cipline under Mr. Boyer's rule. But the spectacle of that prodigy, Coleridge-his friend-must have had even a more powerful influence "the idol of those among his schoolfellows who mingled with their bookish studies the musée (?) of thought and humanity, and he was usually attended round the cloisters by a group of these (inspiring and inspired) whose hearts even then burnt within them as he talked, and whence the sounds yet linger, to mock Elia on his way." Other friends, but of far less mark, were "Bob Allen," later to be a newspaper hack and infidel; and Gutch, in whose house, when growing old, Lamb was to lodge; while many there were whom he would not call companions, but whom he adadmired at a distance. Awful 66 hope of obtaining custom on the strength of his son's connexionshis setting up of a flaming signboard in dull unconsciousness of the agony he was causing his son-was too great a mortification for the young man, who, unable to face his friends, with perhaps a foolish sensitiveness, fled from the place and became a common soldier, falling at Salamanca.3 The little monastic, retiring boy, was kindly and tenderly treated by all. It was noticed that he was always called Charles Lamb, instead of the shorter and blunter patronymic by which other boys were addressed. This seemed a proof of special interest and affection. He was allowed some privileges, which his schoolfellows had not. He might go and see his family when he pleased. The rude diet of the hospital, the meagre beer and penny loaf, the gags," half-pickled or whole fresh boiled beef, "mutton scraggs," "rotten, roasted, or rare," were not for him; or was at least corrected by tea, and other delicacies from the Temple. On certain days his good old aunt would arrive at the cloisters with a plate of roast veal, or "more tempting griskin," and sitting down on the old coalhole steps near the grammar-school door, would open her apron and bring out her basin. The young nephew, struggling between shame and appetite, almost despising, as he bitterly owned later, the affectionate old creature who thus thought of Grecians 4 were Stevens, afterwards master; Thornton, soon to be a diplomatist at the Northern Courts; and Middleton, Bishop of Calcutta. There was Franklin, who, later on, became master of the Hertford Grammar School, "fine and frank-hearted ;" and who acquired a fantastic interest in Lamb's eyes from "having officiated at Thurtell's last moments; and Favelle, whose story was to have a piteous interest :-The son of a common house-painter, he had found his way to Oxford by his own exertions, with brilliant prospects before him, but nervously sensitive as to the paternal trade. The arrival of his father in the very town, with the 1 Hazlitt's "Spirit of the Age." Lamb first published an essay, called “Recollections of Christ's Hospital," containing his own experience; and, later, the essay, entitled, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in which he gave Coleridge's impres sions. These two different versions one highly favourable, the other the contrarypuzzled the readers of the "London Magazine;" and the writer was called on to reconcile the two different birthplaces which he had set down, viz., Calne, in Wiltshire, and the Temple. Elia disposed of these inquiries in a rather flippant fashion, but without suggesting that Coleridge was intended." See But he confessed to Gillman that Coleridge was the subject of the sketch. 2 Letter to Miss Hutchinson. Nov. 11, 1825. 3 Lamb, with a few charming touches, both of tradegy and comedy, gives the whole story; the comedy lying in the father's complacent hope of benefitting by his son's good fortune. A favour he owed to the interest of Mr. Norris, of the hospital, afterwards subtreasurer of the Inner Temple, his father's firm friend, and his, of fifty years. him. It was she, too, who "strained her pocket-strings to give him a sixpenny whole plum-cake," which, in a moment of complacent charity, "in all the pride of an evangelical peacock," he bestowed on an old mendicant; and in what followed, we have one of those valuable glimpses of boyish thought which he treasured up for his maturer years, and then analysed with a masterly touch. Scarcely had the act been accomplished when a revulsion came-the thought of the good aunt's kindness, "the sum it was to her, the pleasure she had a right to expect that I-not the old impostor—should take in eating her cake; the ingratitude by which, under the colours of Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after."1 This bears out what was before insisted on, that in viewing Lamb's childhood, we study his manhood and character. These little incidents were nursed like plants-developed as he grew old and yet older, and were his present sensations, in fact. That he should have felt so acutely on the occasion-the bitter grief following so speedily on the impulse-shows us what his character was. "For me," he