AMONG the strange and unique sights which attract the eye of the stranger in London, one of the oddest is the apparition, in the neighborhood of Newgate street, of a boy dressed in a monastic garb of the sixteenth century. It is raining, yet he is bareheaded, and he wears a long, flowing, dark-blue coat, like a monk’s tunic, confined at the waist by a leather belt, which, with yellow breeches, shoes, and yellow stockings, complete his quaint costume. Who is he? Is he the ghost of some boy of the sixteenth century, or is he a living, flesh-and-blood urchin of the nineteenth century, arrayed in the garb of a bygone time? We need not be ashamed to confess our inability to solve this problem, for it is one which puzzled even so acute and ingenious a thinker as Sydney Smith. The witty Canon of St. Paul’s brooded long over the origin of the Bluecoat Boy, — for it is by this name he is ycleped, — and finally hazarded the theory that he was a Quaker in the chrysalis state.
“Look at the circumstances,” he urged, in a discussion with the Countess of Morley; “at a very early age, young Quakers disappear, — at a very early age the Coat Boys are seen; at the age of seventeen or eighteen young Quakers are again seen, — at the same age, the Coat Boys disappear; who has ever heard of a Coat Man? The thing is utterly unknown in natural history. That such a fact should have escaped our naturalists is truly astonishing. . . . Dissection would throw great light on the 328 question; and if our friend —— would receive two boys into his house about the time of their changing their coats, great service would be rendered to the cause. I have ascertained that the Bluecoat infants are fed with drab-colored pap, which looks very suspicious.” To these daring speculations Lady Morley replied with reasonings equally shrewd and hard to answer. The possible correctness of Sydney’s theory she admitted; but there was a grave difficulty: “The Bluecoat is an indigenous animal, — not so the Quaker. . . . I have seen and talked much with Sir R. Ker Porter on this interesting subject. He has traveled over the whole habitable globe, and has penetrated with a scientific and scrutinizing eye into regions unexplored by civilized man, and yet he has never seen a Quaker baby. He has lived for years in Philadelphia (the national nest of Quakers); he has roamed up and down Broadways, and lengthways in every nook and corner of Pennsylvania, and yet he never saw a Quaker baby; and what is new and most striking, never did he see a Quaker lady in a situation which gave hope that a Quaker baby might be seen hereafter. This is a stunning fact, and involves the question in such impenetrable mystery as will, I fear, defy even your sagacity, acuteness, and industry to elucidate.”
How the question was settled, — whether Sydney continued to maintain that there never was such a thing as a Quaker baby, that “They are always born broad-brimmed and in full quake,” — we know not; and therefore, in lieu of other authority, we will accept the traditionary history of the Bluecoats. According to this, Christ’s Hospital, or the Bluecoat School, was founded in 1553 by Edward VI, in his sixteenth year, just before his death. 329 The buildings were erected on the site of the monastery of the Gray Friars, of which a few arches, a part of a cloister, are all that remains; and the queer costume of the boys, which they intensely dislike, was adopted at the time. The flat caps supplied to them are so small that the boys rarely wear them, and go bareheaded. In 1672, Charles II founded the Mathematical School for forty boys, called “King’s Boys,” to which twelve more have been added; and they are distinguished by a badge on the shoulder. The school now has an income of £40,000 a year, and it feeds, clothes, and educates twelve hundred children, of whom five hundred, including the younger children and girls, are kept in a branch school at Herford, for the sake of the pure air.
It was through the kindness of Messrs. Trübner & Co., the celebrated publishers and booksellers, whose shop on Ludgate Hill, London, is within a stone’s throw of Christ’s Hospital, that we found an “Open Sesame” to the famous school. While indulging our bibliomaniac propensities there one day, we were so lucky as to be introduced to Dr. Brette, Professor of Modern languages in the school, who kindly invited us to visit it the next day. Christ’s Hospital! Where is the scholar or literary man whose pulse does not quicken at the mention of these words? What a crowed of pleasant memories they conjure up! Who, that has skimmed but the surface of modern English literature, has not read Charles Lamb’s charming “Recollections” of that school? Christ’s Hospital! where not only the loving Carlagnulus, as he was afterwards called, but Coleridge, “the inspired charity-boy,” and Camden, and Leigh Hunt, and scores of other worthies, began their education, — how did our hearts leap up at the prospect of seeing the very benches 330 which they hacked, the very spots where they quailed under the eagle glance and thunder tones of Boyer! Accepting Dr. B.’s invitation, we next day proceeded to Newgate street, and, passing the gloomy prison, turned into a cross-street, where, about noon, we entered the boy-King’s school. Entering a corridor, we notice on the wall numerous tablets placed there in honor of the graduates of the school who have become benefactors. Not a few of England’s “solid men” of business, who were educated here, have left handsome legacies to the institution. The buildings consist of several large structures of brick, fronting paved courts, which serve as playgrounds for the boys in sunny weather, while the corridors shield them from the rain in wet weather. Following the lead of Dr. Brette, we visit a school-room, where the hard seats and benches, with deep gashes testifying to the excellence of English cutlery, remind us of the pine planks upon which we tried our Rogers in the old red school-house of our boyhood. Was there ever a school-boy who did not make his mark with his jack-knife whatever his failures in recitation?
