In winter the farm-works do not occupy the pupils so much, and they give more time to their literary studies. They get a good English education; they are grounded in arithmetic and mathematics; and I saw a good map of an adjacent farm, made from actual survey by one of the pupils. Some of them are good draughtsmen likewise, but of their performances I could see no specimen, the artists being abroad, occupied wisely in digging the potatoes.
And here, à propos, not of the school but of potatoes, let me tell a potato story, which is, I think, to the purpose, wherever it is told. In the county of Mayo a gentleman by the name of Crofton is a landed proprietor, in whose neighbourhood great distress prevailed among the peasantry during the spring and summer, when the potatoes of the last year were consumed, and before those of the present season were up; Mr. Crofton, by liberal donations on his own part, and by a subscription which was set on foot among his friends in England as well as in Ireland, was enabled to collect a sum of money sufficient to purchase meal for the people, which was given to them, or sold at very low prices, until the pressure of want was withdrawn, and the blessed potato-crop came in. Some time in October, a smart night’s frost made Mr. Crofton think that it was time to take in and pit his own potatoes, and he told his steward to get labourers accordingly.
Next day, on going to the potato-grounds, he found the whole fields swarming with people; the whole crop was out of the ground, and again under it, pitted and covered, and the people gone, in a few hours. It was as if the fairies that we read of in the Irish legends, as coming to the aid of good people and helping them in their labours, had taken a liking to this good landlord, and taken in his harvest for him. Mr. Crofton, who knew who his helpers had been, sent the steward to pay them their day’s wages, and to thank them at the same time for having come to help him at a time when their labour was so useful to him. One and all refused a penny; and their spokesman said, ‘They wished they could do more for the likes of him or his family.’ I have heard of many conspiracies in this country; is not this one as worthy to be told as any of them?
Round the house of Templemoyle is a pretty garden, which the pupils take pleasure in cultivating, filled not with fruit (for this, though there are seventy gardeners, the superintendent said somehow seldom reached a ripe state), but with kitchen herbs, and a few beds of pretty flowers, such as are best suited to cottage horticulture. Such simple carpenters’ and masons’ work as the young men can do is likewise confided to them; and though the dietary may appear to the Englishman as rather a scanty one, and though the English lads certainly make at first very wry faces at the stirabout porridge (as they naturally will when first put in the presence of that abominable mixture), yet after a time, strange to say, they begin to find it actually palatable; and the best proof of the excellence of the diet is, that nobody is ever ill in the institution: colds and fevers, the ailments of lazy gluttonous gentility, are unknown; and the doctor’s bill for the last year, for seventy pupils, amounted to thirty-five shillings. O beati agricoliculæ! You do not know what it is to feel a little uneasy after half a crown’s worth of raspberry-tarts, as lads do at the best public schools; you don’t know in what majestic polished hexameters the Roman poet has described your pursuits; you are not fagged and flogged into Latin and Greek at the cost of two hundred pounds a year. Let these be the privileges of your youthful betters; meanwhile content yourselves with thinking that you are preparing for a profession, while they are not; that you are learning something useful, while they, for the most part, are not; for after all, as a man grows old in the world, old and fat, cricket is discovered not to be any longer very advantageous to him—even to have pulled in the Trinity boat does not in old age amount to a substantial advantage; and though to read a Greek play be an immense pleasure, yet it must be confessed few enjoy it. In the first place, of the race of Etonians, and Harrovians, and Carthusians that one meets in the world, very few can read the Greek; of those few—there are not, as I believe, any considerable majority of poets. Stout men in the bow-windows of clubs (for such young Etonians by time become) are not generally remarkable for a taste for Æschylus.[34] You do not hear much poetry in Westminster Hall, or I believe at the bar-tables afterwards; and if occasionally, in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel lets off a quotation—a pocket-pistol wadded with a leaf torn out of Horace—depend on it, it is only to astonish the country gentlemen who don’t understand him: and it is my firm conviction that Sir Robert no more cares for poetry than you or I do.
