best scholars and the best writers should wear some pretty garland on their beads, with silver pens well fastened thereunto, and thus walk to church and back again for at least a month:" a ceremony which in these days would infallibly secure for them all sorts of scoffings, and probably a broken head.
Walter Gale, the object of the choice at Mayfield, and the writer of the journal from which the following extracts are taken, was not such an one as Joseph Moxon, who, having acted as waiter at his father's inn at Market Bosworth, was placed by the patron of the school there at the head of it, despite of all his own earnest remonstrances and protestations of incompetency. On the contrary, he was a sort of universal genius: he could turn his hand to almost anything; and, in addition to his scholastic functions, he was a landmeasurer, a practical mathematician, an engraver of tombstones, a painter of public-house signs, a designer of ladies' needlework, and a maker of wills.
When the people of Chorley, in Lancashire, built their schoolhouse, they recorded this their resolution, that no schoolmaster or minister who might hereafter be, should, for "diverse great causes, inhabit therein;" the real "great cause" being, as was afterwards explained, that the wives, and children begotten in such habitation, might become chargeable to the parish. This difficulty, as far as Walter Gale was concerned, was obviated by the selection of a single man, who dwelt with his mother at a place called Coggin's Mill, near Mayfield. The school at first was held in a place partitioned off from the church. A schoolroom was afterwards built, which it is to be hoped, "all superfluity of too curious works of detayle and busie mouldings being layd apart, was edified of the most substantial stuffe of stone, lead, glass, and iron."[1]
Immediately upon his appointment, Master Gale began to keep a journal, and among his earliest notices we find the following account of a dream, which, as we shall see hereafter, was never realized:—
"Tuesday, 14th.—I dreamt last night that I should be advantageously married, and be blessed with a fine offspring,
- ↑ Such are the injunctions for building Eton College given by its royal founder Henry VI.
