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110 SCHOOLMASTERING-WELLINGTON [cRAP. vm
well-doing, and beautiful forbearance in all the rubs and
misunderstanqmgs which make every Bursarship a difficult
post, he stands high among schoolmasters, though his
merits were known only to a tiny circle. He told me that
by exercising ordinary care in turning G.own gas jets with
his own hand, he saved the College £80, and by changing
the butcher no less than £1,600 per annum.
In re finance, a curious trouble fell upon the school, the
effects of which have hardly passed away yet. In the
spring of 1883, or just about then, an ugly outbreak of
diphtheritic throats occurred. Eleven thousand pounds
were expended in setting the drainage to rights, it being
then held as probable that the cause. was due to leaking
pipes. In the autumn of the same year a similar and
rather graver outbreak supervened, and Wickham was in
a tight place, as much public interest was aroused. He
asked the advice of his friend the eminent physician Sir
Andrew Clark, and probably better counsel was never
given. " Don't, whatever you do, go to a great London
firm of sanitary engineers : you may be let in for a
ruinous expenditure. Employ a careful local man to
ascertain every crack, fissure, split, or leakage in the pipes
-there must be some-and patch them up securely. You
may have to pay perhaps £2,000 and not more, and all
will be done that human care could suggest." Wickham
wrote that very day to the Chairman of the Governors,
Edward, Prince of Wales, who in his eagerness to stem
the mischief had written himself to· the great firm of
X--, giving them carte blamhe to make a " good job "
of it. So they did, but the· bill sent in was £80,000 ; and
it was many years indeed before the school recovered·
from the loss.
Wickham was a man who; as a scholar of singul!lr
insight and literary delicacy, won for !'iimself a reputation
wherever English is spoken by his first volume of commentary
on the poet Horace. Yet how a peculiarly refined
academical mind ever found the mundane platitudes
of the Roman congenial to his temperament will never be