In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop’s footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop.
The school was truly classical and nothing else, except for the teaching of “spongy” Reynolds and “hacky” Clark—the writing and arithmetic masters—the affix of this first being due to a nose which was amorphous and appeared to belong to the class Porifera, or sponges, while that of the second was due to a guttural crackling sound of the man’s voice.
To do Reynolds justice, he was not impatient, and he was painstaking with his pupils. To facilitate his arithmetical instruction he wrote two lines of verse which were naïve—they ran thus:—
“Profit and loss accounts are plain;
We debit loss and credit gain.”
But his supreme merit was that of substituting geographical for moral texts in our copy-books. One I remember, for small text, was, “Batavia in Java, capital of the Dutch settlements.”
Reynolds was somebody. He married his daughter to Thomas Hood, and his son was, I believe, the Reynolds of Sunday newspaper fame.
With this exception the school was purely classical; nothing whatever was taught but Greek and Latin. History, geography, English, and its grammar, were unheard of. We had to teach ourselves to read and spell, and none will dispute that the prayers before scanty meat were beautifully given by the Grecians, those head boys who proceeded to the University. Grammar we learnt only from the Greek and Latin, but it was sufficient; composition we derived from the same source, whence, perhaps, our habit of inversion, so offensive nowadays to poetic dribblers, who doat on Wordsworthy prose.
The steward of the school, who was ruler, a sort of president of the growing-up republic, named Higgins, was an oldish man, grey-pated, with a youthful slim figure, fair skin, and a straight disciplinarian mouth. He presided at meal-time, seated at a desk on the large daïs at the upper end of the hall, like a modern Pontius Pilate. There he was, to receive criminals led to judgment by the monitors, and to flog them without mercy. He was greatly feared and, of course, greatly hated. He reminded one of a snake in his movements, which were rapid and flexible. No complaint was made to him of the boys, by beadles or monitors, but what was believed by him; he required no proof.
It was a sort of Russian system; every official, every monitor, was a spy, and the steward was the willing knout, a creature emotional as a reptile, servile as a dog, and as a cat cruel.