write these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against 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 sometimes I loved them not, neither can I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood's hard experience has not been altogether that of their own boys.
I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in "little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an epitaph on himself the following effusion:
"Beneath this stone a Swallow 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 time of day I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read with me Cornelius Nepos and Cæsar and some portions of that hopeless grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption of perpetual sandwiches and beer.
The first school chosen for me (though expensive, there could not have been a worse one) was a large mixed establishment for boys of all ages, from infancy to early manhood, belonging 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 punishments, which passed for discipline, his careful cringing 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 mixed ages and classes is perilously liable to infection from licentious youths left to themselves and their evil propensities, and I can feelingly 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 infant mind of the little fag delivered 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 mischief only and in noise,
Else of a mannish growth and, five in ten,
For infidelity and lewdness, men."
My next school was more of a success; for Eagle House, Brookgreen, where I was from eight to eleven, had for its owner and headmaster a most worthy and excellent layman, Joseph Railton. Mr. Railton was gentle, though gigantic, fairly learned, just and kindly. His school produced, amongst others eminent, the famous naval author Kingston, 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 mansion in South Carolina after the Confederate War. Through the personal good influence of honest "Old Joe," and his middle-aged 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 may a good school chieftain be.
I have little to regret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair was memorable with Richardson's show and Gingel's conjuring, and the walks for mild cricketing at Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays at home; and how pleasant to a schoolboy was the generous visitor who tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden 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 smoked glass to a high premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good Mr. Whitmore an usher, who gave a certain small boy a diamond prayer-book, greatly prized then, though long since lost, and suitably inscribed for him "Parvum parva decent;" and the speech days, wherein the same small boy always signalised himself, to the general astonishment, for he was usually a stammerer, owing much to the early worries of Brentford; all these are agreeable reminiscences.
My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and pedantic scholarship, 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 many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction until past middle life. As for tuition, it must all have grown 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 now; however, we had to do them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry. As for the masters in school, two more ignorant old parsons than Chapman and "Bob Watki" could not readily be found; and though the four others, Lloyd, Dickens, Irvine, and Penny were somewhat more intelligent, still all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a "concio," if the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Homer or Virgil or Horace was haply in dispute between a monitor and his class. In the upper school the single 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 schoolmaster smashing a child's head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose bled, as I once saw? Or, in these milder times when your burglar or garotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the wisdom or equity of some slight fault of idleness or ignorance 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 named Barnes, long since an Indian Judge 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 medio, a public terror to evil-doers, or doers of nothing, 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, proclaimed that I would rather die than be flogged, for I had resolved in that event to commit justifiable homicide on my flogger? I do not mean Allen, who became Head of Dulwich College, and with whom 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 my young days, to the resolute neglect of all other languages and sciences, I for myself have from youth upwards always protested against 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 in my first series of Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my leave as