The eulogists of “modern improvements” will find but little to admire in these venerable piles, except the swimming-room, — the water of which is tempered at pleasure, — the admirable bathing-rooms, of which the boys are required to make use at prescribed times, — and the clean and airy hospital, where boys who are unwell, or who have met with an injury in their sports, are cared for by skillful surgeons and tender nurses. Visiting these apartments, we next glance at the dormitories, with their multitude of iron bedsteads and the monitor’s room in the corner; and then return to the playground, where 331 memory is busy calling up the history of the Bluecoats whose names have been blazoned high on the scroll of fame. Can it be, we musingly ask ourselves, that the spider-legged, spectral-looking “Elia” once trod these courts, and trembled in yon rooms under the master’s frown? Did Horne Tooke here begin the “Diversions of Purley,” and Wesley shout in his boyish games as he never did afterwards in the Methodist class-room? Did the thoughtful Addison and the careless, impulsive Dicky Steele here kick the football, and little Barrow begin the pugilistic feats which he afterwards repeated with such effect in his struggle with an Algerine corsair? Was it here that the youthful Blackstone tested in boyish games the strength of the British Constitution; and was it from this school that Mitchell, the translator of “Aristophanes,” was translated to Cambridge? All these names are on the muster-rolls of the Bluecoat School, and many others hardly less brilliant.
We think of these, and of the Bedlam cells to which naughty boys in Elia’s times were consigned; little fellows of seven years shut up all night in these dungeons, where they could just lie at length upon straw and a blanket: with only a peep of light by day, let in from a prison-orifice at the top; and permitted to come forth only twice a week and then to be flogged by the beadle. We think of that fierce master, Boyer, and his two wigs, — the one serene, smiling, fresh-powdered, and betokening a mild day, — the other, an old, discolored, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. We see him shaking his knotty fist at a poor, trembling child, and crying, “Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me?” — then flinging back into his lair, and after a few moments 332 bounding forth again, and singling out a lad with the exclamation, “Od’s my life, sirrah, I have a great mind to whip you,” which imperfect sense he speedily “pieces out,” as if it had been some devil’s litany, with the expletory yell, “and I WILL, too.” We see the “gentle Elia” in another room, where the thunders rolled innocuous, listening to the Ululantes, and catching glimpses of Tartarus; we hear Coleridge, hardly yet in his teens, unfolding the mysteries of Plotinus, or reciting Homer or Pindar in his Greek, to the wonderment of the visitors. We, think, too, of Coleridge’s pious ejaculation when told that his old master was on his death-bed: “Poor J. B.! may all his faults be forgotten, and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities!”
