On king wrote, with his own hand, in the blank space the scriveners had left for the amount of annual endowment, "four thousand marks by the year," and then said, in the hearing of all the privy council, "Lord, I yield thee most hearty thanks that thou hast given me life thus long to finish this work, to the glory of thy name." Not long after, this boy of infinite promise died. King Edward also left to the four great charities six hundred pounds yearly, from the property of the decayed hospital of the Savoy. The citizens pressed forward the good work, and that same year admitted three hundred and sixty children. Christmas Day, 1552, when the lord mayor and aldermen rode to St. Paul's in the afternoon, the ruddy children, in livery of russet cotton, stood in line from St. Lawrence-lane, towards St. Paul's; but the next Easter they were clothed in blue, and have ever since affected that goodly colour. The boys' dress is a corruption of the old monastic garb. The loose-skirted dark blue coat is the monk's tunic; the under coat, or yellow, is the sleeveless underfrock of the friar; the narrow belt is the monkish cord changed to leather; and the neck-bands are the clerical adornments of the Carolan times. The yellow breeches smack of the Georgian epoch, and the little muffin cap, now justly abandoned, is also of great antiquity. The Hospital school soon found benefactors. Sir William Chester, and John Calthorpe, a rich draper, built the walls adjoining St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and vaulted over the City ditch from Aldersgate to Newgate, which before had been a great source of annoyance and illness to the boys. The playground, still called by Blues the "Ditch," marks the line of the old City moat. Another worthy donor was Richard Castle, an industrious shoemaker, generally known as the " Cock of Westminster," from his untiring hammer calling up all the neighbours, summer and winter, before four o'clock in the morning. His steady thrift won him lands and tenements near the old abbey, of the yearly value of fourand-forty pounds, and, as honest Stow says approvingly, "having no children, with the consent of his wife (who survived him, and was a virtuous good woman), he gave the same lands wholly to Christ's Hospital, to the relief of the innocent and fatherless children." The Great Fire, raging up eastward from Pudding-lane, did not forget to look in at Christ's Hospital, injuring the south front, and burning the church in Newgatestreet. In 1672, Charles the Second, roused by Sir Robert Clayton, ordered the Exchequer to pay an annuity of three hundred and seventy pounds ten shillings to the Hospital, and also a seven years' donation of one thousand pounds, an old debt due to the Hospital from the crown, and with much difficulty wrung from it. This same worthy Sir Robert Clayton and Sir Patience Ward took good care this gold went to found a mathematical school, where forty of the Bluecoat boys could study navigation, five of them being examined every six months by the Brethren of the Trinity House, and ten of them being yearly sent to sea. The King's Boys, as they are called, though Sir Robert was the real benefactor, used to be presented to the reigning king on New Year's Day, and afterwards on the queen's birthday, but the quaint custom (duly recorded in a large dull picture by Verro in the great hall) was discontinued during the insanity of George the Third. The boys on the king's foundation wear on their left shoulders a badge, with allegorical figures upon it representing arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, to distinguish them from the Twelves, or lower mathematical school, who wear their badges on the right shoulder. The Twos form another class, originated by a bequest of a Mr. Stock, in 1780, who left three thousand pounds to maintain four boys (those bearing the name of Stock preferred), two to be taught navigation, and two to be brought up to trades. The rebuilding of the south front, in 1675, was attended with interesting circumstances, and proves to us what good, charitable, and wise men some of those old London merchants were. That same worthy Sir Robert Clayton, governor of the Hospital, who extorted the money from Charles the Second, was seized with a severe illness, from which, in spite of many doctors, he recovered. There was faith even in those evil days, and he arose from his sick-bed impressed with the desire to make some acknowledgment to God for his merciful goodness. Consulting his partner, Mr. Morice, and his best friend, Mr. Firmin, he resolved to rebuild the south front of Christ's Hospital, still in ruins from the Great Fire. He kept his name concealed, and spent seven thousand pounds on the good work. When Charles the Second sold himself to France, and, trusting to our enemies, grew more lawless and despotic than ever, he deprived the City of its charter, and removed Sir Robert from the government of the Hospital. Then it was that Mr. Firmin spoke out, and told the time-serving governors what a benefactor they had displaced. In 1680, Sir John Frederick, another City man, gave five thousand pounds to rebuild the great hall at his sole expense. Three years later the governors founded the juvenile school at Hertford, where forty girls are still taught to knit yellow stockings, and four hundred boys learn to wear them. Generosity is contagious, and the old City merchants had large souls. In 1694, Sir John Moore, whose grave statue still smiles benignantly on generation after generation of yellow stockings, founded the writing school at an expense of five thousand pounds. In 1705, Sir Francis Child, the banker at Temple Bar, and a friend of Pope, rebuilt, at his own expense, the ward over the east cloister, as a worn inscription still testifies; and in 1724, Mr. Travers, another generous benefactor, arose, who gave a