The Parliamentary Debates, of which mention has more than once been made in connection with the District School, took place, on ordinary occasions, in the central part of the school-room; where benches used to be set out opposite to each other, for the temporary accommodation of the speakers. These exercises consisted simply of a memoriter repetition, with some action, of speeches, slightly abridged, which had actually been delivered in a real debate on the floor of the House of Commons. But they served to familiarize Canadian lads with the names and characters of the great statesmen of England, and with what was to be said on both sides of several important public questions; they also probably awakened in many a young spirit an ambition, afterwards gratified, of being distinguished as a legislator in earnest.
On public days the Debates were held up-stairs on a platform at the east end of a long room with a partially vaulted ceiling, on the south side of the building. On this platform the public recitations also took place; and here on some of the anniversaries a drama by Milman or Hannah Moore was enacted. Here we ourselves took part in one of the hymns or choruses of the "Martyr of Antioch."
(Other reminiscences of Dr. Strachan, the District Grammar School, and Toronto generally, are embodied in "The First Bishop of Toronto, a Review and a Study," a small work published by the writer in 1868.)
The immediate successor of Dr. Strachan in the school was Mr. Samuel Armour, a graduate of Glasgow, whose profile resembled that of Cicero, as shewn in some engravings. Being fond of sporting, his excitement was great when the flocks of wild pigeons were passing over the town, and the report of fire-arms in all directions was to be heard. During the hours of school his attention, on these occasions, would be much drawn off from the class-subjects.
In those days there was not a plentiful supply in the town of every book wanted in the school. The only copy that could be procured of a "Eutropius," which we ourselves on a particular occasion required, was one with an English translation at the end. The book was bought, Mr. Armour stipulating that the English portion of the volume should be sewn up; in fact, he himself stitched the leaves together.—In Mr. Armour's time there was, for some reason now forgotten, a barring-out. A pile of heavy wood (sticks of cordwood whole used then to be thrust into the great school-room stove) was built against the door within; and the master had to effect, and did effect, an entrance into his school through a window on the north side. Mr. Armour became afterwards a clergyman of the English Church, and officiated for many years in the township of Cavan.
The master who succeeded Mr. Armour was Dr. Phillips, who came out from England to take charge of the school. He had been previously master of a school at Whitchurch, in Herefordshire. His degree was from Cambridge, where he graduated as a B. A. of Queen's in the year 1805. He was a venerable-looking man—the very ideal, outwardly, of an English country parson of an old type—a figure in the general scene, that would have been taken note of congenially by Fuller or Antony à Wood. The costume in which he always appeared (shovel-hat included), was that usually assumed by the senior clergy some years ago. He also wore powder in the hair except when in mourning. According to the standards of the day, Dr. Phillips was an accomplished scholar, and a good reader and writer of English. He introduced into the school at York the English public-school traditions of the strictest type. His text books were those published and used at Eton, as Eton then was. The Eton Latin Grammar, without note or comment, displaced" Ruddiman's Rudiments"—the book to which we had previously been accustomed, and which really did give hints of something rational underlying what we learnt out of it. Even the Eton Greek Grammar, in its purely mediæval untranslated state, made its appearance: it was through the medium of that very uninviting manual that we obtained our earliest acquaintance with the first elements of the Greek tongue. Our "Palæphatus" and other Extracts in the Græca Minora were translated by us, not into English, but into Latin, in which language all the notes and elucidations of difficulties in that book were given. Very many of the Greek "genitives absolute," we remember, were to be rendered by quum, with a subjunctive pluperfect—an enormous mystery to us at the time. Our Lexicon was Schrevelius, as yet un-Englished. For the Greek Testament we had "Dawson," a vocabulary couched in the Latin tongue, notwithstanding the author's name. The chevaux-de-frise set up across the pathways to knowledge were numerous and most forbidding. The Latin translation, line for line, at the end of Clarke's Homer, as also the Ordo in the Delphin classics, were held to be mischievous aids, but the help was slight that could be derived from them, as the Latin language itself was not yet grasped.
For whatever of the anomalous we moderns may observe in all this, let the good old traditional school-system of England be responsible—not the accomplished and benevolent man who transplanted the system, pure and simple, to Canadian ground. For ourselves: in one point of view, we deem it a piece of singular good fortune to have been subjected for a time to this sort of drill; for it has enabled us to enter with more intelligence into the discussions on English education that have marked the era in which we live. Without this morsel of experience we should have known only by vague report what it was the reviewers and essayists of England were aiming their fulminations against.
Our early recollections in this regard, we treasure up now among our mental curiosities, with thankfulness: just as we treasure up our memories of the few years which, in the days of our youth, we had an opportunity of passing in the old father-land, while yet mail coaches and guards and genuine coachmen were extant there; while yet the time-honoured watchman was to be heard patrolling the streets at night and calling the hours. Deprived of this personal experience, how tamely would have read "School-days at Rugby," for example, or "The Scouring of the White Horse," and many another healthy classic in recent English literature—to say nothing of "The Sketch Book," and earlier pieces, which involve numerous allusions to these now vanished entities!
Moreover, we found that our boyish initiation in the Eton formularies, however little they may have contributed to the intellectual furniture of the mind at an early period, had the effect of putting us en rapport, in one relation at all events, with a large class in the old country. We found that the stock quotations and scraps of Latin employed to give an air of learning to discourse, "to point a moral and adorn a tale," among the country-clergy of England and among members of Parliament of the ante-Reform-bill period, were mostly relics of school-boy lore derived from Eton books. Fragments of the As in præsenti, of the Propria quæ maribus; shreds from the Syntax, as Vir bonus est quis, Ingenuas didicisse, and a score more, were instantly recognized, and constituted a kind of talismanic mode of communication, making the quoter and the hearer, to some extent, akin.
Furthermore; in regard to our honoured and beloved master, Dr. Phillips himself; there is this advantage to be named as enjoyed by those whose lot it was, in this new region, to pass a portion of their impressible youth in the society of such a character: it furnished them with a visible concrete illustration of much that otherwise would have been a vague abstraction in the pictures of English society set before the fancy in the Spectator, for instance, or Boswell's Johnson, and other standard literary productions of a century ago. As it is, we doubt not that the experience of many of our Canadian coevals corresponds with our own. Whenever we read of the good Vicar of Wakefield, or of any similar personage; when in the biography of some distinguished man, a kind-hearted old clerical tutor comes upon the scene, or one moulded to be a college-fellow, or one that had actually been a college-fellow, carrying about with him, when down in the country the tastes and ideas of the academic cloister—it is the figure of Dr. Phillips that rises before the mental vision. And without doubt he was no bad embodiment of the class of English character just alluded to.—He was thoroughly English in his predilections and tone; and he unconsciously left on our plastic selves traces of his own temperament and style.