It is small wonder, with these obstacles deliberately set in our own path, that at our school, at any rate, the acquisition of any knowledge of the French tongue was of the very slightest.
I suppose every boy has his school hero. Mine, I remember, was a South American Spaniard named Echenique, whose father had, for a brief space, figured as President of Peru. He was as handsome as Dickens has pictured Steerforth; and afterwards, when I made the acquaintance of David Copperfield, I had cause to recognise with what unerring sympathy and fidelity the greatest of our masters of romance has mirrored the worship of a boy.
Bruce Castle was, in its way, a remarkable school, though it made no pretence of affording any very extended classical education. It was, indeed, designed for boys of the middle class, of whom I was one, but it was remarkable in this sense, that it was governed on principles of conduct that differed materially from those accepted in other schools of the time.
The Hills held peculiar theories upon the education of boys. Corporal punishment was a thing altogether unknown, and the severest penalty even upon the most hardened offender consisted in nothing worse than a course of compulsory exercise. There was a Prefect, specially told off to take out every day, in what in happier circumstances would have been their play-time, those malefactors who had failed to conform to the discipline of the school.
And yet, under this mild régime, discipline was never lax, both Mr. Arthur Hill and his son Dr. Birkbeck Hill, who succeeded him soon after I entered the school, possessing in a rare degree the power of evoking a sense of responsibility in those elder pupils who controlled the school’s conduct. I
G. BIRKBECK HILL
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think only once in the period of my school-days did a case occur in which the headmaster had need to resort to the final penalty of expulsion.