the care severally
of himself and others of his masters to various distant spots, among
others his own house in the Lake country, where they spent some two
months, and returned to Rugby when the danger was over. It was felt,
however, that this incident furnished no real precedent for the present
venture. What we were proposing was not to arrange a number of
independent reading-parties in scattered country retreats. Such a plan
would hardly have been practicable with a system in which, as in our