nautical turn to the school for ever by leaving money enough to educate forty or fifty sons of naval lieutenants. A century after the writing school a new grammar school was built on the north side of the ditch. An infirmary was erected in 1722, and in 1824 the Duke of York laid the first stone of the new hall, which was designed by Mr. Shaw, the architect of St. Dunstan's, and was opened in 1829. This huge chamber, of rather flimsy Tudor, one hundred and eighty-seven feet long, and eighty-one feet wide, stands on the site of the old City wall, and of the refectory of the Grey Friars. At five tables the Blues, whether Grecians, King's Boys, Twelves, or Twos, dine daily. The dietary of the boys is still somewhat monastic; the breakfast, till 1824, was plain bread and beer, and the dinner three times a week consisted only of milk-porridge, rice-milk, and peasoup. The old school rhyme, imperishable as the Iliad, runs: Sunday, all saints; Wednesday, all bowls; Thursday, tough jack; Saturday, pea-soup with bread The boys, like the friars in the old refectory, still eat their meat off wooden trenchers, and ladle their soup with wooden spoons from wooden bowls. The beer is brought up in leather jacks, and retailed in small piggins. Charles Lamb does not speak highly of the food. The small beer was of the smallest, and tasted of its leather re ceptacle. The milk-porridge was blue and tasteless, the pea-soup coarse and choking. The mutton was roasted to shreds. The boiled beef was poisoned with marigolds. Worst of all, the nurses used to carry away boldly, for their own table, one of every two joints scrupulously weighed out by the matrons for the boys' dinners. There was a curious custom at Christ's Hospital in Lamb's time never to touch "gags" (the fat of fresh boiled beef), and a Blue would have blushed, as at the exposure of some heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger. The same, or even greater refinement, was shown in the rejection of certain kinds of sweet cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory penances, these self-denying ordinances? The gag-eater was held as equivalent to a ghoul, loathed, shunned, and insulted. Of a certain juvenile monster of this kind Lamb tells us one of his most charming anecdotes, droll and tender as his own exquisite humour. A gag-eater was observed to carefully gather the fat left on the table, and to secretly stow away the disreputable morsels in the settle at his bedside. A dreadful rumour ran that he secretly devoured them at midnight; but he was watched again and again, and it was not so. At last, on a leave-day, he was marked carrying out of bounds a large blue check handkerchief. That, then, was the accursed thing. It was suggested that he sold it to beggars. Henceforward he moped alone. No one spoke to him. No one played with him. Still he persevered. At last two boys traced him to a large worn-out house inhabited by the very poor, such as then stood in Chancery-lane with open doors and common staircases. The gag-eater stole up four flights of stairs, and the wicket was opened by an old woman meanly clad. Suspicion being now certainty, the spies returned with cruel triumph to tell the steward. He investigated the matter with a kind and patient sagacity, and the result was, that the supposed mendicants turned out to be really the honest parents of the brave gag-eater. "This young stork, at the expense of his good name, had all this while only been feeding the old birds." "The governors on this occasion," says Lamb, "much to their honour, voted a present relief to the family, and presented the boy with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon rash judgment, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal, I believe would not be lost upon his auditory. I had left school then, but I well remember the tall shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite so well by himself as he had done by the old folks." In Lamb's time the punishments at Christ's Hospital were extremely severe. Absconders wore fetters for the first offence. There were regular dungeons then, and runaways and other offenders for the second time were treated as if in Newgate. The cells were little square bins, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket (mattresses were afterwards substituted), and the peep of light, let in askance from prison-like orifices, was barely enough to read by. Here poor children, just torn from their mothers' apron-strings, were locked in alone all day, only seeing the porter who brought the bread and water, but who was not allowed to speak, or the still less agreeable beadle, who came twice a week to call out the pale and scared culprit for his periodical chastisement. At night the poor little wretch was left alone to his terror. One or two instances of lunacy or attempted suicide at length convinced the governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture was dispensed with. This fancy of dungeons for children sprang from Howard's brain, "for which," says Lamb, "(saving the reverence due to holy Paul), methinks I could willingly spit upon his statue." For the third offence the incorrigible offender was exposed in a sort of san-benito, like a lamplighter's cap and jacket. In the hall, in the presence of all his comrades, he received his final punishment. The beadle, in complete uniform, was the executioner. The steward was also present, and two governors attended to see that no stripes fell short. If the beadle turned pale, a glass of brandy was administered to him. The scourging was after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictors accompanied the criminal quite round the hall. The boys were generally too faint to note much, but report went that the victim's naked back grew slashed and livid. The disgraced boy was then handed over in his san benito