Читать книгу Memoirs of Eighty Years - Thomas Gordon Hake - Страница 16

“Profit and loss accounts are plain;

We debit loss and credit gain.”

But his supreme merit was that of substituting geographical for moral texts in our copy-books. One I remember, for small text, was, “Batavia in Java, capital of the Dutch settlements.”

Reynolds was somebody. He married his daughter to Thomas Hood, and his son was, I believe, the Reynolds of Sunday newspaper fame.

With this exception the school was purely classical; nothing whatever was taught but Greek and Latin. History, geography, English, and its grammar, were unheard of. We had to teach ourselves to read and spell, and none will dispute that the prayers before scanty meat were beautifully given by the Grecians, those head boys who proceeded to the University. Grammar we learnt only from the Greek and Latin, but it was sufficient; composition we derived from the same source, whence, perhaps, our habit of inversion, so offensive nowadays to poetic dribblers, who doat on Wordsworthy prose.

The steward of the school, who was ruler, a sort of president of the growing-up republic, named Higgins, was an oldish man, grey-pated, with a youthful slim figure, fair skin, and a straight disciplinarian mouth. He presided at meal-time, seated at a desk on the large daïs at the upper end of the hall, like a modern Pontius Pilate. There he was, to receive criminals led to judgment by the monitors, and to flog them without mercy. He was greatly feared and, of course, greatly hated. He reminded one of a snake in his movements, which were rapid and flexible. No complaint was made to him of the boys, by beadles or monitors, but what was believed by him; he required no proof.

It was a sort of Russian system; every official, every monitor, was a spy, and the steward was the willing knout, a creature emotional as a reptile, servile as a dog, and as a cat cruel.

Nevertheless, there was one extenuating circumstance—he had a pretty daughter, with whom a friend and school-fellow of mine was in love.

I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. Religious machinery was everywhere visible. There was a grand organ in the gallery at one end of the dining-hall, over the doorway; there was an organist, Mr. Glen, to accompany the hymn or psalm during the daily services before meat, consisting of a bit of Bible and a thanksgiving, the Grecians being pro-chaplains. There was a form of prayer read by any boy in the wards who was handy at bed-time, and a chapter selected at his option; but no teaching of the Scriptures or of the Church dogmas, if we may except the services at Christ Church on Sundays. There may have been such an appointment as chaplain to Christ’s Hospital; if so it was strictly honorary, and kept a profound secret.

By the way, there was some religious improvement to be derived personally through the committing of a misdemeanour, the punishment for which was the getting a chapter in the Bible by heart. I profited by this myself in a curious manner, for, being a very sensitive boy, I made a bad reader, so, when called upon to perform the evening service, I always read the chapter which I knew by heart, and that so impressively and faultlessly, that I came off with much éclat.

I can still repeat that chapter, but no other.