We have referred elsewhere to the light thrown on the
character of the present Head-Master of Rugby by the correspondence which the Times published on Thursday. From that it would appear that Dr. Hayman suspected Mr. Scott of countermining his autho- rity and inveighing against himself as early as the summer of 1870, on the strength of a statement made by a lady whom he called Miss A. to his wife's sister, as to the contents of letters written by Mr. Scott to his relative, Mr. Kynnersley. At a meet- ing of the (old) Rugby Trustees held in February, 1871, Dr. Hayman questioned Mr. Scott on the subject of this statement ; found that, according to Mr. Scott, it was wholly untrue, that he had never written in the terms reported, and he then accepted Mr. Scott's denial,—evidently without conviction. In the fol- lowing July, however, he had a visit from an old pupil,—who turns out to be a Mr. J. W. Fletcher,—who spoke again of the violent letters received by a colleague of his in a school (wrongly described by Dr. Hayman), who turned out to be this same Mr. Kynnersley, which letters were attributed by Mr. Fletcher to Mr. Kynnersley's relative, Mr. Scott. Hereupon Dr. Hayman, in- stead of arguing that as Mr. Scott had positively denied the sub- stance of the former letters received by Mr. Kynnersley, Mr. Kynneraley had in all probability other correspondents at Rugby than Mr. Scott,—which was the truth,--at once assumed that Mr. Scott had not only spoken falsely of the letters written in 1870, but was at the very time he so spoke,—in February, 1871,— writing letters of a like purport. And on this unworthy and really absurd suspicion he founded the charges con- sidered and rejected by the Rugby Masters last autumn. The fact was, that Mr. Scott had throughout been most guarded and reticent in writing about Rugby, and that Mr. Kynnersley's Rugby correspondents, who were not particu- larly fierce, were eight or nine different men, none of them .Assistant-Masters. Yet this was the house of cards for the solidity of which Dr. Hayman has risked his name and reputation as a head master, and in his painstaking anxiety to bolster up which by putting a forced construction on the little hearsay evidence he had,—Mr. Fletelier's,--he has been guilty of a very gross and cruel injustice, for which he has apparently never offered any hearty apology. A man who cannot help taking hie own side against the universe, is sure to crush himself, just for want of a little white light about his own mistakes.
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