70 PRESTWOOD PAPERS. BY FRANCIS JACOX. III.-ABOUT DUNCES AT SCHOOL, WHO BECOME PRIZEMEN IN AFTER LIFE: A CHApter of InstaNCES. It is an old remark, as Hazlitt says, that boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world. Lord Chesterfield received with considerable gratification from his "Dear Boy" a theme in three languages-which performance his lordship, with paternal complacency, showed to some men of letters at the Bath, at the same time telling them the composer's age and standing: of course they expressed a high degree of pleasurable surprise; and said that if the lad went on at this rate for but four or five years longer, he would distinguish himself extremely. "But then they added (for I must tell you all)," the earl writes to his son, "that they observed many forward boys stop short on a sudden," and turn out great blockheads at last. Poor young Stanhope, in after life, is commonly believed to have been one of these. * Hazlitt accounts for the decline and fall, in many such cases, by contending that, in point of fact, the things which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind), he argues, is the chief faculty called into play, in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, &c., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish attention, will make the most forward schoolboy. A lad with a sickly constitution, and no very active mind, Hazlitt goes on to say,-one who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy it for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. "An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book, repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Midsummer." There is, indeed, Hazlitt allows, a degree of stupidity which prevents children from learning the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours; but what passes for stupidity he asserts to * Chesterfield's Letter to his Son, July 24, 1742. be much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the dry and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. "The best capacities are as much above this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university."* Dunce Walter Scott was, and Dunce he would ever remain, was Professor Dalzell's estimate and prediction of young Walter's powers and promise. The Greek Professor took the deepest interest in the progress of his class, one of whom came to call on Scott in St. George's-square, to remonstrate with him on the "silliness of his conduct" in professing contempt for Greek, and resolving not to learn it; and told him he was distinguished by the name of the Greek Blockhead. Scott once handed to the Professor a composition, in which, weighing Homer against Ariosto, he pronounced him wanting in the balance; which heresy he supported by what he calls a profusion of bad reading and flimsy argument. "The wrath of the Professor was extreme, while at the same time he could not suppress his surprise at the quantity of out-of-the-way knowledge which I displayed. He pronounced upon me the severe sentence that dunce I was, and dunce was to remain-which, however, my excellent and learned friend lived to revoke over a bottle of Burgundy, at our literary Club at Fortune's, of which he was a distinguished member."t A writer in "that authentic record" called the "Perey Anecdotes," having ventured on the statement that Scott had been distinguished at Musselburgh school as an absolute dunce, and that only Dr. Blair, seeing further into the millstone, had pronounced there was fire in it,-Sir Walter, in 1826, denied that he was ever at Musselburgh school in his life, or that he had ever, to his knowledge, attracted the attention of Dr. Blair; and adds: "Lastly, I was never a dunce, nor thought to be so, but an incorrigibly idle imp, who was always longing to do something else than what was enjoined him.' Though, on the whole, he made a brighter figure in the yards than in the class, at the Edinburgh High School, and commonly disgusted his kind master, Luke Fraser, by his negligence and frivolity, he seems to have as often pleased him by flashes of intellect and talent. Tom Moore's first schoolmaster, the well-known Samuel Whyte of Dublin, had had a boy entrusted to his care in 1758, whom, after a few years' trial of his powers, he pronounced to be "a most incorrigible dunce." This boy, says Moore, was no other than the afterwards celebrated Richard Brinsley Sheridan; and the worthy schoolmaster, so far from being ashamed of his mistake, had the good sense often to mention the circumstance, as an instance of the difficulty and rashness of forming any judgment of the future capacity of children. Moore, by the way, tells us of himself, when at college, that, after some unavailing efforts (solely to please his anxious mother), and some mortification on finding himself vanquished by competitors whom he knew to be dull fellows, intus et in cute, and who, indeed, proved them * Hazlitt's Essay on the Ignorance of the Learned. Memoirs of