bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread and cheese or butter, whichever we liked."

From Sunday to Saturday the menu consisted of changes metaphorically rung upon bread and butter, milk and water, boiled beef and mutton, and broth (rarely), roast mutton (very rarely), and choking peaseporridge. ' . . . Excepting of Wednesdays (bread and butter and rice-milk) I never had a bellyfull. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables," concludes Coleridge.

In his Table Talk he gives an astounding picture of the hospital in the last decades of the eighteenth century :

The discipline . . . in my time was ultra-Spartan; all domestic ties were to be put aside. 'Boy!' I remember Bowyer (Boyer) saying to me once, when I was crying, the first day after my return from the holidays, ' Boy! the school is your father! Boy, the school is your mother! Boy, the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!''

Touching Boyer's impatient humour and scorn of all the lighter literary arts and graces, Coleridge says :—

In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our School education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, 'Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy you mean! Muse, boy, muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, aye, the cloister pump, I suppose ! (Biographia Literaria.)

Of the same pedagogue-who, in this, unlike some stern and pompous schoolmasters one has known, evidently did not in his turn tremble before a higher, marital potentate Coleridge's Table Talk has a delightful anecdote under the date August 16th, 1832 :—

"No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer (or Boyer). Val. le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us, by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in and said: 'Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!' That saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, 'Away, woman! away!' and we were let off."

Elsewhere in the same interesting collection (but now little read, it is to be feared) of often brilliant literary scintillations of singular applicability to many of the political and social phenomena of our own day, he says:

"When I was a little boy at the Blue-coat Hospital, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation in the time of Edward VI. The march of the intellect has probably now exploded it. It ran thus:

'Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep!

Thumb thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep:
Crosses three we make to ease us,

Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus!'

'And the same charm served for cramp in the leg, with the following substitution :

The Devil is tying a knot in my leg!

Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg!
Crosses three, etc.'

"And really, upon getting out of bed, where the cramp frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. I should not wonder if it were equally good for stitch in the side, but I cannot say I ever tried that."

CHAPTER XVII

CHRIST'S HOSPITAL (continued)

ROBERT WAITHMAN, THE RADICAL Reformer, charges the GovernING BODY-OPEN LETTER TO THE "EXAMINER "-ALLEGATIONS OF PATRONAGE AND FAVOURITISM TOWARDS CHILDREN OF THE RICHLEIGH HUNT'S ADMISSIONS-USURPERS-COLERIDGE AND LAMB CHAMPION HOSPITAL Governors-LAMB'S SINGULAR VOLTE-FACE— "ARE THERE NOT PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS?" SAYS LAMB-BLUECOAT AND CHARITY Boy CONTRASTED-" THE FIRST ORDER "-WHY LEIGH HUNT AND CHAS. Lamb were noT SENT TO THE Universities— FAMOUS BLUECOAT BOYS-THE MODERN CHRIST'S HOSPITAL-How WEST OF ENGLAND POOR BOYS were and are PENALISED BY LOCAL REACTIONARIES "HETHERINGTON'S CHARITY "-BIG SALE OF HOSPITAL LANDS IN SUMMER, 1914.

PUBLIC charges of favouritism and undue distribution of influence were brought against the governors of Christ's Hospital by Robert Waithman, the Radical reformer (1764-1833), in an open letter to those gentlemen, in 1808. Naturally, the newspapers took up the matter vigorously, which for some time occupied a prominent position. The editor of the Examiner (Leigh Hunt himself) was compelled to state in no uncertain terms, and with a creditable candour

"that hundreds of unfortunate objects have applied in vain for admission is sufficiently notorious; and that many persons with abundant means of educating and providing for their children and relatives have obtained their admission into the School is also equally well known."

The son of the Vicar of Edmonton, Mr. Dawson Warren, and a boy named Carysfoot Proby, whose father had two livings, as well as his own and his wife's fortune, were the two chief usurpers.

Coleridge and Lamb, however, took up the cudgels on behalf of the derelictions of the governors. The former's article, in The Courier, vigorously denied Waithman's

contention that the hospital was intended for the poorest children, and expressed a wish that the governors would permit no influence to change their former policy. But, at the same time, he (Coleridge) expressed disapproval of the admission of boys whose fathers were in easy circumstances. Undoubtedly, Coleridge feared, as did Lamb, that the influx which would have attended such a reversion of policy might have permeated the hospital with the ignoble feudalism and the hideous servility inculcated in the contemporary Anglican Church * and parish charity schools, and so have "lowered " its "tone."

Lamb's curiously dull and stilted apologetics in the essay on his First Recollections of Christ Hospital, published in the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1813, queerly contradict the charming essay of Elia (Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago), in which he there attacks "Mr. Lamb's," his own former "magnificent eulogy on my old school." It was no wonder, said he, if the right of presentation had been abused by governors nominating the children of opulent parents to an institution, in town and country, of over a thousand boys! But, while the coarse blue coat and the yellow hose continued to be the school costume, the sons of the aristocracy, cleric or laic, would be often obtruded upon this seminary. "I own, I wish there was more room for such complaints," for a sprinkling of the sons of "respectable parents," and of Clergymen's children in particular," prevented the hospital, he thought, from having" long since degenerated into a mere Charity school, as it must do, upon the plan so hotly recommended by some reformists, of recruiting its ranks from the offspring of none but the very lowest

"The design [of Anglican charity schools] is not in any sort to remove poor children out of the rank in which they were born, but keeping them in it. . . educating them in the principles of religion as well as of civil life, and likewise making some sort of provision for their maintenance, under which last I include clothing them, giving them such learning-if it is to be called by that name-as may qualify them for some common employment. (Bishop Butler, a "Liberal' churchman, in a charity sermon preached at St. Paul's in the eighteenth century.)

"

"

of the people." Were there not for such the parochial schools, charity schools, Bell and Lancaster's? The modern reviewer is said to pipe in an Olympian key in an Olympian journal, the identical man modifying that same tone to a more democratic softness of style and opinions in another corresponding literary milieu. So that one need not be too much surprised at the contrast alluded to above, for Lamb, be it observed, was writing in the Gentleman's Magazine-hardly to be made the vehicle of socialist or ultra-Radical" theories! Nor was the gentle Elia" at all likely to be an exponent of such.

"The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own," wrote Lamb in 1813, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools. . . . Within his bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to mix with other boys, they are a sort of laity to him . . . lest by over-hastily mixing with common and secular playfellows he should commit the dignity of his cloth. . . . That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself by putting a question to any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in thecloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to reward, which he will meet with in the other cannot fail to depress and sadden him. For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy; he feels it in the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he belongs; in the usage which he meets with at school, and the treatment he is accustomed to out of its bounds; in the respect which his well-known garb never fails to procure him in the streets of the metropolis; he feels it in his education, in the measure of classical attainments which every individual at the school, though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his power to procure attainments which it would be worse than folly to put it in the reach of the labouring classes to acquire: he feels

*

Either St. Paul's or the Charter-house.