( 119 )
The readers of Mr. Derwent Coleridge's memoir of his brother Hartley, found in the following passage something to "give them pause," and set them speculating on the possible subject of it: "I have myself known a man … of the very largest natural capacity, whose whole moral and intellectual nature had been dwarfed and distorted by the treatment which he had met with at school. His genius, which it was impossible to quench, kept smouldering on, till life and it went out together." We know how poor Hartley's school-experiences embittered his thoughts—how he suffered from an "instinctive horror of big boys—perhaps derived from the persecution which I suffered from them when a little one"—a horror so stern and predominant that we find him declaring, of the aforesaid "big boys," "They are always at me in my dreams—hooting, pelting, spitting at me—oppressing me with indescribable terrors." His physical peculiarities disqualified him for sharing in the commonest sports of boyhood, so that little sympathy could he have with Cowper's lines:
We love the play-place of our early days;
The scene is touching, and the heart is stone,
That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.
The wall on which we tried our graving skill,
The very name we carv'd subsisting still;
The bench on which we sat while deep employ'd,
Though mangled, hack'd, and hew'd, not yet destroy'd;
The little ones, unbuttoned, glowing hot,
Playing our games, and on the very spot;
As happy as we once, to kneel and draw
The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw;
To pitch the ball into the grounded hat,
Or drive it devious with a dext'rous pat"
to say nothing of the big boy's profligate
The parallel, or analogous instance, alluded to by Mr. Derwent Coleridge, turns out to be that interesting and ill-starred scholar, the late William Sidney Walker, of Trinity College, Cambridge, whose poetical remains have recently been edited, with a touching memoir prefixed, by his friend and fellow poet, the Rev. J. Moultrie, of Rugby.[3] Like
- ↑ Hartley had, however, a passion for spouting, which, he says, "had I not been conscious of a diminutive and ungainly exterior, might have tempted me to try my fortune on the boards."
- ↑ Tirocinium; or, a Review of Schools.
- ↑ The Poetical Remains of William Sidney Walker, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Edited, with a Memoir of the Author, by the Rev. J. Moultrie, M.A. John W. Farker. 1852.