Such thoughts will suggest themselves to a man who has had the benefit of what is called an education at a public school in England, when he sees seventy lads from all parts of the empire learning what his Latin poets and philosophers have informed him is the best of all pursuits,—finds them educated at one-twentieth part of the cost which has been bestowed on his own precious person; orderly without the necessity of submitting to degrading personal punishment; young, and full of health and blood, though vice is unknown among them; and brought up decently and honestly to know the things which it is good for them in their profession to know. So it is, however: all the world is improving except the gentleman. There are at this present writing five hundred boys at Eton, kicked, and licked, and bullied by another hundred—scrubbing shoes, running errands, making false concords, and (as if that were a natural consequence!) putting their posteriors on a block for Dr. Hawtrey to lash at; and still calling it education. They are proud of it—good heavens!—absolutely vain of it; as what dull barbarians are not proud of their dulness and barbarism? They call it the good old English system: nothing like classics, says Sir John, to give a boy a taste, you know, and a habit of reading—(Sir John, who reads the Racing Calendar, and belongs to a race of men of all the world the least given to reading!)—it’s the good old English system; every boy fights for himself—hardens ‘em, eh, Jack? Jack grins, and helps himself to another glass of claret, and presently tells you how Tibs and Miller fought for an hour and twenty minutes ‘like good uns.’ ... Let us come to an end, however, of this moralising; the car-driver has brought the old raw-shouldered horse out of the stable, and says it is time to be off again.
Before quitting Templemoyle, one thing more may be said in its favour. It is one of the very few public establishments in Ireland where pupils of the two religious denominations are received, and where no religious disputes have taken place. The pupils are called upon, morning and evening, to say their prayers privately. On Sunday each division, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian, is marched to its proper place of worship. The pastors of each sect may visit their young flock when so inclined; and the lads devote the Sabbath evening to reading the books pointed out to them by their clergymen.
Would not the Agricultural Society of Ireland, the success of whose peaceful labours for the national prosperity every Irish newspaper I read brings some new indication, do well to show some mark of its sympathy for this excellent institution of Templemoyle? A silver medal given by the Society to the most deserving pupil of the year, would be a great object of emulation amongst the young men educated at the place, and would be almost a certain passport for the winner in seeking for a situation in after life. I do not know if similar seminaries exist in England. Other seminaries of a like nature have been tried in this country, and have failed: but English country gentlemen cannot, I should think, find a better object of their attention than this school; and our farmers would surely find such establishments of great benefit to them: where their children might procure a sound literary education at a small charge, and at the same time be made acquainted with the latest improvements in their profession. I can’t help saying here, once more, what I have said à propos of the excellent school at Dundalk, and begging the English middle classes to think of the subject. If Government will not act (upon what never can be effectual, perhaps, until it become a national measure), let small communities act for themselves, and tradesmen and the middle classes set up CHEAP PROPRIETARY SCHOOLS. Will country newspaper editors, into whose hands this book may fall, be kind enough to speak upon this hint, and extract the tables of the Templemoyle and Dundalk establishments, to show how, and with what small means, boys may be well, soundly, and humanely educated—not brutally, as some of us have been, under the bitter fagging and the shameful rod? It is no plea for the barbarity that use has made us accustomed to it; and in seeing these institutions for humble lads, where the system taught is at once useful, manly, and kindly, and thought of what I had undergone in my own youth,—of the frivolous monkish trifling in which it was wasted, of the brutal tyranny to which it was subjected,—I could not look at the lads but with a sort of envy: please God, their lot will be shared by thousands of their equals and their betters before long!
It was a proud day for Dundalk, Mr. Thackeray well said, when, at the end of one of the vacations there, fourteen English boys, and an Englishman with his little son in his hand, landed from the Liverpool packet, and, walking through the streets of the town, went into the schoolhouse quite happy. That was a proud day in truth for a distant Irish town, and I can’t help saying that I grudge them the cause of their pride somewhat. Why should there not be schools in England as good, and as cheap, and as happy?
With this, shaking Mr. Campbell gratefully by the hand, and begging all English tourists to go and visit his establishment, we trotted off for Londonderry, leaving at about a mile’s distance from the town, and at the pretty lodge of St. Columb’s, a letter, which was the cause of much delightful hospitality.
St. Columb’s Chapel, the walls of which still stand picturesquely in Sir George Hill’s park, and from which that gentleman’s seat takes its name, was here since the sixth century. It is but fair to give precedence to the mention of the old abbey, which was the father, as it would seem, of the town. The approach to the latter from three quarters, certainly, by which various avenues I had occasion to see it, is always noble. We had seen the spire of the cathedral peering over the hills for four miles on our way: it stands, a stalwart and handsome building, upon an eminence, round which the old-fashioned stout red houses of the town cluster, girt in with the ramparts and walls that kept out James’s soldiers of old. Quays, factories, huge red warehouses, have grown round this famous old barrier, and now stretch along the river. A couple of large steamers and other craft lay within the bridge; and, as we passed over that stout wooden edifice, stretching eleven hundred feet across the noble expanse of the Foyle, we heard along the quays a great thundering and clattering of iron-work in an enormous steam frigate which has been built in Derry, and seems to lie alongside a whole street of houses. The suburb, too, through which we passed was bustling and comfortable; and the view was not only pleasing from its natural beauties, but has a manly, thriving, honest air of prosperity, which is no bad feature, surely, for a landscape.