SOON after I was seven years old, I went to what was then, and is still,
one of the most favoured of preparatory schools—Temple Grove—at East
Sheen, then kept by Dr. Pinkney. I was taken thither from Holkham by a
great friend of my father’s, General Sir Ronald Ferguson, whose statue
now adorns one of the niches in the façade of Wellington College. The
school contained about 120 boys; but I cannot name any one of the lot who
afterwards achieved distinction. There were three Macaulays there,
nephews of the historian—Aulay, Kenneth, and Hector. But I have lost
sight of all.
Temple Grove was a typical private school of that period. The type is
familiar to everyone in its photograph as Dotheboys Hall. The progress
of the last century in many directions is great indeed; but in few is it
greater than in the comfort and the cleanliness of our modern schools.
The luxury enjoyed by the present boy is a constant source of
astonishment to us grandfathers. We were half starved, we were
exceedingly dirty, we were systematically bullied, and we were flogged
and caned as though the master’s pleasure was in inverse ratio to ours.
The inscription on the threshold should have been ‘Cave canem.’
We began our day as at Dotheboys Hall with two large spoonfuls of sulphur
and treacle. After an hour’s lessons we breakfasted on one bowl of
milk—‘Skyblue’ we called it—and one hunch of buttered bread, unbuttered
at discretion. Our dinner began with pudding—generally rice—to save the
butcher’s bill. Then mutton—which was quite capable of taking care of
itself. Our only other meal was a basin of ‘Skyblue’ and bread as
before.
As to cleanliness, I never had a bath, never bathed (at the school)
during the two years I was there. On Saturday nights, before bed, our
feet were washed by the housemaids, in tubs round which half a dozen of
us sat at a time. Woe to the last comers! for the water was never
changed. How we survived the food, or rather the want of it, is a
marvel. Fortunately for me, I used to discover, when I got into bed, a
thickly buttered crust under my pillow. I believed, I never quite made
sure, (for the act was not admissible), that my good fairy was a
fiery-haired lassie (we called her ‘Carrots,’ though I had my doubts as
to this being her Christian name) who hailed from Norfolk. I see her
now: her jolly, round, shining face, her extensive mouth, her ample
person. I recall, with more pleasure than I then endured, the cordial
hugs she surreptitiously bestowed upon me when we met by accident in the
passages. Kind, affectionate ‘Carrots’! Thy heart was as bounteous as
thy bosom. May the tenderness of both have met with their earthly
deserts; and mayest thou have shared to the full the pleasures thou wast
ever ready to impart!
There were no railways in those times. It amuses me to see people
nowadays travelling by coach, for pleasure. How many lives must have
been shortened by long winter journeys in those horrible coaches. The
inside passengers were hardly better off than the outside. The corpulent
and heavy occupied the scanty space allotted to the weak and
small—crushed them, slept on them, snored over them, and monopolised the
straw which was supposed to keep their feet warm.
A pachydermatous old lady would insist upon an open window. A wheezy
consumptive invalid would insist on a closed one. Everybody’s legs were
in their own, and in every other body’s, way. So that when the distance
was great and time precious, people avoided coaching, and remained where
they were.
For this reason, if a short holiday was given—less than a week
say—Norfolk was too far off; and I was not permitted to spend it at
Holkham. I generally went to Charles Fox’s at Addison Road, or to
Holland House. Lord Holland was a great friend of my father’s; but, if
Creevey is to be trusted—which, as a rule, my recollection of him would
permit me to doubt, though perhaps not in this instance—Lord Holland did
not go to Holkham because of my father’s dislike to Lady Holland.
I speak here of my introduction to Holland House, for although Lady
Holland was then in the zenith of her ascendency, (it was she who was the
Cabinet Minister, not her too amiable husband,) although Holland House
was then the resort of all the potentates of Whig statecraft, and Whig
literature, and Whig wit, in the persons of Lord Grey, Brougham, Jeffrey,
Macaulay, Sydney Smith, and others, it was not till eight or ten years
later that I knew, when I met them there, who and what her Ladyship’s
brilliant satellites were. I shall not return to Lady Holland, so I will
say a parting word of her forthwith.
The woman who corresponded with Buonaparte, and consoled the prisoner of
St. Helena with black currant jam, was no ordinary personage. Most
people, I fancy, were afraid of her. Her stature, her voice, her beard,
were obtrusive marks of her masculine attributes. It is questionable
whether her amity or her enmity was most to be dreaded. She liked those
best whom she could most easily tyrannise over. Those in the other
category might possibly keep aloof. For my part I feared her patronage.
I remember when I was about seventeen—a self-conscious hobbledehoy—Mr.
Ellice took me to one of her large receptions. She received her guests
from a sort of elevated dais. When I came up—very shy—to make my salute,
she asked me how old I was. ‘Seventeen,’ was the answer. ‘That means
next birthday,’ she grunted. ‘Come and give me a kiss, my dear.’ I, a
man!—a man whose voice was (sometimes) as gruff as hers!—a man who was
beginning to shave for a moustache! Oh! the indignity of it!
But it was not Lady Holland, or her court, that concerned me in my school
days, it was Holland Park, or the extensive grounds about Charles Fox’s
house (there were no other houses at Addison Road then), that I loved to
roam in. It was the birds’-nesting; it was the golden carp I used to
fish for on the sly with a pin; the shying at the swans, the hunt for
cockchafers, the freedom of mischief generally, and the excellent
food—which I was so much in need of—that made the holiday delightful.
Some years later, when dining at Holland House, I happened to sit near
the hostess. It was a large dinner party. Lord Holland, in his
bath-chair (he nearly always had the gout), sat at the far end of the
table a long way off. But my lady kept an eye on him, for she had caught
him drinking champagne. She beckoned to the groom of the chambers, who
stood behind her; and in a gruff and angry voice shouted: ‘Go to my Lord.
Take away his wine, and tell him if he drinks any more you have my orders
to wheel him into the next room.’ If this was a joke it was certainly a
practical one. And yet affection was behind it. There’s a tender place
in every heart.
Like all despots, she was subject to fits of cowardice—especially, it was
said, with regard to a future state, which she professed to disbelieve
in. Mr. Ellice told me that once, in some country house, while a fearful
storm was raging, and the claps of thunder made the windows rattle, Lady
Holland was so terrified that she changed dresses with her maid, and hid
herself in the cellar. Whether the story be a calumny or not, it is at
least characteristic.
After all, it was mainly due to her that Holland House became the focus
of all that was brilliant in Europe. In the memoirs of her father—Sydney
Smith—Mrs. Austin writes: ‘The world has rarely seen, and will rarely, if
ever, see again all that was to be found within the walls of Holland
House. Genius and merit, in whatever rank of life, became a passport
there; and all that was choicest and rarest in Europe seemed attracted to
that spot as their natural soil.’
Did we learn much at Temple Grove? Let others answer for themselves.
Acquaintance with the classics was the staple of a liberal education in
those times. Temple Grove was the _atrium_ to Eton, and gerund-grinding
was its _raison d’être_. Before I was nine years old I daresay I could
repeat—parrot, that is—several hundreds of lines of the Æneid. This, and
some elementary arithmetic, geography, and drawing, which last I took to
kindly, were dearly paid for by many tears, and by temporarily impaired
health. It was due to my pallid cheeks that I was removed. It was due
to the following six months—summer months—of a happy life that my health
was completely restored.