Thomas Moore: Autobiography. selves such through life, he resolved in the second year of his course to give up the struggle for honours, and confine his reading to such books. as he had a taste for, otherwise learning only just enough to bring him through without disgrace. Mistress Elizabeth Delap, the Irish school dame, of hornbook associations, made it the pride and boast of her declining days, when nearly ninety years old-for she flourished in the capacity of hornbook dame fifty years and more-that she was the first that had put a book into the hand of Oliver Goldsmith. Apparently he did not much profit by it, observes one of his biographers, "for she confessed that he was one of the dullest boys she had ever dealt with, insomuch that she had sometimes doubted whether it was possible to make anything of him: a common case with imaginative children, who are apt to be beguiled from the dry abstractions of elementary study by the picturings of the fancy."* The enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever.† In preparing for the university, Goldsmith was at school first at Athlone, and afterwards at Edgeworthstown; and at neither does his proficiency appear to have been brilliant. "He was indolent and careless, however, rather than dull, and, on the whole, appears to have been well thought of by his teachers." So much depends on the teachers, and on the mode of teaching. In accounting for his brother Dr. Andrew Combe's backwardness at the High School, the late George Combe-of course with special reference to his pet doctrine-remarked on the importance of attending to the predominance, respectively, of the observing and the reflecting organs; the consequence of neglecting which distinction was, that "some boys of profound intellects and fine moral dispositions sat on the benches dreary and desolate, without acquiring ideas or gratification. They were considered as irretrievably dull, and left the school stupified and demoralised rather than improved." The correctness of this representation is not, Mr. Combe maintains, contradicted by the fact, that of the recorded "duxes" at the High School, some "stand registered in the country's history as men of superior powers; for these will be found to have had an ample development of certain observing organs which in Andrew were deficient, and also to have enjoyed the aid of private tutors, an advantage which to him was denied."§ Lord Cockburn, in his autobiography, treating also of this High School, observes, that the same powers which raise a boy high in a good school make it probable that he will rise high in life; but that in bad schools it is nearly the very reverse even in the most rationally conducted, however, superiority affords only a gleam of hope for the future. "Men change, and still more boys. The High School distinctions very speedily vanished; and fully as much by the sinking of the luminaries who had shone in the zenith, as by the rising of those who had been lying on the horizon. I have ever since had a distrust of duxes, and thought boobies * Washington Irving, Life of Goldsmith, ch. i. † Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition. Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels, of strict scholastic discipline. There is a certain kind and degree of intellect in which words take root, but into which things have not power to penetrate."-Hazlitt, Table-talk Essays, vol. i. No. v. + Irving. § Life of Dr. Andrew Combe, ch. iii. rather hopeful." As for himself, "Harry" Cockburn doubts whether he ever read fifty pages voluntarily, while at the High School; and he tells us that out of the whole four years of his attendance there were probably not ten days in which he was not flogged, at least once. Yet he never entered the class, or left it, without feeling perfectly up to the work. "But I was driven stupid. Oh! the bodily and mental wearisomeness of sitting six hours a day, staring idly at a page, without motion and without thought, and trembling at the gradual approach of the merciless monster. I never got a single prize, and once sat boobie at the annual public examination." At this period the beauty of no Roman word, or thought, or action, he says, ever occurred to him; nor did he fancy that Latin was of any use except to torture boys.-When he rose to be under Dr. Adam, however, matters seem to have improved with young Cockburn; and he lays stress upon the "sensible and affecting address" that venerable rector made to him and other of the boys on leaving-in which Dr. Adam pointed out the opposite tendencies of early eminence, and of early obscurity, upon school lads; warning those who had been distinguished, against presumption, and those who had hitherto been unnoticed, against despair, and explaining to both, that, even in the very next stage, he had often known them change natures: the one from fancying that nothing more required to be done, the other from discovering that they had everything to do.