Memoirs. Charles Godfrey Leland
play with them, I gravely declined, on the ground that I must “Shun bad company”—this phrase being the title of a tract which I had read, and the boys corresponding in appearance to a picture of sundry young ragamuffins on its title-page.
My portrait had been admirably painted in Philadelphia by Mrs. Darley, the daughter of Sully, who, I believe, put the finishing touches to it. When Mr. Walker saw it, he remarked that it looked exactly as if Charley were just about to tell one of his stories. At the time I was reading for the first time “The Child’s Own Book,” an admirable large collection of fairy-tales and strange adventures, which kept me in fairy-land many a time while I lay confined to bed for weeks with pleurisies and a great variety of afflictions, for in this respect I suffered far more than most children.
AT SCHOOL IN NEW ENGLAND.
Mr. Charles W. Greene was a portly, ruddy, elderly Boston gentleman of good family, who had been in early life attached in some diplomatic capacity to a Legation, and had visited Constantinople. I think that he had met with reverses, but having some capital, had been established by his many friends as a schoolmaster. He was really a fine old gentleman, with a library full of old books, and had Madeira in quaint little old bottles, on which, stamped in the glass, one could read Greene 1735. He had a dear little wife, and both were as kind to the boys as possible. Once, and once only, when I had really been very naughty, did he punish me. He took me solemnly into the library (oh, what blessed beautiful reading I often had there!), and, after a solemn speech, and almost with tears in his eyes, gave me three blows with a folded newspaper! That was enough. If I had been flayed with a rope’s end, it would not have had a greater moral effect than it did.
Everything was very English and old-fashioned about the place. The house was said in 1835 to be a hundred and fifty years old, having been one of the aristocratic Colonial manors. One building after another had been added to it, and the immense elms which grew about testified to its age. The discipline or training was eminently adapted to make young gentlemen of us all. There was almost no immorality among the boys, and no fighting whatever. The punishments were bad marks, and for every mark a boy was obliged to go to bed an hour earlier than the others. Extreme cases of wickedness were punished by sending boys to bed in the daytime. When two were in a room, and thus confined, they used to relieve the monotony of their imprisonment by fighting with pillows. Those who had bad marks were also confined within certain bounds. Good boys, or those especially favoured, were allowed to chop kindling wood, or do other light work, for which they were paid three cents per hour.
The boy who was first down in the morning had an apple given to him. This apple was greatly despised by the bolder spirits, who taunted those who arose promptly with a desire to obtain it.
Candour compels me to admit that, as a teacher of learning, Mr. Greene was not pre-eminent. He had two schoolrooms, and employed for each as good a teacher as he could hire. But we were not at all thoroughly well taught, although we were kept longer in the schoolroom than was really good for us; for in summer we had an hour’s study before breakfast, then from nine till twelve, and again from two to five. In winter we had, instead of the early lesson, an hour in the evening. Something was wanting in the system, and I believe that after a year and a half I knew no more, as regards studies, than I did when I first entered.
When a boy’s birthday came, he was allowed to have some special dainty for us all. I was very much disgusted with the Boston boys when they selected pork and beans, which I loathed. Some would choose plum-pudding, others apple-pies. There were always two or three dishes for breakfast, as, for instance, fried potatoes and butter, or cold meat, or pan-dowdy—a kind of coarse and broken up apple-pie—with the tea and bread and coffee, but we could only eat of one. There was rather too much petty infant-schoolery in all this, but we got on very well. Pepper and mustard were forbidden, but I always had a great natural craving for these, and when I asked for them, Mr. Greene would shake his head, but always ended by handing them to me. He was a bon vivant himself, and sympathised with me. There were one or two books also of a rather peppery or spicy nature in his library, such as a collection of rollicking London songs, at which he likewise shook his head when I asked for them—but I got them. There I read for the first time all of Walter Scott’s novels, and the Percy Ballads, and some of Marryatt’s romances, and Hood’s Annual, and Dr. Holmes’s first poems.
There was in Mr. Greene’s library a very curious and now rare work in three volumes, published in Boston at some time in the twenties, called “The Marvellous Depository.” It consisted of old legends of Boston, such as the story of “Peter Rugg,” “Tom Walker and the Devil,” “The Golden Tooth,” “Captain Kidd,” “The Witch Flymaker,” and an admirable collection of unearthly German tales, such as “The Devil’s Elixir,” by Hoffmann (abridged), “Jacob the Bowl,” “Rubezahl,” “Der Freyschutz,” and many more, but all of the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were appalling enough to any one in those days when the supernatural still thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for steady reading, the book was a perfect Sabbat of deviltry and dramatic horrors. The tales were well told, or translated in very simple but vigorous English, and I pored over the collection and got it by heart, and borrowed it, and took it to Dedham in the holidays, and into the woods, where I read it in sunshine or twilight shade by the rippling river, under wild rocks, and so steeped my soul in the supernatural, that I seemed to live a double life. As was natural, my schoolmates read and liked such tales, but they sunk into my very soul, and took root, and grew up into a great overshadowing forest, while with others they were only as dwarf bushes, if they grew at all. All of this—though I did not know it—was unconsciously educating my bewitched mind to a deep and very precocious passion for mediæval and black-letter literature and occult philosophy, which was destined to manifest itself within a few years.
There was another book which greatly influenced my mind and life. I have forgotten the title, but it was a very remarkable collection of curiosities, such as accounts of a family of seven children who had every one some strange peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted mortals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained in a very mysterious way; for one day I found it in my desk, a blessed gift indeed from some unknown friend who had rightly judged of my tastes. This work I literally lived upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my mother’s came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear book under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read some anecdote in it. In after years I found a copy of it in the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia, but I have never seen it elsewhere. [56] I had at Mr. Alcott’s carefully studied all the Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most of them when recalled by some association; also Goldsmith’s “Animated Nature,” the perusal of which latter work was to me as the waving of a forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, too, I had read—in fact I owned—the famous Peter Parley books, which gave me, as they have to thousands of boys, a desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled greatly at finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son Frank, who was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and sunshiny boy, sat by me in school. Frank Goodrich in after life wrote a novel entitled “Flirtation and its Consequences,” of which my brother said, “What are its consequences, Frank; good rich husbands? By no means.” I can remember being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party at the Goodrichs’, and evening visits there with my mother. And I may note by the way, that Frank himself lived abroad in after years; that his father became the American Consul in Paris, and that in 1848 he introduced to the Gouvernement Provisoire the American delegation, of which I was one, and how we were caricatured in the Charivari, in which caricature I was specially depicted, the likeness being at once recognised by everybody, and how I knew nothing of it all till I was told about it by the beautiful Miss Goodrich, Frank’s younger sister, on a Staten Island steamboat, many, many years after. And as a postscript I may add, that it is literally true that before I was quite twenty-three years of age I had been twice caricatured or pictorially jested on in the Munich Fliegende Blätter and twice in the Paris Charivari, which may show that I was to a certain degree about town in those days, as I indeed was.