breakfast. An hour had passed in the interval. School followed till II a.m., with an hour's play afterwards; dinner at 12; and play till 1, again followed by school, lasting till 5 in summer and 4 in winter. Supper, play, and bed wound up the day.

Leigh Hunt goes on to say :

The Under Grammar Master, in my time, was the Rev. Mr. Field. He was a good-looking man, very gentlemanly, and always dressed at the neatest. I believe he once wrote a play. He had the reputation of being admired by the ladies. A man of more handsome incompetence for his situation perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning; went away soon in the afternoon; and used to walk up and down languidly bearing his cane as if it were a lily, and hearing our eternal Dominuses and As in præsentis, with an air of ineffable endurance. Often he did not hear at all. It was a joke with us, when any of our friends came to the door, and we asked his permission to go to them, to address him with some preposterous question wide of the mark; to which he used to assent. We would say, 'Are you not a great fool, sir?' or 'Isn't your daughter a pretty girl?' to which he would reply, 'Yes, child.' When he condescended to hit us with the cane, he made a face as if he were taking a dose of physic."

Of this period he says :—

...

"Perhaps there is not a foundation in the country so truly English, taking that word to mean what Englishmen wish it to mean-something solid, unpretending, and free to all. . . . It is the largest of all the Free Schools. Nobility do not go there except as boarders. Now and then a boy of noble family may be met with, and he is reckoned an interloper and against the charter; but the sons of poor gentry, and London citizens abound; and with them an equal share is given to the sons of tradesmen of the very humblest description, not omitting servants. I would not take my oath-but I have a strong recollection, that in my time there were two boys, one of whom went up into the drawing-room to his father, the master of the house; and the other down into the kitchen to his father, the coachman. One thing, however, I know to be certain, and it is the noblest of all, that the boys themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another's ranks out of doors. The cleverest

boy was the noblest let his father be who he might. Christ's hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of merchants, of naval officers, of scholars

During the long, warm days of summer, Lamb exquisitely describes how the boys, friendless or with friends to see, were turned out for a whole day's holiday, with no food save a scanty crust of bread. Forth they sallied into the fields, stripped under the warmth of the sun, and wantoned like young dace in the streams at their water pastimes" in the New River. All this while around them were cattle, birds, and fishes at feed, and they, only they-hearty, healthy boys-were without the means of satisfying a splendid appetite, sharp-set by the morning's diversions. Many of the boys were penniless, and faint and languid, as Elia says, they returned to the hospital, after nightfall, famished though half-rejoicing, half-reluctant," that the hours of our uneasy liberty had expired!" Worse still in winter time to see the friendless, bored, and objectless boys from the hospital prowling about the streets of London, shivering at print-shop windows, in the attempt to extract a little amusement; or, as a desperate resort, paying a fifty times repeated and prescriptively free visit to the "Lions in the Tower." Of the Christ's Hospital monitors he says:—

"The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to recollection. I have been called out of bed, and waked for the purpose, in the coldest winter nights and this not once, but night after night-in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder. The same execrable tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perishing with snow; and, under the cruellest penalties, forbade the indulgence of a drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the season, and the day's sports. . . . There was one H-, who, I learned in after

days, was seen expiating some maturer offence in the hulks. ... This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had offended him, with a red-hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us to pamper a young ass, which with the connivance of his nurse's daughter (a young flame of his), he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, as they called our dormitories." In about a week the "foolish beast not able to fare well but he must also cry roast meat . . . waxing fat and kicking in the fulness of bread . . . laying out his simple throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as . . . set concealment any longer at defiance. The client was dismissed ... but I never understood that the patron underwent any censure on the occasion."

Elia also speaks of the "cool impunity with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters for their own tables, one out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron" had "scrupulously weighed out for our dinners."

In Charles Lamb's time the Keate* of Christ's Hospital was the Rev. James Boyer, master of the upper school (1776-99). "J. B. had a heavy hand," says Lamb, who also speaks of Boyer's two wigs of different omen, the one serene, smiling, fresh-powdered, denoting a mild day, the other an old discoloured, angry caxon betokening frequent and bloody execution.

"I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me? Nothing was more common than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom, from his inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 'Od's my life sirrah, I have a great mind to whip you,' then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair-and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the contest) drive headlong out again... with the expletory yell-and I WILL too."

His gentler moods and moments (save the mark !) were, according to Lamb, if whipping were in question, distinguished by a peculiar and ingenious method of castigating *Headmaster of Eton. Vide p. 88.

G.E.S.

S

a boy and reading the reports of the Parliamentary debates at the same time :

"

a paragraph and a lash between; which in these times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress a patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric."

"

Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious ejaculation of C* when he heard that his old master was on his death-bed: 'Poor J. B. !-may all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all heads and wings, with no bottoms, to reproach his sublunary infirmities."

Perhaps some may recall that the peculiar, distinctly peculiar, disciplinary method which Robert Raikes, the alleged founder of Sunday Schools, adopted for the subjugation of recalcitrant or obstreperous scholars was to take the latter up to a red-hot stove and burn their fingers thereon; even so, Howard, the prison reformer, recommended solitary cells for the confinement of naughty children, and in accordance therewith, as readers of the Essays of Elia may remember, there were in Lamb's day at Christ's Hospital little square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket, with a peep of light let in askance at an orifice at the top. Here, he who had merely run away for the second time, was consigned all day long to solitary confinement, without sight of any but the porter,

"who brought him his bread and water-who might not speak to him; or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him for a brief interval from solitude; and here he was shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors that weak nerves and superstition, incident to his time of life might subject him to."t

Presumably, Coleridge.

† Lamb adds that there were one or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, before the governors were induced to abolish this part of the execrable punishment.

The punishment for the third offence of the same tenour may properly be described as damnable in its cold-blooded, histrionic artistry, characterised by not a few of the traits of the auto da fé of the Spanish Inquisition. The unfortunate victim, who had probably merely been guilty of chafing at the intolerable life undergone by the eleemosynarily assisted boy of poor parents, who had no influence with the constituted authorities to have mitigated somewhat such severities, was first arrayed in an appalling attire his San Benito! "With his pale and frighted features, as though some of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him," he was brought into the hall, in the presence of the whole school, the executionerbeadle in his state robe, the steward, and two faces" of direr import "-two of the governors, present by choice or charter, not to mitigate, but to enforce the uttermost stripe.

"The beadle turning rather pale a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictors accompanied the criminal quite round the hall. We were generally too faint with attending to the previous disgusting circumstances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal suffering inflicted. Rumour, of course, gave out the back knotty and livid."

All this diabolical business for the purpose of expelling a poor, friendless "runagate," subsequently to be handed over to the parish officer, "who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the outside of the hall-gate."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lamb's contemporary at the hospital-indeed, Elia's Christ's Hospital of Five and Thirty Years Ago is, or seems to be, an exquisite composite of his own and Coleridge's scholastic experiences-complains strongly, in a private letter, of the extreme monotony of the diet of the Bluecoat boys :

"Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry