The old system of sending mere children to Eton lasted up to about half a century ago. In 1857 boys went still there as young as nine or ten, nor was it uncommon to see children of seven or eight in the Lower School. Many stayed at Eton till they were eighteen, after having worked their way up from the First Form to Doctor’s Division, at the rate of two removes a year--a process which, including three years’ inevitable stoppage in Upper Fifth, required more than ten years to accomplish. In the school list for Election, 1834, Lower School has shrunk to a very small number. The first part of it, Third Form, contains but three boys; the second division, seven. “Sense” and “Nonsense,” which come next, have but six between them; there is no one in Second Form, and in First Form only two.
Up to the early ’sixties of the last century, certain divisions of Third Form retained some quaint old titles--the first sections being called Upper Greek, Lower Greek, “Sense” and “Nonsense.” Lower Remove, Upper and Lower Remove in the Second Form and First Form completed the tail-end of the school. “Sense” and “Nonsense,” it should be added, received their quaint titles because boys in the latter were doomed to a sort of “poetical purgatory,” and only wrote “nonsense” verses; that is, Latin compositions which scanned as verse, but contained no ideas; in which respect the effusions in question resembled the productions of some living bards.
When Mr. John Hawtrey was an Eton master, Lower School, somewhat altering its constitution, became larger again; the boys in it, mostly very young, being all together in his house at the corner of Keate’s Lane, where he kept what was practically a private school apart. His boys were not allowed the same amount of liberty as those in other houses: they took breakfast and tea in common, and generally played their games in Mr. Hawtrey’s private field. On reaching the Upper School they usually went to other houses.
The curriculum of Lower School was entirely different from that followed by the Upper Forms. In “Nonsense” the boys, besides being taught to write nonsense verses, grappled with intricacies of the old “Eton Latin Grammar.” After this they were promoted to “Sense,” when the nonsense verses were discarded; Lower Greek and Upper Greek did very elementary work.