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The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 written by Charles Lamb

C >> Charles Lamb >> The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4




When we came to the house, which was in Soho-square, we discovered
that it was indeed the man--the identical Matravis, who had done all
that mischief in times past--but not in a condition to excite any
other sensation than pity in a heart more hard than Allan's.

Intense pain had brought on a delirium--we perceived this on first
entering the room--for the wretched man was raving to
himself--talking idly in mad unconnected sentences--that yet seemed,
at times, to have reference to _past facts_.

One while he told us his dream. "He had lost his way on a great
heath, to which there seemed no end--it was cold, cold, cold,--and
dark, very dark--an old woman in leading-strings, _blind_, was
groping about for a guide"--and then he frightened me,--for he seemed
disposed to be _jocular_, and sang a song about "an old woman clothed
in gray," and said "he did not believe in a devil."

Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare."--Allan was hanging over
him at that very moment, sobbing.--I could not resist the impulse,
but cried out, "_This_ is Allan Clare--Allan Clare is come to see
you, my dear Sir."--The wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for
he turned his head away, and began talking of _charnel-houses_, and
_dead men_, and "whether they knew anything that passed in their
coffins."

Matravis died that night.


* * * * *


ESSAYS.

RECOLLECTIONS OF CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.


To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without
diminishing the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the
more pressing and homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one
or more perhaps out of a numerous offspring, under the shelter of a
care scarce less tender than the paternal, where not only their
bodily cravings shall be supplied, but that mental _pabulum_ is also
dispensed, which HE hath declared to be no less necessary to our
sustenance, who said, that, "not by bread alone man can live": for
this Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty. Here neither, on the one
hand, are the youth lifted up above their family, which we must
suppose liberal, though reduced; nor on the other hand, are they
liable to be depressed below its level by the mean habits and
sentiments which a common charity-school generates. It is, in a word,
an Institution to keep those who have yet held up their heads in the
world, from sinking; to keep alive the spirit of a decent household,
when poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are
the most willing, but not always the most able, to assist themselves;
to separate a child from his family for a season, in order to render
him back hereafter, with feelings and habits more congenial to it,
than he could even have attained by remaining at home in the bosom of
it. It is a preserving and renovating principle, an antidote for the
_res angusta domi_, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily
upon the most ingenuous natures.

This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its character would be
improved by confining its advantages to the very lowest of the
people, let those judge who have witnessed the looks, the gestures,
the behavior, the manner of their play with one another, their
deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect and physiognomy of
that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who freshen
and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters
of the old Grey Friars--which strangers who have never witnessed, if
they pass through Newgate Street, or by Smithfield, would do well to
go a little out of their way to see.

For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he
feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he
belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the
treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect and
even kindness, which his well-known garb never fails to procure him
in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his education, in
that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that
school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his
power to procure, attainments which it would be worse than folly to
put it in the reach of the laboring classes to acquire: he feels it
in the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, which surround
him; in his old and awful cloisters, with their traditions; in his
spacious school-rooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms
where he sleeps; in his stately dining-hall, hung round with
pictures, by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size
and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom;[1] above all, in the
very extent and magnitude of the body to which he belongs, and the
consequent spirit, the intelligence, and public conscience, which is
the result of so many various yet wonderfully combining members.
Compared with this last-named advantage, what is the stock of
information (I do not here speak of book-learning, but of that
knowledge which boy receives from boy), the mass of collected
opinions, the intelligence in common, among the few and narrow
members of an ordinary boarding-school?

[Footnote 1: By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne,
surrounded by his courtiers,(all curious portraits,) receiving the
mathematical pupils at their annual presentation: a custom still kept
up on New-year's-day at Court.]

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character
of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common
charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought
up at some other of the public schools. There is _pride_ in it,
accumulated from the circumstances which I have described, as
differencing him from the former; and there is _a restraining
modesty_ from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever
keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very
garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it
is a badge of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that
age from breaking out into overt acts of insolence. This produces
silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness
which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up when spoken
to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. Within his
bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along
with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to
mix with other boys; they are a sort of laity to him. All this
proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he
carries about him, of the difference of his dress from that of the
rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by
overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should
commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh at this; for,
considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the
small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress--above all,
where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of
disparagement--this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a
wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor
rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of
either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to
any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of
plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the
same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the
---- cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to
exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to
reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and
sadden him.

