Lamb's charming essay-nor, indeed, of Blakesware itself.1

Thus closes the prettiest idyll in Charles Lamb's life. In the bar

reness and suffering of after-years, his heart dwelt on it with a painful interest.

CHARLES and his sister were sent to a day-school, situated in the mean passage that leads from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings, and looking into a discoloured, dingy garden. It was presided over by a Mr. William Bird, teacher of languages and mathematics, who was assisted by a strange being, called "Captain Starkey," later to be "a character," beggarman, what not. This oddity wrote an account of his own life, which Lamb happened to stumble upon, and the name awakened all his and his sister's slumbering recollections of their school days, and the spontaneousness and delight at there occurring some of the precious memories of childhood, prompted a vivid and graphic little retrospect, which, with some finishing, should have found a place among his Essays.2 "This," he said, "was the Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant anecdotes, and whom, never having seen, I almost seem to remember." Mary had been there long before Charles was sent, and the fashion in which he interweaves her recollections with his own is singularly charming. "Every touch may be accepted as literally true. Heavens knows what 'languages' were taught in it then! I am sure that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By 'mathematics,' reader, must be understood 'ciphering.' It was, in fact, an humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning; and the slender

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erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, &c., in the evening. Now, Starkey presided, under Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable singer and performer at Drury Lane Theatre, and nephew to Mr. Bird, had succeeded him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar mild toneespecially while he was inflicting punishment-which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but, when they took place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, where we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary chastisement was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon now,—the ferule, A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened, at the inflicting end, into a shape resembling a pear, but nothing like So sweet, with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture, and the malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous; but by no process can I look back upon this blister raiser with anything but unmingled horror. To make him look more formidable,-if a peda

gogue had need of these heightenings,-Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart, Bird, I believe, was, in the main, a humane and judicious master.

"Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a free hand, unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral lesson, "Art improves Nature;" the still earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I fear may yet be apparent in this manuscript; the truant looks side-long to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the prize for best spelling which had almost turned my head, and which, to this day, I cannot reflect upon without a vanity, which I ought to be ashamed of; our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; the bright, punctually-washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with another and another ink-spot! 1 "Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-andthirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty a life-long poverty, she thinks-could at no time have so effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face

otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollectionsof him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a half-penny. 'If any of the girls,' she says, 'who were my school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings, from the dead, of their youthful friend, Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do, at having teased his gentle spirit.' They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence necessary ;. and, however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have reduced his. writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative; for, when hewas indespair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, 'Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you ! Once he was missing for a day or two: he had run away. A little, old, unhappylooking man brought him back,—it was his father, and he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping in a corner, with his hands before his face; and the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to annoy him. 'I had been there but a few months,' adds she, when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound secret,-that the tragedy of 'Cato' was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation.' That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she remembers; and, but for his unfortunate person he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him; and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes her recol lection of the cast of characters, even

now, with a relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his two sons in the scene, &c."

But this sort of "hedge schooling was preparatory; and when the boy was only six years old, it was arranged that he should enter Christ's Hospital. Mr. Salt's interest was enough to secure this valuable privilege. He was admitted by a committee, on July 17th, 1782, "by a bond entered into by Samuel Salt, of the Inner Temple, London, Esquire." A petition had been sent in from his father, who set forth" that he had a wife and three children, and he finds it difficult to maintain and educate his family without some assistance." The admission was then merely formal, and he was not "clothed" as a Blue-coat boy until the 9th of October in the same year.2 Here was to begin a new existence, a wider field, from which to gather and store up images which he was hereafter to recal. But there was not to be the old soft poetry of Blakesware; and though a London boy and with his heart alway centered in the town, this era was to have for him a more matter-of-fact complexion. His eyes do not linger on it as he looks backwards. He does not recur to the old images again and again, or reproduce them in pictures of varying shapes. The antique solemnity of the hospital is now almost overpowered by masses of new building which contrast harsh ly with the small remains of mellow old brick; the quaint doorway with

the figure of the blue-coat boy overhead, the church, and the quiet counting-house, with its mullioned windows, has the air of a room in Blakesware itself. There is now a greater publicity, and the old romantic solitude has been encroached upon. Hither it was that the mild, delicate boy who walked with a strange and measured step, and who spoke with a nervous hesitation, came from the Temple to this famous school, where he was to remain seven years.

In two well-known essays he has given a chromatic picture of his school life-full of colour, peopled with figures-the masters, stewards, the boys-their amusements and the somewhat barbarous punishments which they suffered; with a background of the great hall whose ceiling was painted by Verrio, in an oldfashioned florid style, and the stainedglass and the crumbling cloisters. We hear the roar of the five-hundred lads within the great hall-see them refusing "the gags" or pieces of fat (a gag-eater being considered next to a ghoul); watch the tall "Grecians," who were going to the university ; the "sea boys," those cruel tyrants; and the monitors, with their quaint badges. There were the visits to the Tower, where by ancient privilege they enjoyed a gratuitous view of all the curiosities; the procession through the city at Easter, to enjoy the Lord Mayor's bounty; the scenes at Christmas; the carol sung by night at that time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have often lain awake to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed), when it was sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it in their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that

season by angel's voices to the shepherds.

Among the boys he soon found friends-the two Le Grices, Charles Valentine, and Samuel, the former of whom became a clergyman and tutor in Cornwall, writing agreeable verses to the end of his life; the latter, sanguine, volatile, and sweet-natured," breaking away from college, and dying of fever at Jamaica. "The Christ Hospital boys' friends," says Elia, "are commonly his intimates through life;" and it was here that he laid the foundation of an intimacy with a most remarkable character Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their standing nearly corresponded, Coleridge remaining longer at the school, becoming "Grecian," a rank Lamb was prevented attaining to. This prodigy was of course not recognised; and his gifts were rudely chastised by the eccentric James Boyer, who was chief master of the school. The portrait of this being is a singular one, and his severities awful. His wigs betokened the changes of his temper: one serene, smiling, fresh-powdered"-heralding a mild day; the other, "an old, discoloured, unkempt, angry canon, denoting frequent and bloody execution." He would "make a headlong entry" into the schoolroom from his inner recess, and singling out a lad, roar out, "Odds my life, sirrah!" (his favourite adjuration), "I have a great mind to whip you!" then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling himself back into his lair; and after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the

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contest), drive headlong out again, ...with the expletory yell, "And I WILL too." The great thinker long after owned that to him he owed his classical taste, though he hardly forgave him his rude treatment. Lay thy animosity against Jimmy, in the grave," wrote Charles Lamb to his friend, when the news of Boyer's death reached him. Coleridge did forgive him then, with the aspiration, "Poor J. B., may all his faults be forgiven, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings!" It reached the master's ears that the precocious lad had read Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary:" "So, sirrah, you are an infidel, are you?" he said, "Then I'll flog the infidelity out of you,' and proceeded to administer the severest flogging the boy had yet received.

Charles Lamb was more fortunate in having a gentle, careless master, Matthew Field, who actually neglected his scholars, attending gay parties, or presenting himself at episcopal levies. His class sat in the same room with that of the severe master, and the contrast was amusing. Sometimes, the latter marked his sense of their indulgence by such grim satire, as remarking of the birch which he had borrowed of his colleague, "how neat and fresh the twigs looked." With such a director, under whose care he remained four or five years, Lamb could not have learned much. His nice classical taste, evinced even by the excellent Latinity of some of his familiar letters, was probably owing to his two years' wholesome dis