My Life as an Author | Page 7

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