barely comfortable. To myself, after the summer heats of my native land had somewhat effervesced out of my blood and memory, it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might be a little too warm; but it was that modest and inestimable superabundance which constitutes a bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly enough. During my first year in England, residing in perhaps the most ungenial part of the kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable without a fire on the hearth; in the second twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I became sensible of austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the succeeding years-whether that I had renewed my fibre with English beef and replenished my blood with English ale, or whatever were the cause-I grew content with winter and especially in love with summer, desiring little more for happiness than merely to breathe and bask. At the midsummer which we are now speaking of, I must needs confess that the noontide sun came down more fervently than I found altogether tolerable; so that I was fain to shift my position with the shadow of the shrubbery, making myself the movable index of a sundial that reckoned up the hours of an almost interminable day. For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer-day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnum . bered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day beholds its successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island, that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them. I had earned this repose by a long course of irksome toil and perturbation, and could have been content never to stray out of the limits of that suburban villa and its garden. If I lacked anything beyond, it would have satisfied me well enough to dream about it, instead of struggling for its actual possession. At least, this was the feeling of the moment; although the transitory, flitting, and irresponsible character of my life there was perhaps the most enjoyable element of all, as allowing me much of the comfort of house and home without any sense of their weight upon my back. The nomadic life has great advantages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us at every stage. AN OLD SCHOOLMASTER HOUSEHOLD WORDS, 1850: A Sample of the Old School OLD BOB,1 in the face, was rather like Socrates; in form, save as to shoulders, he strongly resembled Punch. . . . He dressed the character of the old schoolmaster, from the shovel-hat and powdered bald head to the gaiters, as correctly as if he proposed to act it in a farce. . . . In general Old Bob was good-tempered, patient and forbearing, not punishing without fair warning, and then with deliberate dignity. But on peculiar provocation, as by anything like the exhibition of a mutinous spirit, especially on the part of a big boy, he lost all control of himself. His face grew pale, his eyes twinkled ominously, he would puff his cheeks out, and his whole form appeared actually to swell. Then, pulling up his nether garments—a habit with him when in a rage—and his voice shaking with passion, he would exclaim, "Take care, Sir. Let me not hear thee say that again. If thou dost, I'll whip thee. I'd whip thee if thou wast as high as the house! I'd whip thee if thou wast as big as Goliath !!" and it was generally understood among us that he would have done so in either case. 1 The Hyde Abbey Boys' School, Winchester, was founded about 1760; it ended in 1833 on death of Rev. Chas. Richards ("Old Bob"), who was schoolmaster for fifty years, thirty-one of which he was also vicar of the parish. He retired in 1828, and on his death the whole of the premises were put up to auction. Such implicit confidence had Old Bob in birch that he imagined he could absolutely whip us up Parnassus, and he very often flogged a boy for not being able to do his verses. "I'll make thee a poet, my boy," he used to say, or the rod shall." Old Bob had a very high idea of the force of example. Incredible as it may appear, it is a fact that he would send a troublesome pupil to see an execution (at Winchester Gaol). I once witnessed him doing this. The boy in question was incorrigibly mischievous, and given to roguish pranks. Addressing him by name, Old Bob said, "There is a man to be hanged this morning. Go and see him, my boy. Thou art a bad boy, and it will do thee good. You"-turning to an elder boy-" you go with him and take charge of him." Truly this was carrying out the principle of "the good old school." K THE EVE OF ST. MARK.1 JOHN KEATS (1795-1821) ; UPON a Sabbath-day it fell; 1 Keats wrote from Winchester in 1819: "Sometime since I began a poem called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of quietude. I think I will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in the coolish evening. I know not whether I shall ever finish it. . . .' |