Part 1 (2/2)

Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus My father's annual holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at the tie the Third: itso at St

Paul's My father took his little boy with hi; but e came in there was his kind-hearted Majesty, who patted ! How far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected hts and spiritual powers of a king ood

I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a drea man, was a student at Guy's Hospital, from which school of medicine he went to Yaren He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey for Southa s, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave Telling this to his parents at ”The Pollet,” they would not let hiely enough, the se by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I have heard my father tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr Watts' aard line, ”On little things what great depend” I s in dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences For instance, my ”Dream of Ambition” in Proverbial Philosophy was a real one And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual s False,” which has several tio, in Devonshi+re, for the first tih a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling that I had seen all this before: noe changed horses just on this side of a cross street, and I resolved withinnew to ht and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents Now, if reasonably asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soulevents both real and ideal But we s in heaven and earth,” &c

On Mr Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to s either towards verse or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on stone, and otherwise showed that she cas, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain, wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs, labelled by ,” but whether or not original, I cannot tell As a Guernseylish They see before hie of French poetry, and hiood Norman poet, Mr

John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells s are excellent, and that he re when he was a boy

About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals so with men, ”fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;” this so far as bodies are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable instances prove, where children do not take after their parents If, however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary talent, or at all events authorshi+p, _is_ hereditary, especially in these days of that general epidemic, the ”cacoethes scribendi”

I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and as I cannot iland, I produce it here in its integrity

A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class were o cannot fail to have eneration on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because weeveryiser, better, and happier than our recent forebears And in setting myself to write these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at ti names (for the too frequent use of dashes and asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisiainst or for either the dead or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom ”schools and schoolmasters” It is true that soeneral respect theiron my part shall be uardians will rejoice that ether that of their own boys

I was sent to schoolpreviously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in ”little Latin and less Greek” of the naht a wit and a poet in those days because oneeffusion:

”Beneath this stone a S lies, No one laughs and no one cries; Where he is gone or how he fares No one knows and no one cares”

At this tiinal, but it served to give h opinion of the pundit who read with me Cornelius Nepos and Caesar and sora consumption of perpetual sandwiches and beer

The first school chosen for h expensive, there could not have been a worse one) was a large es, fro to one Rev Dr Morris of Egglesfield House, Brentford butts, which I now judge to have been conducted solely with a view to the proprietor's pocket, without reference to the morals, happiness, or education of the pupils committed to his care All I care to remember of this false priest (and there were many such of old, whatever may be the case now) are his cruel punish to parents, and his careless indifference towards their children, and in brief his total unfitness for the twin duties of pastor and teacher A large private school of es and classes is perilously liable to infection from licentious youths left to thely recollect how miserable for nearly a year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for crime) who did all he could to pollute the infantdelivered over to his cruelty Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses the situation:--

”Would you your son should be a sot or dunce, Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once, Train him in public with a mob of boys, Childish in rowth and, five in ten, For infidelity and lewdness, le House, Brookgreen, where I was froht to eleven, had for its owner and headmaster a most worthy and excellent layantic, fairly learned, just and kindly His school produced, aston, well known from cabin-boy to admiral; there was also Lord Paulet, some others of noble birth, and the two Middletons, nick-named Yankees, whom years after I visited at their ruined h the personal good influence of honest ”Old Joe,” and his ed housekeeper, Mrs Jones, our whole well-ordered company of perhaps a hundred boys lived and learned, worked and played purely, and happily together: so great a social benefactor ret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair was , and the walks forat Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays at hoenerous visitor who tipped hiarden with its flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the arden was liberally thrown open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to monks and nuns Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing sh pre travels and stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good Mr Whitave a certain sh long since lost, and suitably inscribed for him ”_Parvum parva decent_;” and the speech days, wherein the saeneral astonish reeable reminiscences

My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as hterhouse, no doubt from the cruel tyranny of another educational DD, the Rev Dr Russell For this man and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and pedantic scholarshi+p, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to fix for , which was my affliction until past rown of itself by dint of private hard grinding with dictionaries and grammars, for the exercises, themes, and other lessons were notoriously difficult, and those before me would be inextricable puzzles noever, we had to do them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry As for the norant old parsons than Chaph the four others, Lloyd, dickens, Irvine, and Penny were soent, still all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a ”concio,” if the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Hoil or Horace was haply in dispute between a le really excellent teacher and good clergyman, Edward Churton, had but one fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell, who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly Mr Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief What should we think nowadays of an irate school a child's head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose bled, as I once saw? Or, in these arotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the wisdonorance being visited with the Reverend Doctor's terrible sentence, ”Allen, three rods, eighteen, and most severely”?

Let me comment on this line, one of a sharp satire by a boy nae and I suppose translated Elsewhere

Allen was head-gown-boy, and so chief executioner, the three rods being some five-feet bunches of birch armed with buds as sharp as thorns, renewed after six strokes for fresh excoriation! sometimes the exhibition was in , but usually in a sort of side chapel to the lower school where the whipping-block stood Who could tolerate such things now? and who can wonder that I, as a lad, proclaied, for I had resolved in that event to coer? I do not e, and hom I have since dined, annually as donor of a picture there, but Russell, concerning whom I vowed that if ever he was made a Bishop (happily he wasn't) I would desert the Church of England; as yet I have not, albeit it has lately become so papalised as to be little worth an honest Protestant's adherence

As to the exclusively classic education in es and sciences, I for ainst it as mainly waste of time and of very little service in the battle of life For proof of this, before I was eighteen, I wrote that essay on Education to be seen inyears after the celebrated Dr Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with eneration And while there was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those aard verbs in ”Mi,” or above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty involved severe punishment), let us remember that all this time Holywell Street was suffered to infect Charterhouse with its poison (I speak of long ago, before Lord Caovernors professionally recognised no sort of sins or shortconored everything out of school,of his coovern boys, that the e I think the system was called Lancastrian

One very noticeable trait in the parson-schoolmasters of those old days (and perhaps it still survives) was the subserviency to rank and wealth towards any pupils likely to give thes, whereof more anon; at present, an appropriate instance occurs to round, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled fa there, and much to their credit for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted _hi-pole under a Captain Clias who taught us athletics I was technically responsible for this open insult offered to Hibernian nobility, however well disposed to look another way and let lynch-law take its course Accordingly, the Doctor had me up for punishment, and he inflicted an almost iest of all) to be translated word for word, English and Greek, and to be given to him in MS within a month (it would have been work for a year), that or expulsion Had Mr Dillon been a plebeian, no notice would have been taken of the e his righteous punisheous set-task was curious and worthy of this its first and only record All the seventy boys in Irvine's house and others elsewhere, volunteered to do the whole ies closely written with Greek and Latin, were sewn together, e quarto pa Doctor; who had, however, too much shrewdness to care to inquire closely as to this popular outburst of a general indignation, so he said nothing more about it