We think of the poor scholar who conveyed to his room his fragments of coarse meat, which he was supposed to sell to beggars, for which he was excommunicated by the other boys as a gag-eater, until the kind steward found that he carried home the scraps, which he denied himself, to his starving parents. We think of the silver medal which the noble lad received for this from the Governor of the school: and then, perhaps, our thoughts revert to another boy, the petty Nero, afterwards seen a culprit in the hulks, who actually branded a boy who had offended him, with a red-hot iron, — and who nearly starved forty younger lads, by exacting from them daily one-half of their bread to pamper a young ass, which he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads of the ward, as the dormitories were called, till the foolish beast, waxing fat, and kicking in the fulness of bread, betrayed him by braying. All these, and many other 333 recollections, comic or touching, are related by Lamb and Coleridge in their own inimitable style, but hardly seemed to us, when we were 4,000 miles away, as they do now, realities. It was here, too, that the following ludicrous scene occurred, narrated by some graduate, to omit which, in an account of this famous school would be like blotting Moses’ experience from the Vicar of Wakefield:
Among the scholars, when Lamb and Coleridge attended, was a poor clergyman’s son, by the name of Simon Jennings. On account of his dismal and gloomy nature, his playmates had nicknamed him Pontius Pilate. One morning he went up to the master, Dr. Boyer, and said, in his usual whimpering manner, “Please, Dr. Boyer, the boys all call me Pontius Pilate.” If there was one thing which old Boyer hated more than a false quantity in Greek and Latin, it was the practice of nicknaming. Rushing down among the scholars from this pedestal of state, with cane in hand, he cried, with his usual voice of thunder: “Listen, boys; the next time I hear any of you say ‘Pontius Pilate,’ I’ll cane you as long as this cane will last. You are to say ‘Simon Jennings,’ not ‘Pontius Pilate.’ Remember that, if you value your hides.” Having said this, Jupiter Tonans remounted Olympus, the clouds still hanging on his brow.
The next day, when the same class were writing the Catechism, a boy of remarkably dull and literal turn of mind had to repeat the creed. He had got as far as “suffered under,” and was about popping out the next word, when Boyer’s prohibition unluckily flashed upon his obtuse mind. After a moment’s hesitation he blurted out, ‘suffered under Simon Jennings, was cruci ——.” The rest of the word was never uttered, for Boyer had already 334 sprung like a tiger upon him, and the cane was descending upon his unfortunate shoulders like a Norwegian hail-storm or an Alpine avalanche. When the irate doctor had discharged his cane-storm upon him, he cried: “What do you mean, you booby, by such blasphemy?” “I only did as you told me,” replied the simple-minded Christ-Churchian. “Did as I told you?” roared old Boyer, now wound up to something above the boiling point. “What do you mean?” As he said this, he again instinctively grasped his cane more furiously. “Yes, Doctor, you said we were always to call ‘Pontius Pilate’ ‘Simon Jennings.’ Didn’t he, Sam?” appealed the unfortunate culprit to Coleridge, who was next to him. Sam said nought; but old Boyer, who saw what a dunce he had to deal with, cried, “Boy, you are a fool. Where are your brains?” Poor Dr. Boyer for a second time was floored, for the scholar said, with an earnestness which proved its truth, but to the intense horror of the learned potentate, “In my stomach, sir.” The Doctor ever afterwards respected that boy’s stupidity, as though half afraid that a stray blow might be unpleasant.
But, whoop! our musings are interrupted by shouts, and away bounds a football, followed by an avalanche of boys, screaming, pushing, kicking, jostling, and tumbling headlong, very much like boys in America, and showing, by their earnestness, impetuosity, and energy, that they belong to the nineteenth century, and not to the sixteenth. But what a plague their long coats are, and how strange that the Governors do not see the grotesqueness and inconvenience of these old monkish costumes! To play their games the boys tuck up their coat-tails, and so, we suppose, will have to do for years 335 to come, till John Bull can see that modern garments may be substituted without impairing the stability of the British Constitution.
But, hark! a burst of martial music is heard; the boys have dropped the footballs, and, under the directions of a drill-master, are marshaled in platoons, each displaying its number on a flag. After a series of evolutions, they march, seven hundred strong, with a boy-band of thirty performers at their head, up the grand staircase to the Gothic hall, to dinner. This magnificent hall, which was completed in 1829, is 187 feet long, is lighted by large stained-glass windows, has an organ gallery at one end, and the walls are hung with portraits of the founder and benefactors of the institution. We take seats on a platform on the west side of the hall; a bell is touched, and a boy at the organ plays an anthem, while seven hundred children’s voices mingle in the chant of thanksgiving. Another bell, and down sit the boys, off come the covers, and Bluecoats wait on Bluecoats, until all have quieted their barking stomachs with a plentiful supply of meat, potatoes, bread, and, above all, beer. The boys themselves clear the tables, and, after a few minutes’ chat with them, we leave the hall, with many thanks to Dr. Brette for his courtesies, and a feeling that henceforth the writings of “Elia” and the “Highgate Sage” will have for us an added charm, if it is possible for us to hang with profounder interest over their bewitching pages. Meanwhile, if any of our readers care to see the famous old school as it has been for three centuries, they must cross the ocean soon, for these venerable piles are speedily to be swept away, to make room for the ruthless locomotives of the Mid-London Railway.