_To the Editor of the Every-Day Book._
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,” &c.--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 odour
of his merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder
pupils. The school-room stands where it did, looking into a discoloured
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, &c. 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,
whence 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 any thing 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.
O, how I remember our legs wedged in to 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 side-long 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
ink-stands, 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 halfpenny. 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 sate 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, &c.
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.