18

INSTRUCTION WASTED.

years at Eton, and could not spell but!" There was another case of one who came to college, and could not decline musa, said Paley's friend, though his manners were as good as those of Etonians always are.

"How did you contrive to learn so little in so long a time?" said a friend of mine to a lad.

"I don't know," he replied, "they gave me the run of the school, and flogged me."

I had myself a cousin at a grammar school, who lodged in the master's house, and made up his mind to be flogged, having undergone the punishment once or twice, and thus got seasoned. He was many years at school, and I do not believe he acquired anything worth learning either of Latin or Greek. Of the sciences or the literature of modern

times he knew nothing whatever. He had a good mechanical head, and scrambled through life better than many men of twenty times his ability and acquirements. On the justices' bench he was thought an oracle, notwithstanding he had acquired little and remembered less; they had learned more, and remembered nothing. One of them insisted that alveus was a bed for sleeping in place of lectus ; after some dispute, he quoted cubitum discessimus to show they were wrong!

There is something melancholy in revisiting a paternal dwelling which has long been forsaken,

MY FATHER'S HOUSE.

19

more especially when its inmates are nearly all departed from the world. I remember such a visit.

The spot where we passed our earlier years, where we were cherished by our parents, and which we left to launch out upon the great scenes of life, cannot but revive mournful feelings. I must mention mine, visited after its hearth had long been cold for mine and me. I had been long absent from a domicile which at present exists but in a ruin. A street partly crosses the place where it stood environed with trees, and now shows an extended level of housetops. After twenty years' absence I visited it, before its destruction. Such localities are powerful in affecting the minds of all who think. I felt desirous of recalling bye-gone times. I anticipated a melancholy pleasure in entering once more where I had opened my eyes upon the world. There I remembered my mother nursing an infant sister of mine, of whom death a few years afterwards deprived her. I shall see again the chimney-piece over which had hung a vessel with all sail set, on which my young eyes had gazed with admiration a thousand times, and which I had more than once vainly imitated with a pencil on the discarded cover of a letter. A large landscape, an indifferent copy from Wilson, hung near the door, on which I had

I touched upon this subject soon afterwards in the London Magazine, if I recollect rightly.

20

RETROSPECTIVE GLANCES.

once thought art had exhausted its utmost efforts. I now fancied how much I should like to restore all those pictures to their old places, and spend days in that room in holding communion with the spirits of the past.

Impressed with this idea, I reached the house and found it untenanted and desolate. The wind sighed through the broken casements, and a sort of wing containing what had been once used as a nursery in my time had been pulled down to improve a road which ran close up to the place. Such improvements make havoc with old associations. What memories of past pain and pleasure belonging to hundreds of minds are involved in the destruction of a street, or the widening of an alley! What stories might not these vanished apartments have told of men and things, before they disappeared! Purveyors of bricks and mortar make in this mode sad havoc with the poetry of our lives!

In the present case the appearance of the old house smote me to the heart. Still I congratulated myself that I had found it nearly entire, that I might enter it again, and gaze upon the rooms where once my young heart had throbbed with delight at the smile of most affectionate parents-my mother, in particular. What gift of heaven exceeds that of a good mother? To youth, earth has no blessing to compete with it; the best father is but half a good

MELANCHOLY SENSATIONS.

21

mother.

How happy was Pope that he had one to watch and nurse, when he was past the meridian of life-a happiness but few could enjoy as he did.

With some difficulty I procured the key of the dilapidated habitation from an aged female neighbour, who well remembered when my family occupied the place. We entered it together. I felt as I always feel in a locality where I remember objects in connection on whom the light of the sun shines no longer. I thought of Moore's lines:

"There we shall have our feast of tears,

And many a cup of silence pour,
Our guests the shades of former years,

Our toasts to lips that bloom no more."

My companion did not partake in these sensations. I got rid of her by a little management, and rambled alone through the apartments. What a gloom seemed to pervade them! The hues of decay from parted time, and their neglected state, added to sombre remembrances, coloured every object. My heart beat quicker as I entered the old drawingroom, that which had been most used in my early years; all was silent, desolate, dead. The furniture, the carpet, the paper on the walls, two or three frequent visitants who were free guests there, all came up in their shadowy forms to my sobered recollection. Here appeared one great mystery of our being. I remembered on which part of the wall I

22

FANCIES OF THE PAST.

had once sketched the candle-light shadows of my companions. My name scratched on the glass of one of the lower room windows, fragile as it was, had survived most of the inhabitants, and a small ash tree waved near that had survived the solid walls of the nursery, recalling the lines applied to Rome and the Tiber, where that which was fugitive and passing, or in this case fragile, was permanent.* There were other names scrawled upon the same window, which had been there before it became the habitation of my family; I had spelled them over a hundred times when a boy. I was standing among the shadowy wrecks of my own years, and contemplating their nothingness. Where were the friends that looked upon my childhood? I gazed around and saw none; I turned my vision inwards, and fancy's forms appeared distinctly enough, aud the corners of the rooms their chairs occupied, their very positions as they sat, but I needed not the

reality of the place to recall them. memory could do that anywhere.

The mystery of

I wandered into the room which my father had occupied as a study, but I found it inhabited only by the spider, curtained with its web, and aged with neglect. In that corner were still shadowed the