Lamb, in his delightful essay, Recollections of Christ's Hospital, dwells on some of his fellow-pupils whose memory one cannot help recalling while lingering under these arches. And chief among them, "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, logician, metaphysician, bard—who in these cloisters unfolded in deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus, or recited Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy." He tells us, too, of Thomas Fanshawe Middleton, "a scholar and a gentleman in his teens," but said afterwards to have borne his mitre rather high as the first Protestant bishop of Calcutta, though a more humble and apostolic bearing "might not have been exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with reverence for home institutions and the church which such fathers watered." There is a monument to the memory of Bishop Middleton at S. Paul's, where he is represented, in his robes of office, in the act of confirming two East Indians, but the hand raised over their heads has all the fingers broken off but one. Let us hope what apostolic authority he possessed was centred in that digit!
Above all, at Christ's Hospital one recalls the gentle Elia himself. Perhaps in yonder dim corner he furtively ate the griskin brought from the paternal kitchen by his aunt. "I remember the good old relative," he says (in whom love forbade pride), "squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens ministered to the Tishbite), and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding. There was love for the bringer, shame for the thing brought and the manner of its bringing."
Under these pillared arches, so shadowy to-day with the heavy London fog, Richardson perhaps conceived his first dramatic scenes, and Leigh Hunt began to weave the delicious fancies that have since charmed us all. Yonder was the dormitory the young ass was smuggled into, which waxed fat, and proclaimed his good fortune to the world below, setting concealment any longer at defiance.
While thus musing, an instalment of the eight hundred boys at the Hospital came out to their sports in their quaint costume of black breeches, long yellow stockings to the knees, and a dark-blue gown down to the heels, garnished with bright buttons bearing the likeness of Edward VI., and confined by a leather belt. White bands at the neck give them a clerical look by no means at variance with so monastic a place. They had innocent, open faces, such as we find in our monastic schools, reminding one of Pope Gregory's well-known exclamation: "Non Angli sed angeli." They tucked up their skirts and betook themselves most heartily to their sports. It was queer to see their long yellow-stockinged legs flying across the quadrangle. They have caps, it is said, about the size of a saucer, which they dislike so much that they prefer going bare-headed, but they did not mind the fog, now almost amounting to rain. Children, we all know, are, as Lamb says, "proof against weather, ingratitude, meat under-done, and every weapon of fate." One of them stopped to pump some water for the visitor to offer as a libation to the memory of Charles Lamb.
"Pierian spring!" scornfully shouted Master Boyer to a young writer of a classical turn: "the cloister pump, you mean!"
The school-room visited bore marks that would have done credit to a Yankee jack-knife, and revived pleasant reminiscences of youthful achievements in a New England school-house. The chapel, too, with its mural tablets, and flag tombstones, and painted window, of Christ blessing little children, is interesting. At the right of the chancel is a remnant of old monastic charity. An inscription in yellow letters on a claret-colored ground announces that "the bread here given weekly to the poor of the parish of S. Leonard's is from a bequest of Sir John Trott and other benefactors," and on the other side in equally glaring characters: "Praise be to thee, O Lord God, for this thy gift unto the poor!" There is rather a more amusing inscription of a similar nature at S. Giles', Cripplegate, opposite the monument to Milton:
"This Bvsbie, willing to reeleve the poore with fire and withe breade,
Did give that howse whearein he dyed then called ye Queene's heade,
Fovr fvlle loades of ye best charcoales he wovld have brovght each yeare,
And fortie dosen of wheaten breade for poore howseholders heare:
To see these thinges distribvted this Bvsby pvt in trvst
The Vicar and Chvrch wardenes thinking them to be IVST:
God grant that poore howseholders here may thankfvll be for svch,
So God will move the mindes of moe to doe for them as mvch:
And let this good example move svch men as God hath blest
To doe the like before they goe with Bvsby to there rest:
Within this chappell Bvsbie's bones in dvst a while mvst stay,
Till He that made them rayse them vp to live with Christ for aye."
The said Busby is represented above this curious inscription, in bold relief, as a be-ruffed man of jovial type, holding a bottle in one hand, and a death's-head in the other, so that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. It would be more reasonable to cry over the grave of that dreadful prevaricator Fox, called the Martyrologist, said to be buried in the same church, only one does not know where to weep, as the precise spot is not known. So one has to be satisfied with sighing before a huge stone set up to his memory at the end of the church, and thinking with Lessing that "if the world is to be held together by lies, the old ones which are already current are as good as the new." What a pity Fox had not belonged to S. Pancras' parish! However, that saint seems to have kept an eye on him, and avenged the cause of truth. We do not suppose there are many now who are credulous enough to accept Fox as reliable authority concerning the history of those sad times. And if we stop to look at his tablet here, it is with something of the same feeling that we turn down Fetter Lane to see where "Praise God Barebones" and his brother "Damned Barebones" lived, and wonder how any one house could hold them both.
But to return to Christ's Hospital. It must not be supposed that, meanwhile, it has been forgotten that this institution was originally a Catholic foundation. It was the first thought at entering, nor could the pleasant associations of later years prevent a regret that so monastic a building is no longer peopled by the old Grey Friars. Keats' lines recurred to memory:
"Mute is the matin bell whose early call
Warned the Grey fathers from their humble beds;
Nor midnight taper gleams along the wall,
Or round the sculptured saint its radiance sheds!"