Poor old Chaunters! We were not to have many more meetings. The next year, on my arrival at the rectory, I was warned that there was something special in store for me, and in due course the secret was revealed. Some old friend had bequeathed to him two dozen of 1847 port, and a bottle had been decanted with extraordinary care. I own I find it difficult to drink port in the afternoon, but such nectar could not come at a wrong time. The Rector was with difficulty induced to join me: he would have just one glass to see whether it had “suffered by translation”; and just another glass because he wouldn’t see me again for a whole year; and the merest drop more to drink Church and Queen, because we had forgotten that ceremony. As I was going away he charged me to remember that the ’47 was to be kept for me: “no one else came to see the old man,” and with his gout he couldn’t touch it himself: so long as the old man lasted there was a bottle for me.
Alas for good intentions! Next October, when I came to the rectory, the Rector had had the gout, and the port was gone.
It was not on that account, but because of the increase of work which necessitated devolution of the smaller schools to the sub-inspectors, that in the following year I had to delegate the inspection of Chaunters’ school to my senior colleague. But I charged him to deal gently with the old man; to lunch with him; to tell him about the anthems at the cathedral; and specially to be careful to introduce into his conversation such fragments of Latin as would give it a scholarly flavour without straining his host’s classical memory; and to this end we compiled a list of phrases, such as bona fide, in situ, in statu quo, timeo Danaos, festina lente, profanum vulgus, and others which I forget.
It was a great success. The Rector wrote to me, expressing his sincere regret that I could not come; but thanking me for sending so excellent a substitute: it was rare, he remarked, in these days to meet a man whose conversation gave such ample proof of a liberal education.
I think I never saw him again: his death occurred soon afterwards, and I trust his nephew “carved his epitaph aright.” Like Browning’s Bishop he would have liked Latin; but he would not have cared whether it were Tully or Ulpian, so long as it was familiar; and he would have given a preference to examples from the Latin Grammar. It would have sufficed, I think, to begin with “Hic jacet,” and to wind up with “Multis ille bonis flebilis occidit”; and I should heartily have appended “Nulli flebilior quam MIHI.”
FOOTNOTES:
[32] “Hoo,” or more properly “oo,” in the Counties Palatine stands for “she” or “her.”
CHAPTER XXI
R.C.s
“A single life doth well with churchmen, for charity will hardly water the ground, where it must first fill a pool.”—Bacon.