BOSTON SCHOOL FESTIVAL.*

MR. MAYOR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, AND MY YOUNG FRIENDS OF BOTH SEXES:

I REALLY rise with no little diffidence to address you at this time. You have remarked truly, sir, that I never before have had the happiness to be present on an occasion like this. Many years ago in old times, I used to go to the old "school dinner"-a very different affair, my friends, I assure you, from that which has called us together on this occasion. I do not wish to speak disparagingly of former days, or of any thing that was done under the auspices of the city fathers in the olden time, but it used to be a feast of rather an unintellectual character. Eating and drinking, after a laborious day, was the greatest part of the occupation at that time at the school dinner. There was nothing of that which now surrounds us, nothing of the intellectual treats prepared for us in these odes and songs, these flowers from the field of nature, and these fairer flowers, where intellect, and grace, and loveliness are added to the red and white, which

"Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on."

I have, however, had much pleasure in complying with the particular request of the committee, that I would be present on this occasion and say a few words to our young friends. Dr. Shurtleff, in desiring me to do so, suggested as a reason, that my connection with the public schools of Boston, which

* Remarks made in Faneuil Hall, on the 23d July, 1855, at the Annual Festival of the Boston Public Schools.

began as a pupil fifty-two years ago, ceases this year as a parent. Having enjoyed their great advantages in my own person, and that of my son, I feel it to be a kind of duty to say a grateful word at parting.

It was, as I have said, sir, fifty-two years last April since I began, at the age of nine years, to attend the reading and writing schools in North Bennett street. The reading school was under Master Little, (for " Young America" had not yet repudiated that title,) and the writing school was kept by Master Tileston. Master Little, in spite of his name, was a giant in stature-six feet four, at least-and somewhat wedded to the past. He struggled earnestly against the change then taking place in the pronunciation of u, and insisted on our saying monooment and natur. But I acquired, under his tuition, what was thought in those days a very tolerable knowledge of Lindley Murray's abridgment of English grammar, and at the end of the year could parse almost any sentence in the American Preceptor. Master Tileston was a writing-master of the old school. He set the copies himself, and taught that beautiful old Boston handwriting, which, if I do not mistake, has in the march of innovation (which is not always the same thing as improvement) been changed very little for the better. Master Tileston was advanced in years, and had found a qualification for his calling as a writing-master, in what might have seemed at first to threaten to be an obstruction. The fingers of his right hand had been contracted and stiffened in early life, by a burn, but were fixed in just the position to hold a pen, a penknife, and a rattan! As they were also considerably indurated, they served as a convenient instrument of discipline. A copy badly written or a blotted page was sometimes visited with an infliction which would have done no discredit to the beak of a bald eagle. I speak, sir, from observation not from experience. His long deep desk was a perfect curiosity-shop of confiscated balls, tops, penknives, marbles, and jews-harps; the accumulation of forty years. I desire, however, to speak of him with gratitude, for he put me on the track of an acquisition which has been extremely useful to me in after

life, that of a plain, legible hand. I remained at these schools about sixteen months, and, on leaving them, had the good fortune in 1804 to receive the Franklin medal in the English department.

After an interval of about a year, (during which I attended a private school taught by Mr. Ezekiel Webster, a distinguished gentleman of New Hampshire, and on occasion of his absence, by his much more distinguished and ever memorable brother, Daniel Webster, at that time a student of law in Boston,) I went to the Latin school, then slowly emerging from a state of extreme depression. It was kept in School street, where the Horticultural Hall now stands. Those who judge of what the Boston Latin School ought to be from the spacious and commodious building in Bedford street, can form but little idea of the old school-house. It contained but one room, heated in the winter by an iron stove, which sent up a funnel into a curious brick chimney built down from the roof, in the middle of the room, to within seven or eight feet from the floor, being, like Mahomet's coffin, held in the air to the roof I hardly know how, perhaps by bars of iron. The boys had to take their turns in winter in coming early to the school-house, to open it; to make a fire sometimes of wet logs and a very inadequate supply of other combustibles, if such they might be called; to sweep out the room, and, if need be, to shovel a path through the snow to the street. These were not very fascinating duties for an urchin of ten or eleven; but we lived through it, and were perhaps not the worse for having to turn our hand to these little offices.

