Fled that cursed tribe who lately
Stained there honour and thier names.




CHAPTER III

School Days


CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the _Autobiography_ speak of any
school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court,
usually called at that time Bewsher's, from the name of the
Headmaster. Though it is not technically the preparatory school for
St. Paul's, large numbers of Paulines do pass through it. It stands
opposite St. Paul's in the Hammersmith Road and must have been felt
by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he
nowhere differentiates between the two.

St. Paul's School is an old city foundation which has had among its
scholars Milton and Marlborough, Pepys and Sir Philip Francis and a
host of other distinguished men. The editor of a correspondence
column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "Yes,
Milton and G. K. Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school.
We fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the
school." In an early life of Sir Thomas More we learn of the keen
rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and
St. Paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end
to by Dean Colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when