The Christ's Hospital boy is a religions character. His school is
eminently a religious foundation; it has its peculiar prayers, its
services at set times, its graces, hymns, and anthems, following each
other in an almost monastic closeness of succession. This religious
character in him is not always untinged with superstition. That is
not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and traditions
which must circulate, with undisturbed credulity, amongst so many
boys, that have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse
with the world at large; upon whom their equals in age must work so
much, their elders so little. With this leaning towards an
over-belief in matters of religion, which will soon correct itself
when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn for romance
above most other boys. This is to be traced in the same manner to
their excess of society with each other, and defect of mingling with
the world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such books as the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and others of a still wilder cast,
are, or at least were in my time, sought for by the boys. I remember
when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card,
or compass, on a serious expedition to find out _Philip Quarll's
Island_.

The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly
tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial
observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict
obligations of the moral law. Those who were contemporaries with me
at that school thirty years ago, will remember with what more than
Judaic rigor the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats[1] was
interdicted. A boy would have blushed as at the exposure of some
heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden
portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he
was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger.
The same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the rejection of
certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory
penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they
certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little
excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance
for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the
less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral
feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what
took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I
must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed,
the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject,
almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I
believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I
speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little
changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is improved; but
that which I ventured before to term the _public conscience_ of the
school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes and
to which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe,
pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen, within this
twelvemonth almost, the change which has been produced upon a boy of
eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school;
how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was
comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two
or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by
injudicious treatment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome
society of so many school-fellows, in less time than I have spoken
of, he has sunk to his own level, and is contented to be carried on
in the quiet orbit of modest self-knowledge in which the common mass
of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move: from being a
little unfeeling mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it
be a difficult matter to show how, at a school like this, where the
boy is neither entirely separated from home, nor yet exclusively
under its influence, the best feelings, the filial for instance, are
brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under a
completely domestic education; how the relation of a parent is
rendered less tender by unremitted association, and the very
awfulness of age is best apprehended by some sojourning amidst the
comparative levity of youth; how absence, not drawn out by too great
extension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the
relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the better
_child_ by that which keeps the force of that relation from being
felt as perpetually pressing on him; how the substituted paternity,
into the care of which he is adopted, while in everything substantial
it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omission of individual
fondnesses and partialities, directs the mind only the more strongly
to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses
are the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves after them
betrays no perverse palate. But these speculations rather belong to
the question of the comparative advantages of a public over a private
education in general. I must get back to my favorite school; and to
that which took place when our old and good steward died.

[Footnote 1: Under the denomination of _gage_.]

[Footnote 2: I am told that the late steward [Mr. Hathaway], who
evinced on many occasions a most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the
comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and
perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices,
in which he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one
half of the animal nutrition of the school those honors which painful
superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from
it.]

And I will say that when I think of the frequent instances which I
have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and
insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot
and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something
in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the
expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period
which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry eye
to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine
emotion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past,
seemed suspended throughout the school; and the boys, lately so
mirthful and sprightly, were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in
sad groups standing about, few of them without some token, such as
their slender means could provide, a black riband or something, to
denote respect and a sense of their loss. The time itself was a time
of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school hours) was
abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded;
and the gates, which at other times kept us in, were left without
watchers. Yet, with the exception of one or two graceless boys at
most, who took advantage of that suspension of authorities to _skulk
out_, as it was called, the whole body of that great school kept
rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprisonment; and
they who broke bounds, though they escaped punishment from any
master, fell into a general disrepute among us, and, for that which
at any other time would have been applauded and admired as a mark of
spirit, were consigned to infamy and reprobation; so much _natural
government_ have gratitude and the principles of reverence and love,
and so much did a respect to their dead friend prevail with these
Christ's Hospital boys, above any fear which his presence among them
when living could ever produce. And if the impressions which were
made on my mind so long ago are to be trusted, very richly did their
steward deserve this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call
to mind his portly form, the regal awe which he always contrived to
inspire, in spite of a tenderness and even weakness of nature that
would have enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other master; a
yearning of tenderness towards those under his protection, which
could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him each as to
their individual father. He had faults, with which we had nothing to
do; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry was a most
extraordinary creature. Contemporary with him and still living,
though he has long since resigned his occupation, will it be
impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper
grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian,
indeed, of a different stamp from him whom I have just described;
but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little too hasty
to leave the more nervous of us quite at our ease to do justice to
his merits in those days, are long since over, ungrateful were we if
we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity with which
he attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we been
the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been
instigated by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have
made himself a greater slave to the most laborious of all occupations
than he did for us sons of charity, from whom, or from our parents,
he could expect nothing. He has had his reward in the satisfaction of
having discharged his duty, in the pleasurable consciousness of
having advanced the respectability of that institution to which, both
man and boy, he was attached; in the honors to which so many of his
pupils have successfully aspired at both our Universities; and in the
staff with which the Governors of the Hospital, at the close of his
hard labors, with the highest expressions of the obligations the
school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present him.

