RALPH LECTURETH ON DIVINITY AND LITTLE BOYS' NETHER GARMENTS--DESPONDETH
EXCEEDINGLY--AND BEING THE WEAKEST GOETH TO THE WALL, AND THERE FINDETH
CONSOLATION--AN OLD FRIEND WITH AN OLD FACE AND EXCELLENT PROVENT.
The next morning I arose the possessor of eight shillings, a box of
playthings, a plum-cake, and a heavy heart. It is most true, that which
Wordsworth hath said or sung, "The boy's the father of the man." When I
mingled with my schoolmates, and the unexpected possession of my various
wealth had transpired, I found many of them very kind and _fatherly_
indeed, for they borrowed my money, ate my cake, broke my playthings,
and my heart they left just in the same state as it as before.
But I will no longer dwell upon the portraiture of that saddest of all
created things, the despised of many. I was taught the hard lesson of
looking upon cruelty as my daily bread, tears as my daily drink, and
scorn as my natural portion. Had not my heart hardened, it must have
broken. But before I leave what I call the desponding epoch of my
schoolboy days, I must not omit to mention a species of impious
barbarity, that had well-nigh alienated my heart for ever from religion,
and which made me for the time detest the very name of church.
Christianity is most eminently a religion of kindness; and through the
paths of holy love only, should the young heart be conducted to the
throne of grace, for we have it from the highest authority that the
worship of little children is an acceptable offering and may well mingle
with the sweetest symphonies that ascend from the lips of seraphs to the
footstool of the Everlasting. Our God is not a God of terrors, and when
he is so represented, or is made so by any flint-hearted pedagogue to
the infant pupil, that man has to answer for the almost unpardonable sin
of perilling a soul. Let parents and guardians look to it. Let them
mark well the unwilling files that are paraded by boarding-school
keepers into the adjacent church or chapel, bringing a mercenary puff up
to the very horns of the altar, and let them inquire how many are then
flogged, or beaten, or otherwise evil-entreated, because they have
flagged in an attention impossible in the days of childhood, and have
not remembered a text, perhaps indistinctly or inaudibly given--let
those parents or guardians, I say, inquire, and if but one poor youth
has so suffered, let them be fully assured that that master, whatever
may be his diligence, whatever may be his attainments, however high his
worldly character may stand, is not fit to be the modeller of the
youthful mind, and only wants the opportunity to betray that bigotry
which would gladly burn his dissenting neighbour at the stake, or lash a
faith, with exquisite tortures, into the children of those whom, in his
saintly pride, he may call heretical.
At church we occupied, at least, one-third of the whole of one side of
the gallery. Two hundred and fifty boys and young men, with their
attending masters and ushers, could not but fill a large space, and, of
course, would form no unimportant feature in the audience. Mr Root and
the little boys were always placed in the lower and front seats. There
we sat, poor dear little puppets, with our eyes strained on the
prayerbooks, always in the wrong place, during the offertory, and, after
the sermon had begun, repeating the text over and over again, whilst the
preaching continued, lest we should forget it; whilst all this time the
bigger boys in the rear were studying novels, or playing at odd-and-even
for nuts, marbles, or halfpence. I well know that the mathematical
master used, invariably, to solve his hard problems on fly-leaves in his
prayer-book during service, for I have repeatedly seen there his
laborious calculations in minutely small figures; and he never opened
his prayer-book but at church--as perhaps he thought, with the old woman
of Smollett, that it was a species of impiety to study such works
anywhere else. Whilst all this was going on in the back rows, Mr Root,
in the full-blown glory of his Sunday paraphernalia, and well powdered,
attended exclusively to the holiness and devout comportment of his
little chapter of innocents. Tablet in hand, every wandering look was
noted down; and alas the consequences to me were dreadfully painful.
The absolution absolved me not. The "Te Deum laudamus" was to me more a
source of tears than of praise; and the "O be joyful in the Lord" has
often made me intensely sorrowful in the school-room. In all honesty, I
don't think that, for a whole half-year, I once escaped my Sunday
flogging. It came as regularly as the baked rice-puddings. I began to
look upon the thing as a matter of course; and, if any person should
doubt the credibility of this, or any other account of these my
school-boy days, happily there are several now living who can vouch for
its veracity, and if I am dared to the proof by anyone by whose
conviction I should feel honoured, that proof will I most certainly
give.
I have stated all this, from what I believe to be a true reverence for
worship, to make the offices of religion a balm and a blessing, to prove
that there is a cherishing warmth in the glory of light that surrounds
the throne of Exhaustless Benevolence, and that the Deity cannot be
worthily called upon by young hearts stricken by degrading fears, and
fainting under a Moloch-inspired dread. Notwithstanding my eccentric
life, I have ever been the ardent, the unpretending, though the unworthy
adorer of the Great Being, whose highest attribute is the "Good." I
have had reason to be so.
