A Morning's Walk from London to Kew

by Sir R. Phillips

I learnt with regret that the improved Psalmody of Gardiner had not yet been introduced into the service of this church, and that the drawling-monkish tunes are preferred to those sublime passages of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, which that gentleman has so ingeniously adapted to the Psalms of David. It might have been expected that every church in the enlightened vicinage of the metropolis would, ere this, have adopted a means of exalting the spirit of devotion, which has received the high sanction of the Regent and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which exhibits among its patrons nearly the whole bench of bishops. I suspect, indeed, that the shops of the mere trading Methodists attract as many auditors by their singing as by their preaching; consequently, enlarged churches and improved psalmody would serve to protect many of the people from becoming the dupes of that CANT and CRAFT of FANATICISM, which is so disgraceful to the age, so dangerous to religion, and so inimical to the progress of truth and knowledge.

Viewing this church in a statistical point of view, I counted 85 pews, capable of holding about 550 persons, and I learnt that about 100 charity-school and other children sit in the aisles. Hence, perhaps, 600 attend each service; and, if 300 attend in the afternoon who do not in the morning, then we may calculate the attendants on the church-service, in this parish, at about 900. The population is, however, about 2100; from which, deducting 300 children, it will appear that half the inhabitants are dissenters, methodists, or indifferents. Of these, about 200 belong to a chapel for the Independents, and perhaps others attend favourite preachers in the vicinity. Such are the religious divisions of this parish; yet, as there are no manufactories, and the clergyman is well respected, the attendants on the Church may be considered as above even the general average of the Establishment in other parishes.

I was induced to ascend into the belfry, where I found ropes for eight bells—those musical tones, which extend the sphere of the Church’s influence, by associations of pleasure, devotion, or melancholy, through the surrounding country. What an effective means of increasing the sympathies of religion, and exciting them by the fire-sides, and on the very pillows of the people! Who that, as bride or bridegroom, has heard them, in conjunction with the first joys of wedded love, does not feel the pleasurable associations of their lively peal on other similar events? Who, that through a series of years has obeyed their calling chime on the Sabbath morning, as the signal of placid feelings towards his God, and his assembled neighbours, does not hear their weekly monotony with devotion? And who is there that has performed the last rites of friendship, or the melancholy duties of son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, brother, or sister, under the recurring tones of the awful Tenor, or more awful Dumb-peal, and does not feel, at every recurrence of the same ceremony, a revival of his keen, but unavailing, regrets for the mouldering dead? Thus does art play with our ingenuous feelings; and thus is an importance given to the established Church in the concords of man’s nervous system, which renders it unnecessary for its priesthood to be jealous or invidious towards those who dissent from its doctrines for conscience sake. In truth, such is the imposing attitude of the national Church, that, if the members leave the Church to sit under strange pulpits, the incumbent should suspect his doctrines, his zeal, his talents, or his charity in the collection of his dues and tithes. What but gross misconduct in the priest—what but doctrines incompatible with the intelligence of an enlightened age—or what but the odious impost of tithes-in-kind, can separate the people from the building where they first heard the name of God, and which contains the bones of their ancestors?

In conceding to the influence of bells so many services to the establishment which monopolizes them, I must, however, not forget that the power they possess over the nerves, however agreeable or interesting in health, is pernicious, and often fatal, when the excitability is increased by disease? What medicine can allay the fever which is often exasperated by their clangor? What consoling hope can he feel who, while gasping for breath, or fainting from debility, hears a knell, in which he cannot but anticipate his own?—Hundreds are thus murdered in great cities every year by noisy peals or unseasonable knells. Sleep, the antidote of diseased action, is destroyed by the one; and Hope, the first of cordials, is extinguished by the other. The interesting sympathies and services of bells appear to be, therefore, too dearly purchased. In all countries, death-knells and funeral-tollings ought to be entirely abolished; and even the ringing of peals should be liable to be interdicted, at the request of any medical practitioner. Nor ought the sanctuaries of the professed religion of peace and charity to be disgraced at any time, by celebrations of those murderous conflicts between man and man, which too often take place, to gratify the malice and pride of WEAK PRINCES, or sustain the avarice and false calculations of their WICKED MINISTERS. Even in justifiable wars of self-defence, such as the resistance to the unprincipled invasion of William the Norman, or of the English people against the tyrannical Charles, the church of Christ ought only to mourn at the unhappy price of the most decisive victory.