to his angry friends, or, if an orphan and friendless, to his parish officer, who always waited for such criminals at the hall-gate, to cuff him clear out of Eden. These punishments, monastic in their severity and ruthless in their execution, were evidently founded on the tradition of the school being a charity. When it ceased to be so, such punishments became a mere disgraceful anomaly. But let us get back into the sunshine, the true atmosphere of happy boyhood. Those were merry days with the Blues when, on long summer afternoons, they would sally out to the New River, and, in the fields near Newington, "wanton like young dace," or troutlets in the pool, living for hours in the water, never caring for dressing when they had once stripped. Then there were the ever-repeated visits to the lions in the Tower, where, known to every warder, the Blues, by ancient privilege and courtesy immemorial, had a prescriptive right to admission-not to mention the favourite games of leap-frog and bait the bear, in which the school excelled. There were, too, the solemn, oldfashioned processions through the City at Easter, with the lord mayor's pleasant largess of buns, wine, and sixpence, "with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the dispensing aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the banquet." Nor does the delightful chronicler forget the stately suppings in public, "when the well-lighted hall, and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made the whole look more like a concert or assembly than a scene of a plain breadand-butter collation.' Then there was the grave annual Latin oration upon Saint Matthew's Day (now altered), when the senior Grecian, in quaint Erasmian dress, perched on a table, dilates to mayor and aldermen, who wisely pretend to understand the ancient language spoken in the fine fluent continental manner, the praises of those patriarch Blues: the learned Cam. den and pious Stillingfleet, or oftener Joshua Barnes, the editor of Euripides in Queen Anne's time, and perennial Markland, a later and equally eminent Greek critic. The hymns and anthems and the well-toned organ fitly heralded the festive joys of Christmas, "when," as Lamb says, 'the richest of us would club our stock to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished with logs, and the penniless and he that could contribute nothing partook in all the mirth, and in some of the substantialities, of the feasting." Nor does the immortaliser of the fine old school 66 forget the nightly Advent carols sung at ten P.M., and for which Lamb, when he was sent to bed at seven, used to lie awake to hear the fresh young voices of the Grecians and monitors, till he felt transported to the fields of Bethlehem, and the song sung by angels' voices to the shepherds. But again to tune our harps, as the bigger wigged poets say, to graver strains. The school in the old times was, like the discipline, Spartan enough. The King's Boys, roughly nurtured by William Wales, a stern, north country sailor, who had sailed with Captain Cook, grew up hardy, brutal, graceless, often wicked, and were the ceaseless terror of the younger boys, who ran shuddering from the cloisters whenever the cry was raised, "The first order is coming.' These janizaries of the school were the athletes of the Hospital; they never moved out of the way for any one, and many a Cheapside apprentice and greasy butcher-boy of Newgate Market felt the impetus of their fists, and had ocular demonstration of their stubborn valour. The system of fagging, in its very worst form, prevailed, or rather raged, in Christ's Hospital at the end of the last century. The young brutes, as Lamb justly calls them, used to wake the last eleven lads in the dormitory in the coldest winter nights (time after time), to thrash them with leather thongs because there had been talking heard after they were gone to bed. The same tyranny drove the younger lads away from the fires in snow time, and, under the heaviest penalties, forbade them to drink water during the summer nights. One monitor (afterwards naturally enough seen on the hulks) actually branded, with a red-hot iron, a small boy who had offended him, and nearly starved forty minor lads by exacting from them, daily, half their bread to pamper a young ass, whom, with the connivance of his flame, the nurse's daughter, he had contrived to smuggle in and stable on the leads of the ward. Of course Christ's Hospital had ghosts. How could an old friary, where wicked Queen Isabella, the tormentor of her husband, lay, be without them? Yet were they of a lowly kind. In one of the cloisters was a hollow in a stone, which used in Leigh Hunt's time to be attributed by some to the angry stamping of the ghost of a beadle's wife. There was also a traditional horror in the school of a mysterious being only seen at night, and called the "Fazzer." Like the African Mumbo Jumbo, the fazzer was perfectly known to be only one of the big boys disguised, yet an epidemical fear invested him with somewhat of a supernatural character. The fazzer's amiable habit was to pull small boys out of bed, or to fazz (pull) their hair in a goblin way. The fazzer always disguised his face, and sometimes.appeared in his white shirt, dumb and motionless, in the moonlight. "One time," says Leigh Hunt, in his agreeable way, "I saw this phenomenon under circumstances more than usually unearthly. It was a fine moonlight night. I was then in a ward the casement of which looked on the churchyard. My bed was under the second window from the east, not far from the statue of Edward the Sixth. Happening to wake in the middle of the night, and cast up my eyes, I saw on a bedstead near me, and in one of the casements, a figure in its shirt, which I took for the fazzer. The room was silent, the figure motionless. I fancied that half the boys in the