The man who has acknowledged his Creator amidst his most stupendous
works, who has recognised his voice in the ocean storm, who has
confessed his providence amidst the slaughter of battle, and witnessed
the awful universality of that adoration that is wafted to Him from all
nations, under all forms, from the simple smiting of the breast of the
penitent solitary one, to the sublime pealings of the choral hymn,
buoyed upon the resounding notes of the thunder-tongued organ in the
high and dim cathedral,--the man who has witnessed and acutely felt all
this, and has no feelings of piety, or deference to religion, must be
endued with a heart hardened beyond the flintiness, as the Scriptures
beautifully express it, "of the nether millstone."
But my _forte_ is not the serious. I am intent, and quiet, and
thoughtful, only under the influence of great enjoyment. When I have
most cause to deem myself blessed, or to call myself triumphant, it is
then that I am stricken with a feeling of undesert, that I am grave with
humility, or sad with the thought of human instability. But, on the eve
of battle, on the yardarm in the tempest, or amidst the dying in the
pest-house, say, O ye companions of my youth, whose jest was the most
constant, whose laugh the loudest? Yet the one feeling was not real
despondence, nor the other real courage. In the first place, it is no
more than the soul looking beyond this world for the real; in the
second, she is trifling in this world with the ideal. However, as in
these pages I intend to attempt to be tolerably gay, it may be fairly
presumed that I am very considerably unhappy, and dull, perhaps, as the
perusal of these memoirs may make my readers.
As such great pains were _taken_, at least by me, in my religious
education, it is not to be wondered at that I should not feel at all
sedentary on the Sunday afternoons after church-time. In fact, I
affected any position rather than the sitting one. But all the Sundays
were not joyless to me. One, in particular, though the former part of
it had been passed in sickening fear, and the middle in torturing pain,
its termination was marked with a heartfelt joyousness, the cause of
which I must record as a tribute of gratitude due to one of the "not
unwashed," but muddy-minded multitude.
I was stealing along mournfully under the play-ground wall with no hasty
or striding step, not particularly wishing any rough or close contact of
certain parts of my dress with my person, my passing schoolmates looking
upon me in the manner that Shakespeare so beautifully describes the
untouched deer regard the stricken hart. My soul was very heavy, and
full of dark wonder. The sun was setting, and, to all living, it is
either a time of solemn peace, or of instinctive melancholy when looked
upon by the solitary one. Of a sudden I was roused from my gloom by the
well-known, yet long missed shout of "Ralph! Ralph!" and, looking up, I
discovered the hard-featured, grinning physiognomy of Joe Brandon,
actually beaming with pleasure, on the top of the wall. How glad he
was! How glad I was! He had found me! Instead of seeking the Lord in
his various conventicles on the Sunday, he had employed that day,
invariably, after I had been taken from his house, in reconnoitring the
different boarding-schools in the vicinity, and at some distance from
the metropolis. To this, no doubt, he was greatly instigated by the
affection of my nurse, but I give his own heart the credit of its being
a labour of love. The wall being too high to permit us to shake hands,
at my earnest entreaty, he went round to the front; but, after having
made known his desire,--literally, "a pampered menial drove him from the
door." Well, the wall, if not open to him, was still before and above
him, and he again mounted it. Our words were few, as the boys began to
cluster around me. He let drop to me fourpence-halfpenny, folded in a
piece of brown paper, and disappeared. Oh, how I prize that pilgrim
visit! Forget it, I never can! That meeting was to me a one bright
light on my dark and dreary path. It enabled me to go forward; there
was not much gloom between me and happier days--perhaps the light of joy
that that occurrence shed enabled me to pass over the trial. It might
have been that, at that period, I could have borne no more, and should
have sunk under my accumulated persecutions. I will not say that so it
was, for there is an elasticity in early youth that recovers itself
against much--yet I was at that time heavy indeed with exceeding
hopelessness. All I can say to the sneerer is, I wish, that at the next
conclave of personages who may be assembled to discuss the destinies of
nations, there may be as much of the milk of human kindness and right
feelings among them as there was between me and the labouring sawyer,
Joe Brandon, the one being at the top, and the other at the bottom of
the wall.
The next Sunday, Brandon was again on the wall with a prodigious
plum-cake. A regular cut-and-come-again affair: it fell to the ground
with a heaviness of sound that beat the falling of Corporal Trim's hat
all to ribbons. To be sure, the corporal's fell as if there had been a
quantity of "clay kneaded in the crown of it," whilst mine was kneaded
with excellent dough. The Sunday after, there was the same appearance,
varied with gingerbread, and then--for years, I neither saw, nor heard
of him. Poor Joseph was threatened with the constable, and was put to
no more expense for cakes for his foster-son.