The solemn tick of the parish-clock reminding me of the progress of the day, I hastened down the worn stairs, which indicated the busy steps of generations long returned to their gazeous elements, into the church-yard. The all-glorious sun, mocking the fate of mortals, still shed a fascinating lustre on the southern fields, and reminded me, that the village on my left was the eastern Sheen, so called from the very effect which I witnessed. Several pretty mansions skirted the fields, and the horizon was beautifully filled by the well-grown woods of Richmond Park, the walls of which were but half a mile distant. The path across the meadow would have tempted me to enjoy its rare beauty; but my course lay westward, and I turned from this brilliant scenery of Nature to the homely creations of man in the village street.

Contemptibly as I think of the morals of Dee, yet, as an able mathematician and an extraordinary character, I could not resist my curiosity to view the house in which he resided. It is now a Ladies’ boarding-school; and, on explaining the purpose of my visit, I was politely shown through the principal rooms. In two hundred years, it has of course undergone considerable alterations: yet parts of it still exhibit the architecture of the sixteenth century. From the front windows I was shown Dee’s garden, on the other side of the road, still attached to the house; down the central path of which, through iron gates, yet standing, Queen Elizabeth used to walk from her carriage in the Sheen road, to consult the wily conjurer on affairs of love and war.

I found the gouvernante of this establishment perfectly intelligent on the subject of her proper business. Her unaffected politeness induced me to take a chair and recruit my strength with a glass of water and a crust of bread. We talked on Education, and particularly on that of females. She agreed that a female pedant is at best a ridiculous character, and that retired graces, personal accomplishments, and useful domestic acquirements, are best adapted to the destiny of woman. We approved of dancing, because it affords social recreation and wholesome exercise; and of music, for its own sake, and as a means of relieving the monotony of the domestic circle in long evenings and bad weather. She considered the study of a foreign language to be partly necessary, as a means of acquiring exact ideas of the science of language generally; and we agreed in preferring the French, for its conversational powers and its universality as a living tongue. Nor did we differ in our views of the necessity of making the future companions of well-educated men intimately acquainted with the leading facts of geography and history, and with the general principles of natural philosophy and chemistry. I ventured to suggest, that the great objection to female boarding-schools, the neglect of the arts of housewifery might be obviated, by causing two of the pupils, of a certain age, to assist in the management of the store-room and kitchen for a week in rotation, during which they should fill up the items of the house-keeper’s account-book, and make purchases of the family tradesmen. At this the good lady smiled—Ah, sir, (said she,) yours is a plausible theory, but not one mother in ten would tolerate a practice which they would consider as a degradation of their daughters.—But, (said I,) is not household economy the chief pursuit of nine of every ten of the sex; and is not the system of education incomplete, if not a waste of time, which does not embrace that pursuit as part of the plan? And just for that reason, (said she,) that one in every ten may not have occasion to concern herself in household affairs, the whole avoid them as degrading—each looks for the prize in the lottery of fortune, and therefore all pitch themselves too high—and it would be offensive to the pride and vanity of parents, to suppose that their daughter might have occasion to know any thing of the vulgar employments of the house and the kitchen.—It is the parents, then, (said I, in conclusion,) who require instruction as much as their children.—We agreed, however, in our estimate of the superior advantages which children of both sexes enjoy in the present day, from the improved and extended views of the authors of school-books. She was warm in her praises of the Interrogative System of some recent authors; and I found she was no stranger to the merits of the Universal Preceptor, and of the elementary Grammars of Geography, History, and Natural Philosophy.

