The Book-Hunter | Page 3

husband was unable to meet that outlay, he was not in a position to
maintain her beside himself.
After some six or eight years of mutual longing for each other's society,
separated by the distance of London from Aberdeen, William Burton
succeeded in exchanging his position in the Fencibles for a lieutenancy
in a line regiment under orders for India. There also he went
unaccompanied by his wife. After brief service in India he had to return
home in ill health. Then at last the husband and wife were reunited;
first to live together for a time in Aberdeen--afterwards to go with their
two sons to Jersey.
The eldest son, William, ten years older than John, afterwards went into
the Indian army, and died in India, leaving a son and daughter.
John Hill Burton's earliest recollections dated from his stay with his
parents in garrison in Jersey. This must have been about the year 1811
or 1812, when he was therefore two or three years old. He used to say
he remembered the relieving of guard in Jersey; that he had an infantine
recollection of a military guard-room by night; and remembered a
"Lady Fanny," the wife, as he believed, of the colonel of the regiment,
who showed some slight kindness towards him and other garrison
children.
The greatest adventure of Dr Burton's unadventurous life occurred
when he was returning with his parents from Jersey, in a troop-ship.
The vessel was chased by a French privateer, and for some time the
little family had reason to fear becoming inmates of a French prison. It
was this incident which Dr Burton used in his later life to say entitled
him to assert that he had been in the Peninsular War. The homeward
journey from Jersey was to Aberdeen, which it is believed Lieutenant
Burton and his family never left again till his death. His failing health
obliged him to retire from active service on the half-pay of a lieutenant.
His wife, from some writings to be hereafter mentioned, seems also to

have enjoyed an allowance of £40 per annum from her father.
Besides William and John Hill, there were born in Aberdeen to William
Burton and Eliza Paton three sons--two of whom died early, one of
them being accidentally drowned in the Don at Grandholm--and one
daughter. The surviving brother of Dr Burton is a retired medical
officer of the East India Company. The sister, Mary, remains
unmarried.
The little household established in Aberdeen about the year 1812 knew
the woes of failing health and narrow means, part of the latter doled out
to them by an unwilling hand. Lieutenant Burton's health continued to
decline till his death, about the year 1819. His son John was then ten
years old, and had begun his school education.
His recollections of schools and schoolmasters were vivid and
picturesque. The one schoolmaster--almost the only teacher--to whom
he acknowledged any obligation, was James Melvin. To him, he was
wont to say, he owed his good Scotch knowledge of Latin; and he
delighted even till the end of his life in dwelling on Dr Melvin's
methods of teaching, and on the fine spirit of generous emulation and
eagerness for knowledge which inspired his pupils.
Both before and after the time of his studies under Dr Melvin he had
experience of schoolmasters of a different type. The tales of flogging
under these pedagogues were so absolutely sickening, that Dr Burton's
family used to beg him to stop his narrations to spare their feelings. He
had beheld, though he had never undergone, the old-fashioned process
of flogging by heezing up the culprit on the back of the school-porter,
so as to bring his bare back close to the master's lash. The trembling
victim, anticipating such punishment, used to be sent to summon the
porter. He frequently returned with a half-sobbing message, "Please, sir,
he says he's not in." The fiction did not lead to escape. Cromar was the
name of the chief executioner in these scenes. Detested by his pupils,
he was a victim to every sort of petty persecution from them, so that
cruelty acted and reacted between him and them. On one memorable
occasion he flogged John Burton with such violence as to cause to
himself an internal rupture.

The offence which led to this unmeasured punishment was "looking
impudent!"--and the look of supposed impudence was produced by a
temporarily swollen lip; but the swollen lip was the effect of a single
combat with a schoolfellow; and fighting was so rife, and so severely
repressed, that it appeared less dangerous to meet the consequences of
the supposed impertinent face than those of the battle. The unfortunate
pupil of course continued to grimace, and the wretched schoolmaster to
flog, till the pupil streamed with blood, and the master sat