The standard of scholastic attainment was certainly not higher than that of material comfort in those days. We read pretty much the same books. or books of the same class in Latin and Greek as are read now, with the exception of the Greek Testament, but we read them in a very cursory and superficial manner. There was no attention paid to the philosophy of the languages, to the deduction of words from their radical elements, to the niceties of construction, still less to prosody. I never made an hexameter or pentameter verse, till years afterwards, when I had a son at school in Lon

don, who occasionally required a little aid in that way. The subsidiary and illustrative branches were wholly unknown in the Latin School in 1805. Such a thing as a school library, a book of reference, a critical edition of a classic, a map, a blackboard, an engraving of an ancient building, or a copy of a work of ancient art, such as now adorn the walls of our schools, was as little known as the electric telegraph. If our children, who possess all these appliances and aids to learning, do not greatly excel their parents, they will be much to blame.

At this school, in 1806, I had the satisfaction to receive the Franklin medal, which, however, as well as that received at the English School in 1804, during my absence from the country in early life, I was so unfortunate as to lose. I begged my friend, Dr. Shurtleff, a year or more ago, to replace them these precious trophies of my school-boy days-at my expense, which he has promised to do. He has not yet had time to keep his word; but as, in addition to his other numerous professional and official occupations, he is engaged in editing the Records of the Massachusetts and Plymouth Colonies, in about twenty-five volumes folio, and is bringing out the work at the rate of five or six volumes a year, I suppose I must excuse him for not attending to my medals; although, like Julius Cæsar, the Doctor possesses the faculty of doing three or four things at the same time, and all with great precision and thoroughness. I take this public occasion to bring the matter to his recollection, and I think now, unless he has a much poorer memory than I believe he possesses, he will not forget it.

Mr. Mayor, the schools of Boston have improved within fifty years, beyond what any one will readily conceive, who has not in his own person made the examination. I have made it myself only with reference to the Latin School, but I have no reason to doubt that it is the same with all the others. The support of the schools is justly regarded as the first care of the city government; and the public expenditure upon them is greater in proportion to the population than in any city in the world. I had occasion last week to make a

statement on this subject, to a gentleman from a distant part of the country, and when I informed him that the richest individual in Boston could not, with all his money, procure better schooling for his son than the public schools furnish to the child of the poorest citizen, he was lost in admiration. I do not think the people of Boston themselves value as they ought the privilege which they possess in having that education brought to their doors, for which parents in some other parts of the country are obliged to send their children a hundred or a thousand miles from home; to say nothing of the homesickness and heart-sickness of the poor children, who, at the age when the affections are tender, are thus banished from the paternal roof; and we may well repeat the inquiry of Cicero: "Ubi enim aut jucundius morarentur quam in patria, aut pudicitius continerentur quam sub oculis parentum, aut minore sumtu quam domi?"

In a word, sir, when the Public Library shall be completed, (and thanks to the liberality of the city government it is making the most satisfactory progress,) which I have always regarded as the necessary supplement to our schools, I do really think that Boston will possess an educational system superior to any other in the world.

Let me, sir, before I sit down, congratulate the boys and girls on their success, who as medal scholars are privileged to be here. The reward they have now received for their early efforts is designed as an incentive to future exertion; without which the Franklin medal will be rather a disgrace than a credit to them. But let them also bear their honors with meekness. Of their school mates of both sexes who have failed to attain these coveted distinctions, some, less endowed with natural talent, have probably made exertions equally if not more meritorious; some have failed through ill-health. Some whom you now leave a good way behind will come straining after you and perhaps surpass you in the great race of life. Let your present superior good fortune, my young friends, have no other effect than to inspire you with considerateness and kind feeling towards your school mates. Let not the dark passions, and base selfish and party feelings which