says, "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 colours which imagination gave to every thing then. I belong to no body corporate such as I then made part of."" The recollections of this time lingered in his mind, such as his being hoisted upon a servant's shoulder, in Guildhall, to look "upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing lottery-the Blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket." His wanderings and playings in the Temple Gardens, making the little fountain rise and fall to the amazement of companions, he knowing the trick; his first visit to church, described with his wonderful analysis of childish emotion. This word "church" suggested to him now a great hollow cave, then something moveable, like a waggon or a cart. Was it anything to eat or drink?" he asked his mother.* He was awestricken by the grotesque heads and monsters which ran along the sides of the church which his father told him were very improper ornaments for such a place. "And so I now think them," adds Charles, writing years afterwards. Yet he immediately makes a protest against this rather limited view, correcting it by his old childish faith; since, as they were placed upon a church, "to which I had come with such serious thoughts, I could not help thinking they had some serious meaning, and looked at them with wonder, without any temptation to laugh. I somehow fancied they were the representation of wicked people set up as a warning. "The scene was the Temple Church, though he only hints at it, and he was awe-stricken by the tombs, figures, windows, &c. ; for he says paternally he was "a poor lonely creature then. His father, too, had, from some fantastic notion of education, taken care that he should not receive any religious impression or instruction till he was five or six years old. The child 1 Letter to Coleridge, March 9, 1822. Compare also essay. 2 Recollections of Christ's Hospital. The Illustrious Defunct: "New Monthly Magazine," 1825. * Susan Yates, in "Mrs. Leicester's School." tells how all this time, during this first visit, he was thinking how happy he was, and what a privilege he enjoyed in being allowed to join with so many grown people, "I remember I foolishly applied everything that was said to myself, so as it could mean nobody but myself. . . All that assembly of people seemed to me as if they were come together only to shew me the way of a Church." This is but the common thought of all children on such occasions. "Oh," he says in conclusion, "it was a happy day for me; for before I used to feel like a little outcast in the wilderness-like one that did not belong to the world of Christian people.' However, these religious instincts were soon to be overpowered in the rather wild explorings after truth, which again were to give place to a shape of meagre theism but little removed from philosophic paganism. But now the time was come for him to quit 1 school. His knowledge and proficiency, it seems to be admitted, were sufficient to entitle him to go to the universities as an exhibitioner. But Sir J. Talfourd states there was an understanding that such exhibitioners should embrace the Church. "Lamb," he says, "was unfitted by nature for such a profession," and was not allowed to enjoy his promotion. The impediment of a stammerer could hardly have been held sufficient for inflicting what was an injustice on an industrious boy, who, we are told, saw all his own contemporaries preferred before him. It seems more probable that his industry and abilities were not suffieient to entitle him to the rank of Grecian. He was, however, "deputy Grecian-in the lower division of the second class."2 At last the day arrived when he was to quit the old cloisters; and and on November 23rd, 1789, he was discharged. "Wheu a child," he wrote to Coleridge, "I remember blushing, being caught on my knees to my Maker, or doing otherwise some praiseworthy action." Letter, Aug. 13, 1814. 2 Talfourd says the school phrase. Deputy Grecian." he was not a Deputy Grecian, but "in Greek form," according to But Lamb himself writes to Dyer, "I can never forget I was a Feb. 22, 1831. He wrote a sort of Deputy Grecian's hand. LIVES OF THE LORD CHANCELLORS OF IRELAND. (109) A.D. 1807. LORD MANNERS During the session of Parliament of 1802, a committee was appointed by the House of Commons to examine into the arrears of the Civil List, in relation to which a message had been received from the King; and at the same time the SolicitorGeneral to the Prince of Wales called the attention of the House to the arrears alleged to be due to His Royal Highness from the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall, which he stated were, by undoubted and inalienable right, the property of the 1 Sir Bernard Burke's Peerage. heir to the throne. He showed how the Duchy had, in early times, been vested in the Princes of Wales, and the mode in which they enjoyed it. He then