ward were glaring at it without daring to speak. It was poor C— (who afterwards went mad) gazing at that lunar orb, which might afterwards be supposed to have malignantly fascinated him." The upper grammar master in the great times of Coleridge, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, was a cruel pedant named Boyer. He was a good verbal scholar, and a conscientions teacher, but of a hard, passionate nature, ruling by terror, and disdaining love. In one of the many pictures left us of this school in its old days, he is sketched as a short punchy man, with large face and hands, long plebeian upper lip, close cruel piggish eyes, veiled by spectacles, and an aquiline nose. He dressed in black, and wore a powdered wig; his sleeves were short, as if to leave his strong hands more play for flogging, and he wore very tight grey worsted stockings over what Leigh Hunt playfully calls "little balustrade legs." His weak side was carpentering; he generally carried a carpenter's rule in an express side-pocket. His favourite oath of vengeance was, "Odd's my life, sirrah." "He had two wigs," Lamb says, "both pedantic, but of different shades. The one serene and smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day; the other, an old, discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor, trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips), with a Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me ?' In gentler moments, when satiated by heavy doses of Latin and much flogging, he was known to whip a boy and read the parliamentary debates at the same time, a paragraph and a lash alternately. When you were out in your lessons, he turned upon you a round, staring, blank eye, like that of a fish, and he had a spiteful way of pinching under the chin, and lifting boys off the ground by the lobes of their ears. Coleridge describes Boyer coming up to him as he was crying, the first day of his return after the holidays, and saying: 66 Boy! the school is your father. Boy! the school is your mother. Boy! the school is your brother. The school is your sister. The school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations. Boy! let's have no more crying." Boyer used to send to Field, the quiet, idle, gentleman-like under-master, to borrow a birch; then remark, with a sardonic grin, to one of his satellites, "How neat and fresh the twigs look.' When the tyrant was on his death-bed, Coleridge said of him with droll pity, "May all his faults be forgiven, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, that there may be no foundation for future reproach as to his sublunary infirmities." As for the second master, Field, his boys, of whom Lamb was, were happy as birds, and spent their time (for they never got beyond Phædrus) in making paper sundials, weaving cat's- cradles, playing at French and English, or making peas dance on the end of a tin pipe. The funerals in the cloisters in Lamb's time must have been very impressive; and Lamb specially mentions the interment of the portly steward Perry, when nearly every one of the five hundred boys wore a black ribbon, or something to denote respect. Of the greatest of the three great modern worthies of Christ's Hospital, Coleridge, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, we have a fine Vandyck sketch from the hand of the second. "Come back into memory," says Elia, in one of his noblest and highest moods, "as thou wert in the springtime of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee, the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-logician, metaphysician, bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mys teries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years that waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar; while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy! Many were the 'wit combats' (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le Grice, which, too, I beheld, like a great Spanish galleon and an English man-of-war." Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performance. C. V. L., like the English manof-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. Lamb himself, who had left just before Leigh Hunt entered the school, is described by the latter, as seen by him when revisiting the school. His walk was sidling and peculiar, and the boys, susceptible of his quaintness of manner and costume, called him " Guy." Lamb has left two splendid essays on his old school. In one he takes the rose-coloured side, and writes as a rich man's son; in the second, bantering himself, he writes as if poor, and touches on some faults and unhappinesses of the place. Like Lamb, Leigh Hunt, from having a slight stammer, never rose to be one of the supreme Grecians, and did not, therefore, pass on to the university. He was at Christ's Hospital just the loving, impressionable creature that he afterwards continued-sturdy for the right, devoted in his friendship, and full of sensitive impulses. Among the contemporaries of Lamb were Thomas Fanshaw Middleton, afterwards the scholarly Bishop of Calcutta ; Richards, author of a spirited Oxford prize poem, the Aboriginal Britons; Barnes, afterwards editor for so long of the Times, a man who, but for dreaming over Fielding, and chatting over his glass, might have done greater things. Nor can we close the list of Leigh Hunt's contemporaries without mentioning that most clever and ingenious scholar, Mitchell, the translator of Aristophanes. There is a curious history attached to the portrait of a Mr. St. Arnaud, the grandfather of a benefactor to the Hospital, which hangs in the treasury. By the terms of St. Arnaud's will, all the money he left passes to the University of Oxford from the Bluecoat School if this picture is ever lost or given away, and the same deprivation occurs if this picture is not produced |