Memoirs of Eighty Years. Thomas Gordon Hake
with the exception of my dear husband, he is the greatest liar in the county.”
My uncle, Captain Wallinger, would sometimes drive me over to Denton, and we generally reached the parsonage in time to see a general rush of the boys from the house and premises. They were so dirty, so ill-clad and unkempt, they did not dare to face their uncle. Mr. Gwynne was seldom at home; his time was fully employed in keeping appointments with dog-fanciers, horse-dealers, gunsmiths, and the like. He allowed the parish to take care of itself, or to be cared for by the farmers or his wife; and as he preached extempore, he had no sermons to prepare. He was very fluent, which he accounted for by saying that he looked at the congregation as he would do on a field of cabbage-stalks. I have no doubt that, when preaching to others, he was sincere, and that he preached to himself at the same time. But he was not one of those self-martyrs who annoy themselves through life with religious dogmas. Still, he was not a mere agnostic in canonicals, but true to his belief, though he did not avail himself personally of this advantage.
There was not a tree in the village, except a willow that wept over a mud pond on the roadside by the church, as some sanctified parties do over the worthless dead; yet Denton could be compared to nothing but the backwoods of a colony, so rugged an aspect did the Gwynne boys give to the place. They were the talk of the neighbourhood for miles around. They could, nevertheless, satirize and very cleverly mock those who looked down on their doings. One or two of them, once on a visit at the Wallingers’, followed their aunt, by invitation, up to the drawing-room. She knew them of old, and while they ascended the stairs she turned round suddenly, when she met the sight she expected—one was making hideous faces at her, the other was squaring his fists at her back.
“Dear me! You seem amused,” was her only reproof; but she secretly enjoyed it, for everything was grateful to her that stamped others as her inferiors.
IX.
I was now to enter on a new life. My home was to be a monastic one, which three hundred years before had been the residence of mitred abbots. A king had expelled these from their Gothic dominion; another and a better king had given it to his children, among whom in these latter days were Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. And now I was to be there, to tread in their steps, to pace the same ancient cloisters, to catch the same earnest mood in pacing them.
The place was more like a university than a school. Four classical masters to teach us the languages of Athens and Rome; two writing-masters, who themselves wrote like copper-plate, and made us do likewise, besides teaching us figures.
Then we had playgrounds by the acre. One looking on Little Britain through lofty palisades, on which same ground were the residences of the masters and of certain dignitaries, among them that of the treasurer, always a City magnate, and to us inscrutably great. The counting-house was in the grounds, as well as the head and junior master’s houses, together with the office and house of the steward. With all these buildings, the playground was not crowded; and apart, in the large open space on the north side, stood the grammar school.
Now that the institution is to be removed, the character of the boys will change, and all its traditions end. The cloisters and garden within their quadrangle, with the monkish dormitories and other old places, have hitherto shaped the minds of the boys, and this influence will cease, and the feeling will vanish that the school owed its foundation to a king. It was in this feeling that the pride of the boys lay; it indulged them in the belief that they were superior to all other boys. They thought of their royal founder almost as if they were descended from him, and honoured their very dress from its similarity to that which the youthful sovereign himself wore.
In my time the cloisters were Gothic, as originally built; half a century ago they were reconstructed into Saxon or some other contemptible pattern, which has perpetuated the architect’s ignorance, insensibility, and bad taste up to the present. But it signifies little; all will be swept away and covered with shops, where the name of Homer will nevermore be heard. But Parliament, in sympathy with open spaces, may grant the necessary million. Not they!
But nothing was intended to last for ever, if we except—what?
The genius of the place affected me very soon, I felt myself growing into monkhood. I preferred the sombre cloister to the playground, and for that reason I often had to be alone there, not in steady thought, but under involuntary emotions which ran through me like an underground current. Then, the suggestiveness of some of the inscriptions on the walls, thus, “Here lies a benefactor, let no one move his bones.” This I used to regard as a very pathetic appeal, as if the bones were very comfortable where they were yet in constant dread of being disturbed. Had nothing been said they might have been safer from the antiquarian.
But I should mention that the first ordeal I was put through was to fight. Every boy knew whom he could fight; this was required of him for the benefit of his public. A boy named Yardley was selected to test my pugnacious powers. We were of a height, both tall, and of about the same age. We were taken into a private yard. Of fighting I knew nothing; but I had a quick eye and was quick of limb. More than this I had dramatic imagination, and to this it was that I owed my victory. I pictured to myself a tiger springing at his prey, and with this example I leapt at my antagonist from some distance, and my fists covered his face and eyes almost before he knew that I was upon him. He had not a moment’s chance, he floundered each time that I was upon him.
This encounter was never forgotten by the boys, and I was never asked to fight again.
X.
Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright, that the soliloquy and the dagger-scene were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office” were not prominent grievances in Hamlet’s career.
When I was about eleven years old I became owner of Rowe’s “Shakespeare,” which has in it a wonderful little life of the bard. He quotes the marvellous passage beginning with—
“She never told her love,”
and, as far as memory serves me, it was to declare that poetry of such exquisite beauty was not to be found in any other writer, ancient or modern. I have since often thought that nothing in the context fairly led up to an idea of such magnitude, and that the passage was one of Shakespeare’s interpolations. Be this as it may, it had an elevating effect on me which has lasted me for life; it gave me a sense of perfect excellence. It may appear ridiculous to say that it not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but that it depressed me, in turn, with the feeling that I could never equal it, however long I might live!
No other writer at that time affected me similarly, except Virgil, when I came to that passage which depicts the breaking of the waves on the prow of the vessel and the receding of the cities and lands (terræque urbesque recedunt). After we reached our beds at night the boys were wont to “coze” in literary cliques round some favourite tale-teller, who would relate marvellous stories of knights and ladies, with much about genii, fairies, and witches. Though I never heard anything to that effect, I have always thought that Coleridge must have lent himself to such delights for the pleasure of others, and that “Christabel” was unconsciously an outcome of these romantic entertainments.
Many of the boys were great readers of forbidden story, and smuggled books into the school, the penalty of which, on being found out, was a flogging. The books in question were romances of enchanted castles; of beautiful young women, the prisoners of tyrants; of subterraneous passages and solitary cells. I would give much to possess a circulating library of that day. Such a one I found at Seaford, and devoured whenever my holidays came round.