moved for a select committee to inquire into the application of the revenues of Cornwall during the minority of his Royal Highness, together with certain sums which had been voted by Parliament for payment of the Prince's debts. When the question was first moved, Mr. Sutton stated that during the minority of the Prince, the arrears of the Duchy amounted to £900,000, and that £221,000 having, at different times, been voted by Parliament for the use of his Royal Highness, there remained a balance of £679,000 in his favour. To bring him in thus as a creditor of the King, or of the public, for such a sum, was a capital device hit upon by Mr. Sutton to extricate him from his embarrassments. But the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Addington, resisted this claim, which, on a division of the House, was lost by an overwhelming majority.2 The conduct of Mr. Manners Sutton in this transaction won for him the favour not alone of Pitt and Fox, but of Mr. Addington, then Prime Minister, who, in the month of May, 1802, promoted him to the office of Solicitor-General to the King. He executed with great temperance and ability the duty, which soon after devolved upon him, of replying to the evidence brought forward by Colonel Despard, in defending himself against a charge of high-treason. He also assisted at the trial of M. Peltier for 2 Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxxvi., p. 327, 333, 340. a libel on the First Consul, during the short peace with France, the speedy termination of which saved the defendant from being called up for judgment.1 On the 4th of February, 1805, Sutton was appointed one of the Barons of the Exchequer in England; and on the fall of the short-lived coalition ministry, in 1807, he was created Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Manners, of Foston, in Lincolnshire. During his long tenure of office (extending over twenty years) the Chancellor had one guiding-star in his appointments to the magistracy hatred to the Church of Rome, which was then fast recovering from her long depression. He saw the tendency of every successive Act of Par liament was to loosen the chains in which the Romish faith had been bound. Catholic magistrates, therefore, who had been appointed by his predecessor, George Ponsonby, were superseded because they were Catholics; while Orangemen, on the other hand, were promoted to high places because they were Orangemen. The following anecdote will furnish an example of his prejudice "In the year 1812, a controversy of an angry nature took place between Lord Cloncurry and the Chancellor, in relation to the younger children of the Hon, Joseph Leeson, eldest son of the Earl of Miltown. Mr. Leeson had died in 1800, before his father succeeded to the earldom, and his widow married, in 1811, Valentine, Lord Cloncurry. As the deceased gentleman had not lived to inherit the honours of his family, his younger children were not entitled to the rank or privileges of the younger children of a peer. The Crown in such cases usually extends to an Earl's grandchildren the privileges they would possess had their father succeeded to the peerage. The Lord-Lieutenant, on application made to him by Lady Cloncurry, at first was of opinion that the ordinary rule should be followed in this case. On reconsidering the question, however, his Excellency arrived at a different conclusion, and the Chancellor declared that Lady Cloncurry could not have the relief she prayed for on behalf of her children on the grounds that her second husband was a supporter of Catholic Emancipation, an enemy of Protestant ascendancy, and a violent opponent of the Government. Mrs. Douglas, mother of Lady Cloncurry, then waited on Lord Manners, and unsuccessfully urged the claims of her grandchildren. His lordship informed her that "Lord Cloncurry was hostile to the Government, and that when a woman marries to injure her children's prospects in life she must submit to the consequences." This conversation Mrs. Douglas took the very questionable course of embodying in an affidavit, which she swore before Lord Cloncurry, who, indignant at the liberty thus taken with his name, immediately addressed Lord Manners the following letter: 2— 66 Dublin, Fune 25, 1817. "My Lord,-..... Your lordship, in a recent interview with Mrs. Douglas, had the offensive and indiscreet candour to declare that, however favourably you were disposed towards Lord Miltown, yet, that he being under my protection, the request could not be granted, nor would you do anything in the business, because I was an 'emancipator, an enemy to the Protestant ascendancy, and a violent opposer of the Government.' And, in relation to Lady Cloncurry, you added, 'that when a woman marries to injure her children she must submit to the consequences.' Now, my lord, I forbear to dwell upon the indelicacy 1 State Trials, vol. xxvii.. p. 469-530. 2 Recollections of Lord Cloncurry, p. 250. |