* Smollett introduces a judicious pedagogue, by whose careful tendance young Perry Pickle is redeemed from the pains and penalties of irretrievable duncedom. The absurd discipline to which the boy had been previously subjected, had strangely perverted the bias of his disposition. The new master "found him in a state of sullen insensibility, which the child had gradually contracted, in a long course of stupifying correction" -and by discriminating treatment and observant tact, enabled him soon to acquit himself of the imputation of dulness.† Like Cymon, in Dryden's adaptation from Boccaccio, he studied lessons he before abhorred: Thus the man-child advanced, and learn'd so fast, which is the way with so many when, and only when, they have left school-for good. Linnæus thought himself ill-managed at school: whatever the cause, his masters made severe complaints of his stolidity, and one of them, at Wexio, pronounced him, at nineteen, "if not a positive blockhead," at any rate unfit for holy orders, for which he was intended. They recommended his being apprenticed to some handicraft trade, instead. Sir Isaac Newton for some time could be got to take but little interest in his books, and stood very low in the school. A curious accident, or incident, is alleged as the turning-point to a more prosperous issue: the boy who was above him, having one day, says Sir David Brewster, "given him a severe kick upon the stomach, from which he suffered great pain, Isaac laboured incessantly till he got above him in the school, and from that time he continued to rise until he was the head-boy."§ * Memorials of his Time, by Henry Cockburn, pp. 4, 11. † Peregrine Pickle, ch. xii. § Brewster's Life of Newton. Cymon and Iphigenia. Mr. Thackeray says of Steele, that he fears no good report could be given by his masters and ushers at the Charterhouse of that thickset, square-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish boy. "He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times. Though he had very good parts of his own, he got other boys to do his lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging-block."* At the various schools to which Robert Clive was sent, he seems to have been both idle and unruly. His father resented his neglect of his studies; and in after life, when informed from time to time of his son's distinguished career, the old gentleman used to exclaim, with mingled pride and dudgeon, "So, the booby has some sense in him, after all!" Hogarth tells us that his exercises, when at school, were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them, than for any merit of their own; adding: "In the former [the exercises], I soon found that blockheads with better memories could soon surpass me; but for the latter I was particularly distinguished."+ In childhood, Patrick Henry gave little promise of distinction-his aversion to study being invincible: no persuasion could bring him either to read or to work.§ Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay) assures us that she was so backward when a child, that at the age of eight she was still ignorant of her letters -though by the time she was ten, she was an inordinate scribbler of elegies, odes, plays, songs, stories, farces, and even epic poems. Molière's Monsieur Diafoirus would perhaps have predicated her predestined eminence, from the mere fact of her early backwardness; to judge at least from his sagacious disquisition on the antecedents of that precious lout, his son. "On eut toutes les peines du monde à lui apprendre à lire, et il avait neuf ans qu'il ne connaissait pas encore ses lettres. Bon, disais-je en moi-même, les arbres tardifs sont ceux qui portent les meilleurs fruits. On grave sur le marbre bien plus malaisement que sur le sable, mais les choses y sont conservées bien plus longtemps; et cette lenteur à comprendre, cette pesanteur d'imagination, est est la masque d'un bon jugement à venir."|| Only the à venir, sometimes, as in the instance of Thomas Diafoirus, is toujours à venir. For it is not every irreclaimable dunce at school that walks off with first-class prizes in the prime of life. It is possible not to know one's letters at nine years old, and yet to be void of common sense at nine times five. Affright at the irresistible progress of the Civil Service and universal Examination system prompted the perplexed inquiry, some time ago, what is to become of the Stupid Men in the next generation, when the system will be in full play? The question, said the querist, is a dreadful one for parents and guardians; insomuch that if a boy under twelve develops a "healthy animalism," the best thing that can be done with him is to put him quietly out of the way-like the weakly babies of Plato's ideal community. Any taste which calls him off from his books is as * Lectures on the English Humorists: Steele. Hogarth's Anecdotes of Himself. † Life, by Malcolm. § Wire's Sketches of Life of P. Henry, cited in Earl Stanhope's Hist. Engl., ch. xlii. Le Malade Imaginaire, Acte II. Sc. 6. |