I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution
of this school, that the offices of steward and school-master are
kept distinct; the strict business of education alone devolving upon
the latter, while the former has the charge of all things out of
school, the control of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of
dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this
division of management, a superior respectability must attach to the
teacher, while his office is unmixed with any of these lower
concerns. A still greater advantage over the construction of common
boarding-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of the
masters, rendering them totally free of obligation to any individual
pupil, or his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools
where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master derives
from him, where he views him every day in the light of a caterer, a
provider for the family, who is to get so much by him in each of his
meals. Boys will see and consider these things; and how much must the
sacred character of preceptor suffer in their minds by these
degrading associations! The very bill which the pupil carries home
with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though
necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers have other ends
than the mere love to learning, in the lessons which they give him;
and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca or
Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those disinterested
pedagogues to teach philosophy _gratis_. The master, too, is sensible
that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that
affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the
bitter labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into
unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have
conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to
acknowledge. From this inconvenience the settled salaries of the
masters of this school in great measure exempt them; while the happy
custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the
establishment) from those who have received their education there,
gives them an interest in advancing the character of the school, and
binds them to observe a tenderness and a respect to the children, in
which a stranger, feeling that independence which I have spoken of,
might well be expected to fail.

In affectionate recollections of the place where he was bred up, in
hearty recognitions of old school-fellows met with again after the
lapse of years, or in foreign countries, the Christ's Hospital boy
yields to none; I might almost say, he goes beyond most other boys.
The very compass and magnitude of the school, its thousand bearings,
the space it takes up in the imagination beyond the ordinary schools,
impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation of mind, that
attends him through life. It is too big, too affecting an object, to
pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends
at school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do not
know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too
obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted
ratio to the usual sentiments of mankind, nothing that I have been
engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the
colors which imagination gave to everything then. I belong to no
_body corporate_ such as I then made a part of.--And here, before I
close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing myself
solely to my old school-fellows, that were contemporaries with me
from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of
those circumstances of our school, which they will not be unwilling
to have brought back to their minds.

And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish
eyes, the young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination
of _Grecians_, were waiting the expiration of the period when they
should be sent, at the charges of the Hospital, to one or other of
our universities, but more frequently to Cambridge. These youths,
from their superior acquirements, their superior age and stature, and
the fewness of their numbers (for seldom above two or three at a time
were inaugurated into that high order), drew the eyes of all, and
especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and
admiration. How tall they used to seem to us! how stately would they
pace along the cloisters! while the play of the lesser boys was
absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least allayed, at
their presence! Not that they ever beat or struck the boys--that
would have been to have demeaned themselves--the dignity of their
persons alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, of
corporal chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of
wards, who, it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much
license allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; and the
interference of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual
power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation
the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor. In
fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school. Eras were
computed from their time;--it used to be said, such or such a thing
was done when S---- or T---- was Grecian.

As I ventured to call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the
King's boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the
Janissaries. They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up
under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and
conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales. All his systems were
adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to
encounter. Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be
borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as
inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To
make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to
be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate. Moral
obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense,
for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the
effects expected to be produced from it were something very different
from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a
perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened
by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely
took away the sting from his severities. His punishments were a game
at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when
he found himself at times overcome by his pupil. What success this
discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon the
after-lives of these King's boys, I cannot say: but I am sure that,
for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school.
Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in
the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the
system of their education they were kept longer at school by two or
three years than any of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a
constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some who may
read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which
the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the
cloisters, that _the First Order was coming_--for so they termed the
first form or class of those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some
good purposes, in the school. They were the military class among the
boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the
prowess of the school far and near; and the apprentices in the
vicinage, and sometimes the butchers' boys in the neighboring market,
had sad occasion to attest their valor.