DEAR SIR,--I read your account of this unfortunate being, and his
forlorn piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which
the annals of insignificance excite, till I came to where he says, "I
was bound apprentice to Mr. William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher
of languages and mathematics," etc.; when I started as one does on the
recognition of an old acquaintance in a supposed stranger. This, then,
was that Starkey of whom I have heard my sister relate so many pleasant
anecdotes, and whom, never having seen, I yet seem almost to remember.
For nearly fifty years she had lost all sight of him; and, behold! the
gentle usher of her youth, grown into an aged beggar, dubbed with an
opprobrious title to which he had no pretensions, an object and a
May-game! To what base purposes may we not return! What may not have
been the meek creature's sufferings, what his wanderings, before he
finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old hospitaller of
the almonry of Newcastle? And is poor Starkey dead?
I was a scholar of that "eminent writer" that he speaks of; but Starkey
had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. Still the odor
of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder
pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discolored,
dingy garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's
Buildings. It is still a school,--though the main prop, alas! has fallen
so ingloriously,--and bears a Latin inscription over the entrance in the
lane, which was unknown in our humbler times. Heaven knows what
"languages" were taught in it then! I am sure that neither my sister nor
myself brought any out of it but a little of our native English. By
"mathematics," reader, must be understood "cyphering." It was, in fact,
a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys
in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the
girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening. Now Starkey presided, under
Bird, over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a
respectable singer and performer at Drury-Lane Theatre, and nephew to
Mr. Bird, had succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat,
corpulent, middle-sized man, with something of the gentleman about him,
and that peculiar mild tone--especially while he was inflicting
punishment--which is so much more terrible to children than the angriest
looks and gestures. Whippings were not frequent; but when they took
place, the correction was performed in a private room adjoining, where
we could only hear the plaints, but saw nothing. This heightened the
decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary public chastisement was the
bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost obsolete weapon
now, the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened at the
inflicting end into a shape resembling a pear,--but nothing like so
sweet,--with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a
cupping-glass. I have an intense recollection of that disused instrument
of torture, and the malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness,
with which its strokes were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied
with something ludicrous; but by no process can I look back upon this
blister-raiser with anything but unmingled horror. To make him look more
formidable,--if a pedagogue had need of these heightenings,--Bird wore
one of those flowered Indian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters,
the strange figures upon which we used to interpret into hieroglyphics
of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart, Bird, I believe, was, in
the main, a humane and judicious master.
Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable sloping
desks, where we sat elbowing each other; and the injunctions to attain a
free hand, unattainable in that position; the first copy I wrote after,
with its moral lesson, "Art improves Nature"; the still earlier
pot-hooks and the hangers, some traces of which I fear may yet be
apparent in this manuscript; the truant looks sidelong to the garden,
which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment; the prize for best spelling,
which had almost turned my head, and which to this day I cannot reflect
upon without a vanity which I ought to be ashamed of; our little leaden
inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; the
bright, punctually washed morning fingers, darkening gradually with
another and another ink-spot! What a world of little associated
circumstances, pains, and pleasures, mingling their quotas of pleasure,
arise at the reading of those few simple words,--"Mr. William Bird, an
eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics, in Fetter
Lane, Holborn"!
Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness
in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any
particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between
seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to
promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject
thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive
Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when
he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty--a
life-long poverty, she thinks--could at no time have so effaced the
marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise
strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him, she
thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or
borrowed a half-penny. "If any of the girls," she says, "who were my
school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles,
tidings from the dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a
pang, as I do, at ever having teased his gentle spirit." They were big
girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence
necessary; and however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have
reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days
his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative: for, when he
was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was,
"Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven
can make you!" Once he was missing for a day or two: he had run away. A
little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back,--it was his
father,--and he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping
in a corner, with his hands before his face; and the girls, his
tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to
annoy him. "I had been there but a few months," adds she, "when Starkey,
who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us, as a
profound secret, that the tragedy of 'Cato' was shortly to be acted by
the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation."
That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she
remembers; and but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some
distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous
task of prompter assigned to him; and his feeble voice was heard clear
and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She
describes her recollection of the cast of characters, even now, with a
relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to
Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master
Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a
masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by the head than his
two sons in the scene, etc. In conclusion, Starkey appears to have been
one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient in
understanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He
might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if
Fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that, he
became a Captain,--a by-word,--and lived and died a broken bulrush.
* * * * *
Perhaps the reader would be pleased to see another of Elia's
contributions to Hone's "Every-Day Book." For, though Lamb's articles in
that amusing and very entertaining miscellany are not very highly
finished or very carefully elaborated, they contain many touches of his
delicious humor and exquisite pathos, and are, indeed, replete with the
quaint beauties and beautiful oddities of his very original and very
delightful genius.
Sterne's sentimental description of the Dead Ass is immortal; but few of
the readers and admirers of Charles Lamb know that he, who wrote so
eloquently and pathetically in defence of Beggars and of
Chimney-Sweepers, and who so ably and successfully vindicated the little
innocent hare from the charge--made "by Linnaeus perchance, or
Buffon"--of being a timid animal, indited an essay on the same
long-eared and loud-voiced quadruped.