What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

At the cathedral a series of benches between the pulpit and Bishop’s throne and the altar were reserved for us, so that the preacher was immediately in front and to the right of us. The surplice was used in the cathedral pulpit at the morning service, the Geneva gown at that in the afternoon. At the former one of the prebendaries or the dean was the preacher, at the latter a minor canon.

I remember that we used to think a good deal of the dean’s sermons, and always attended to them—a compliment which was not often paid, to the best of my recollection, to the other preachers. Dean Rennell was a man of very superior abilities, but of great eccentricity, mainly due to extreme absence of mind. It used to be told of him that unless Mrs. Rennell took good care, he was tolerably certain, when he went up to his room to dress for a dinner-party, to go to bed. It will be understood from what has been said of the accommodation provided for us in the cathedral, that in order to face us, the preacher, addressing himself to the body of the congregation in the choir, must have turned himself round in the pulpit. And this Rennell would sometimes do, when he thought what he was saying especially calculated for our edification. He was, as I have already mentioned, a great Platonist, and when he alluded, as he not unfrequently did, to some doctrine or opinion of the Grecian philosopher, he would turn to us and say, in a sort of parenthetical aside, “Plato I mean.”

Among the stories that were current of Rennell I remember one to the effect that when upon one occasion he was posting from Winchester to London he stopped at Egham for luncheon. A huge round of boiled beef, nearly uncut, was placed upon the table. But the dean found it was, as he thought, far too much boiled; so without more ado he cut the huge mass into four quarters and helped himself to a morsel from the centre! The landlady, when the mutilated joint was carried out, was exceedingly indignant, and insisted that a guinea should be paid for the entirety of it. The dean, much against the grain, as the chronicle goes, paid his guinea, but packed up the four quarters of the round and carried them off with him.

Further indication of his eccentricity might be seen, as I remember, in his habit of wearing in the cathedral pulpit in cold weather, not a skull cap, but a flat square of velvet on his head, with which occasionally he would in the heat of his discourse wipe his face, then clap it on his head again.

The cathedral, as I have had occasion to mention in a former chapter, had been undergoing a very extensive restoration, one operation in the course of which had been the removal of the organ from over the screen; and the question whether it should be replaced there or be transferred to the north transept was very earnestly, and, it was said, somewhat hotly debated by the chapter. The dean was exceedingly vehement in supporting the latter course, which was eventually adopted, it can scarcely be doubted by those who see the church as it now is, with entire judiciousness.

I could, not without gratification to myself, chatter much more about reminiscences of the years I passed at Winchester. But I feel that the only excuse for having yielded to the temptation as far as I have must be sought in the illustrations afforded by what I have written of the large changes in habits, thoughts, customs, feelings that have been wrought in English society and English institutions by the lapse of some sixty years.

And now the time had come when I, having attained the age of eighteen, was superannuated at the election in the July of 1828. It was not at that time certain whether I should or should not succeed to a fellowship at New College, for that depended upon the number of vacancies that might occur in the year up to the election of 1829. Eventually I missed it by, as I remember, one only. One more journey of “Speedyman” before July, 1829, announcing the marriage or the death of a fellow of New College, or the acceptance of a college living by one of them, would have made me a fellow of New College. But “Speedyman” did not make his appearance.

I left Winchester a fairly good Latin scholar, and well grounded—I do not think I can say more—in Greek; and very ignorant indeed of all else. According to what I hear of the requirements at the present day, I had no scholarly knowledge whatever of my own language. I knew nothing whatsoever of Anglo-Saxon, or of mediæval English. I had never—have never, I may rather say—had any English grammar in my hand from my cradle to the present hour.

It is certain, however, that the enlarged requirements in this department, to which I have referred, have somehow or other failed to banish from the current literature of the day a vast number of solecisms, vulgarisms, and grammatical atrocities of all sorts, which defile the language to a much greater degree than was the case at the time of which I have been writing, and which would have been as abhorrent to me when I left Winchester as they are now.

Of arithmetic I knew nothing—I should write “know”—and of all that arithmetic should be the first step to, à fortiori, still less. In the art of writing I received the best possible instruction, for I was licked by my tutor and scourged by the masters if my writing was illegible. Of less indirect tuition I had none.