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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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there was a steady and increasing flow of young visitors to his office, where he made them welcome, listened to tales of their doings while he worked, and became the center of a nightly gathering. Among his more surprising traits was a power of faithful mimicry of speech, equally exact for general human types and for individuals, which began at Livermere when he and his brother Herbert created, as a perpetual game between them, the roles of two argumentative, slow witted village tradesmen: Johnson, a butcher, played by Herbert, and Barker, a grocer, played by Monty, who later expanded it into other ignorant, talkative types for the amusement of his friends. Early in the 1890's he made his first brief tour of the continent on a double tricycle, and after the invention of the bicycle he toured France yearly from 1895 on, usually in April. His initial tour of Denmark in 1896 with his friends Will Stone and James McBryde was followed by other Scandinavian visits in August or September of subsequent years. In France he preferred rural districts and small towns to the metropolitan "centers of interest" mobbed by conventional tourists, and he enjoyed pausing by the wayside to admire landscapes and nature, in which he took a keen though quiet interest. After a term as Provost of King's College, he was made Provost of Eton in 1918, the position he held for the rest of his life. Here he was unprecedentedly popular with the boys and enjoyed inviting newcomers to tea and watching all the school games. They sensed that despite his fame as a scholar he really preferred simple, sincere persons of any age to pretentious "stuffed-shirts," though he retained a calm, natural dignity and held the respect of everyone who knew him. Meanwhile the list of his published works of scholarship mounted prodigiously, including exhaustive catalogues of all the major collections of medieval manuscripts in England, translations of and commentaries on the Apocrypha, and books on cathedrals, abbeys, and similar medieval architecture; the list of his publications occupies one and one-half columns of fine print in Who's Who. Toward the end of his life he ventured out less and less often, and finally on June 13, 1936, he died at the age of seventy-three. It is obvious that in so full a life the writing of ghost stories can have been only a casual hobby indulged in but rarely, and so it was, for he usually wrote just one story a year, at Christmas, to read to his friends. The first we hear of them is when he read "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" and "Lost Hearts" in his room on October 28, 1893, to ten members of a small discussion group called the Chitchat Society (including E. F. Benson, who later attained distinction as a ghost story writer in his own right). The tales must have made an impression, for the editors of the National Review and the Pall Mall Magazine heard of them and published them shortly thereafter. Dr. James's friend Samuel Lubbock tells us: So the Ghost Stories began, and they were continued at the urgent request of a small party that was used to gather at King's just before Christmas. Some pressure was needed; and on the appointed evening the party met and waited till at last, about 11 p.m. as a rule, Monty appeared with the ink still wet on the last page. All lights except one were turned out and the story was read. Afterward, when he was Provost, the same ritual was preserved; but by then the small party had grown, and when the Punch and Judy story was read there was a large gathering in the big drawing room of the Lodge. On that occasion the silence which fell when the grim story ended was broken by the voice of Luxmore: "Were there envelopes in those days?" and Monty of course was easily able to prove that there were. (2) -- 4 --
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there was a steady and increasing flow of young visitors to his office, where he made them welcome, listened to tales of their doings while he worked, and became the center of a nightly gathering. Among his more surprising traits was a power of faithful mimicry of speech, equally exact for general human types and for individuals, which began at Livermere when he and his brother Herbert created, as a perpetual game between them, the roles of two argumentative, slow witted village tradesmen: Johnson, a butcher, played by Herbert, and Barker, a grocer, played by Monty, who later expanded it into other ignorant, talkative types for the amusement of his friends. Early in the 1890's he made his first brief tour of the continent on a double tricycle, and after the invention of the bicycle he toured France yearly from 1895 on, usually in April. His initial tour of Denmark in 1896 with his friends Will Stone and James McBryde was followed by other Scandinavian visits in August or September of subsequent years. In France he preferred rural districts and small towns to the metropolitan "centers of interest" mobbed by conventional tourists, and he enjoyed pausing by the wayside to admire landscapes and nature, in which he took a keen though quiet interest. After a term as Provost of King's College, he was made Provost of Eton in 1918, the position he held for the rest of his life. Here he was unprecedentedly popular with the boys and enjoyed inviting newcomers to tea and watching all the school games. They sensed that despite his fame as a scholar he really preferred simple, sincere persons of any age to pretentious "stuffed-shirts," though he retained a calm, natural dignity and held the respect of everyone who knew him. Meanwhile the list of his published works of scholarship mounted prodigiously, including exhaustive catalogues of all the major collections of medieval manuscripts in England, translations of and commentaries on the Apocrypha, and books on cathedrals, abbeys, and similar medieval architecture; the list of his publications occupies one and one-half columns of fine print in Who's Who. Toward the end of his life he ventured out less and less often, and finally on June 13, 1936, he died at the age of seventy-three. It is obvious that in so full a life the writing of ghost stories can have been only a casual hobby indulged in but rarely, and so it was, for he usually wrote just one story a year, at Christmas, to read to his friends. The first we hear of them is when he read "Canon Alberic's Scrap-book" and "Lost Hearts" in his room on October 28, 1893, to ten members of a small discussion group called the Chitchat Society (including E. F. Benson, who later attained distinction as a ghost story writer in his own right). The tales must have made an impression, for the editors of the National Review and the Pall Mall Magazine heard of them and published them shortly thereafter. Dr. James's friend Samuel Lubbock tells us: So the Ghost Stories began, and they were continued at the urgent request of a small party that was used to gather at King's just before Christmas. Some pressure was needed; and on the appointed evening the party met and waited till at last, about 11 p.m. as a rule, Monty appeared with the ink still wet on the last page. All lights except one were turned out and the story was read. Afterward, when he was Provost, the same ritual was preserved; but by then the small party had grown, and when the Punch and Judy story was read there was a large gathering in the big drawing room of the Lodge. On that occasion the silence which fell when the grim story ended was broken by the voice of Luxmore: "Were there envelopes in those days?" and Monty of course was easily able to prove that there were. (2) -- 4 --
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