slip a guinea, now and then, into the hands of a nurse or attendant-these things have been to Allan as privileges, for which he was content to live; choice marks, and circumstances, of his Maker's goodness to him. And I do not know whether occupations of this kind be not a spring of purer and nobler delight (certainly instances of a more disinterested virtue) than arises from what are called Friendships of Sentiment. Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, and common feelings, oftentimes subsists a Variety of Sentiment, which disposes each to look upon the other as the only being in the universe worthy of friendship, or capable of understanding it,-themselves they consider as the solitary receptacles of all that is delicate in feeling, or stable in attachment: when the odds are, that under every green hill, and in every crowded street, people of equal worth are to be found, who do more good in their generation, and make less noise in the doing of it. It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities, I have been describing, that Allan oftentimes discovered considerable inclinations in favour of my way of life, which I have before mentioned as being that of a surgeon. He would frequently attend me on my visits to patients; and I began to think that he had serious intentions of making my profession his study. He was present with me at a scene-a death-bed scene-I shudder when I do but think of it. CHAPTER XIII. I was sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman, who had been wounded in a duel,—and his wounds by unskilful treatment had been brought to a dangerous crisis. The uncommonness of the name, which was Matravis, suggested to me, that this might possibly be no other than Allan's old enemy. Under this apprehension, I did what I could to dissuade Allan from accompanying me-but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased himself with the notion, that it might lie within his ability to do the unhappy man some service. So he went with me. 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 a 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, andsang a song about "an old woman clothed in grey," 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. 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. To comfort the desponding parent with fining its advantages to the very lowest of the thought that, without diminishing the the people, let those judge who have witstock which is imperiously demanded to fur-nessed the looks, the gestures, the behaviour, nish the more pressing and homely wants of the manner of their play with one another, our nature, he has disposed of one or more their deportment towards strangers, the 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 con 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 wellknown 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 labouring 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 schoolrooms, 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 sur passing in size and grandeur almost any other in the kingdom;* 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 booklearning, 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? 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 over-hastily 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 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. 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. 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. Let The Christ's Hospital boy is a religious 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 halfdozen 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 that all knowledge was comprehended within of the moral law. Those who were con- his shallow brains, because a smattering of temporaries with me at that school thirty two or three languages and one or two years ago, will remember with what more sciences were stuffed into him by injudicious than Judaic rigour the eating of the fat of treatment at home, by a mixture with the certain boiled meats was interdicted. A wholesome society of so many schoolfellows, boy would have blushed as at the exposure in less time than I have spoken of, he has of some heinous immorality, to have been sunk to his own level, and is contented to be detected eating that forbidden portion of his carried on in the quiet orbit of modest allowance of animal food, the whole of which, self-knowledge in which the common mass of while he was in health, was little more than that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys sufficient to allay his hunger. The same, or seem to move: from being a little unfeeling even greater, refinement was shown in the mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor rejection of certain kinds of sweet-cake. would it be a difficult matter to show how, What gave rise to these supererogatory at a school like this, where the boy is neither penances, these self-denying ordinances, I entirely separated from home, nor yet could never learn; † they certainly argue no exclusively under its influence, the best defect of the conscientious principle. A feelings, the filial for instance, are brought little excess in that article is not undesirable to a maturity which they could not have in youth, to make allowance for the inevitable attained under a completely domestic eduwaste which comes in maturer years. But cation; how the relation of a parent is in the less ambiguous line of duty, in those rendered less tender by unremitted associadirections of the moral feelings which cannot tion, and the very awfulness of age is best be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate apprehended by some sojourning amidst what took place in the year 1785, when the comparative levity of youth; how 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 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 Under the denomination of gags. every + 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 honours which painful superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired to withhold from it. 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 favourite school; and to that which took place when our old and good steward died. 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 L L 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 honours 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 labours, with the highest expressions of the obligations the school lay under to him, unanimously voted to present him. school, favourable to the expansion of the still living, though he has long since resigned best feelings of our nature, that, at the his occupation, will it be impertinent to period which I am noticing, out of five mention the name of our excellent upper hundred boys there was not a dry eye to be grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? found among them, nor a heart that did not He was a disciplinarian, indeed, of a different beat with genuine emotion. Every impulse stamp from him whom I have just described; to play, until the funeral day was past, but, now the terrors of the rod, and of a seemed suspended throughout the school; temper a little too hasty to leave the more and the boys, lately so mirthful and sprightly, nervous of us quite at our ease to do justice were seen pacing their cloisters alone, or in to his merits in those days, are long since sad groups standing about, few of them over, ungrateful were we if we should refuse without some token, such as their slender our testimony to that unwearied assiduity means could provide, a black riband or with which he attended to the particular something, to denote respect and a sense of improvement of each of us. Had we been their loss. The time itself was a time of the offspring of the first gentry in the land, 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 I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution of this school, that the offices of steward and schoolmaster 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 |