As I continued my course towards the site of the ancient residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, which lies at the western extremity of the village, I could not avoid asking myself, how, in a country abounding in such means of instruction, political fraud has continued so successful? Has education yet effected nothing for mankind, owing to its servility to power? Is the press but a more effective engine for promulgating sophistry, owing to its ready corruption? Is religion in the pulpit but a plausible means of palliating the crimes of statesmen, owing to the ambition of its professors? Would it now be possible to poison Socrates, banish Aristides, and crucify Jesus, for teaching truth and practising virtue? Alas! a respect for that same truth compelled me to say, Yes!—Yes, said I, there never was a country, nor an age, in which artful misrepresentation could be more successfully practised than at this day in Britain! Can the press effectually sustain truth, while no penal law prevents the purse and patronage of ministers and magistrates from poisoning its channels of communication with the people? Can the pulpit be expected to advocate political truth, while the patronage of the Church is in the hands of the Administration of the day? Can education itself be free from the influence of corrupt patronage, or the force of numerous prejudices, while an abject conformity to the opinions of each previous age is the passport to all scholastic dignities? Does any established or endowed school, and do any number even of private schools, make it part of their professed course to teach their pupils the value of freedom, the duties of freemen, and the free principles of the British constitution? Is the system of the public schools, where our statesmen and legislators are educated, addressed to the HEART as well as the HEAD? Is poverty any where more degraded; cruelty to the helpless animal creation any where more remorselessly practised; or the pride of pedantry, and the vain-glory of human learning, any where more vaunted? In short, are the vices of gluttony, drunkenness, pugilism, and prodigality, any where more indulged? Yet, may we not say, as in the days of William of Wykeham, that “Manners make the man!”—and, on the subject of public duties, might we not derive a lesson even from the ancient institutions of Lycurgus?

The best hopes of society are the progressive improvement of succeeding generations, and the prospect that each will add something to the stock of knowledge to that which went before it. But gloomy is the perspective, if the science of education be rendered stationary or retrograde by the iron hand of power and bigotry, and if errors by these means are propagated from age to age with a species of accelerated force. Yet, what signs of improvement are visible in our public schools, wherein are educated those youths who are destined to direct the fortunes of Britain in each succeeding age? Most of these schools were endowed at the epoch of the revival of learning; yet the exact course of instruction which was prescribed by the narrow policy of that comparatively dark age, is slavishly followed even to this hour! Instead of knowledge, moral and physical, being taught in them, as the true end of all education,—those dead languages, which in the 15th and 16th centuries were justly considered as the fountains of wisdom, are still exclusively taught; as though the English language, now, as then, contained no works of taste and information on a par with those of the ancients; and as though such writers as Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Locke, Addison, Pope, Johnson, Blackstone, Hume, Robertson, and Blair, had never lived! Is it not to mistake the means for the end, to teach any language, except as the medium of superior philosophy? And is it not a false inference, to ascribe exclusively to the study of languages, those habits of industrious application, which would grow with equal certainty out of the study of the useful sciences, if pursued with the same system, and for a similar period of time?

Reason demands, however, on this subject, those concessions from the PRIDE of PEDANTRY which that pride will never yield. We seem, therefore, to be destined, by the force of circumstances, to make slow or inconsiderable advances in civilization; and it remains for other nations, the bases of whose institutions are less entangled in prejudices, to raise the condition of man higher in the scale of improvement than can be expected in Britain. We may, as a result of geographical position, attain a certain degree of national distinction; but, if our system of public education cannot be made to keep pace with knowledge, and is not calculated to generate a succession of patriots, who are qualified to sustain liberty at home and justice abroad, we cannot fail to sink in our turn to the level of modern Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Those hotbeds of human genius were ultimately degraded by the triumph of prejudices over principles, by the extinction of public spirit, by the preference of despotism over liberty, and by the glare of foreign conquests. The countries, the soil, and even the cities remain; but, as their youth are no longer trained in the love of truth and liberty, they exist but as beacons to warn other people of their fall and its causes.