[From the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.]
CHRIST-HOSPITAL WORTHIES.
Christ-Hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of merchants, of naval officers, of scholars; it has produced some of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium, between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton the Westminster, and the plebeian submission of and charity schools. In point of University honors, it claims to be equal with the best; and though other schools can show a greater abundance of eminent names, I know not where many will be found who are a greater host in themselves. One original author is worth a hundred transmitters of elegance; and such a one is to be found in Richardson, who here received what education he possessed. Here Camden also received the rudiments of his. Bishop Stillingfleet, according to the memoirs of Pepys, lately published, was brought up in the school. We have had many eminent scholars, two of them Greek professors, to wit, Barnes, and the present Mr. Scholefield, the latter of whom attained an extraordinary succession of University honors. The rest are Markland; Middleton, late Bishop of Calcutta; and Mitchell, the translator of "Aristophanes." Christ-Hospital, I believe, toward the close of the last century, and the beginning of the present, sent out more living writers, in its proportion, than any other school. There was Dr. Richards, author of the "Aboriginal Britons;" Dyer, whose life was one unbroken dream of learning and goodness, and who used to make us wonder with passing through the school-room (where no other person in "town-clothes" ever appeared) to consult books in the library; Le Grice, the translator of "Longus;" Horne, author of some well-known productions in controversial divinity; Surr, the novelist (not in the Grammar school); James White, the friend of Charles Lamb, and not unworthy of him, author of "Falstaff's Letters" (this was he who used to give an anniversary dinner to the chimney-sweepers, merrier than, though not so magnificent as Mrs. Montague's); Pitman, a celebrated preacher, editor of some school-books, and religious classics; Mitchell, before mentioned; myself, who stood next him; Barnes, who came next, the editor of the "Times," than whom no man (if he had cared for it) could have been more certain of obtaining celebrity for wit and literature; Townsend, a prebendary of Durham, author of "Armageddon," and several theological works; Gilly, another of the Durham prebendaries, who wrote the "Narrative of the Waldenses;" Seargill, a Unitarian minister, author of some tracts on Peace and War, &c.; and lastly, whom I have kept by way of climax, Coleridge and Charles Lamb, two of the most original geniuses, not only of the day, but of the country. We have had an embassador among us; but as he, I understand, is ashamed of us, we are hereby more ashamed of him, and accordingly omit him.
Coleridge I never saw till he was old. Lamb I recollect coming to see the boys, with a pensive, brown, handsome, and kindly face, and a gait advancing with a motion from side to side, between involuntary consciousness and attempted ease. His brown complexion may have been owing to a visit in the country; his air of uneasiness to a great burden of sorrow. He dressed with a quaker-like plainness. I did not know him as Lamb: I took him for a Mr. "Guy," having heard somebody address him by that appellative, I suppose in jest.
Every upper boy at school appears a giant to a little one. "Big boy" and senior are synonymous. Now and then, however, extreme smallness in a senior scholar gives a new kind of dignity, by reason of the testimony it bears to the ascendency of the intellect. It was the custom for the monitors at Christ-Hospital, during prayers before meat, to stand fronting the tenants of their respective wards, while the objects of their attention were kneeling. Looking up, on one of these occasions, toward a new monitor who was thus standing, and whose face was unknown to me (for there were six hundred of us, and his ward was not mine), I thought him the smallest boy that could ever have attained to so distinguished an eminence. He was little in person, little in face, and he had a singularly juvenile cast of features, even for one so petite.
It was Mitchell, the translator of Aristophanes. He had really attained his position prematurely. I rose afterward to be next to him in the school; and from a grudge that existed between us, owing probably to a reserve, which I thought pride, on his part, and to an ardency which he may have considered frivolous on mine, we became friends. Circumstances parted us in after life: I became a reformist, and he a quarterly reviewer; but he sent me kindly remembrances not long before he died. I did not know he was declining; and it will ever be a pain to me to reflect, that delay conspired with accident to hinder my sense of it from being known to him, especially as I learned that he had not been so prosperous as I supposed. He had his weaknesses as well as myself, but they were mixed with conscientious and noble qualities. Zealous as he was for aristocratical government, he was no indiscriminate admirer of persons in high places; and, though it would have bettered his views in life, he had declined taking orders, from nicety of religious scruple. Of his admirable scholarship I need say nothing.
Equally good scholar, but of a less zealous temperament was Barnes, who stood next me on the deputy-Grecian form, and who was afterward identified with the sudden and striking increase of the Times newspaper in fame and influence. He was very handsome when young, with a profile of Grecian regularity; and was famous among us for a certain dispassionate humor, for his admiration of the works of Fielding, and for his delight, nevertheless, in pushing a narrative to its utmost, and drawing upon his stores of fancy for intensifying it; an amusement for which he possessed an understood privilege. It was painful in after life to see his good looks swallowed up in corpulency, and his once handsome mouth thrusting its under lip out, and panting with asthma. I believe he was originally so well constituted, in point of health and bodily feeling, that he fancied he could go on all his life without taking any of the usual methods to preserve his comfort. The editorship of the Times, which turned his night into day, and would have been a trying burden to any man, completed the bad consequences of his negligence, and he died painfully before he was old. Barnes wrote elegant Latin verse, a classical English style, and might assuredly have made himself a name in wit and literature, had he cared much for any thing beyond his glass of wine and his Fielding.
What pleasant days have I not passed with him, and other schoolfellows, bathing in the New River, and boating on the Thames. He and I began to learn Italian together; and any body not within the pale of the enthusiastic, might have thought us mad, as we went shouting the beginning of Metastasio's ode to Venus, as loud as we could bawl, over the Hornsey-fields.