DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR,

ΤΟ

THE REV. EDWARD CRAVEN HAWTREY, D.D.,

HEAD MASTER OF ETON.

IN

ADMIRATION OF HIS ZEALOUS AND ABLE DISCHARGE OF

A HIGH NATIONAL DUTY.

M69396

PREFACE.

I HAVE endeavoured to prepare and collect in this volume

a series of memoirs of the most eminent men who have been connected with Eton, by education or office, during the four centuries that have elapsed since the foundation of the College to the present time.

The project is one which Rawlinson and many others have, in the course of the last eighty years, undertaken and announced, but it has never before been completed.

It is, indeed, more difficult than it would appear at "Alumni Etonenses" of Harwood, the Registrum Regale" of the Rev. G. H. Dupuis, and Allen's Manuscripts, which are preserved in Eton College Library, make it easy to ascertain all the eminent Etonians who have been educated on the foundation, and who afterwards became members of the sister foundation of King's College, Cambridge.

first sight. The "Alumni Etonenses

From the same works, especially from the "Registrum,” the names of all the Provosts and Fellows of Eton may be learned, with brief but useful epitomes of their lives. But there are no similar catalogues of the Oppidans,-that is to say, of the great majority of those who have been educated at Eton for the last three centuries; nor do the works to which I have referred, at all notice the students on the foundation, who, by being superannuated, or other causes, did not succeed to scholarships at King's.

After collecting and arranging the information which I obtained from these sources, and adding the names of the great men who are familiarly known to have been Etonians, such as Wotton, Waller, Walpole, Gray, Porson, Canning, &c., I found it necessary to examine a very large number of biographical collections, such as "Johnson's Lives of the Poets;" the "Biographia Britannica;" Chambers's, Gorton's, and Cunningham's Biographical Dictionaries; the "Biographie Universelle;" several Cyclopædias, and many more works of various kinds, in order to collect the names of those, whose eminence in life is well known, but whose Eton education is not equally notorious.

I have also largely (and, I fear, wearisomely) availed myself of the kindness of my Eton friends in making researches on the subject.