Collections and RecollectionsRussell, George William Erskine
History
Collections and Recollections
Russell, George William Erskine
England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
Here was a view of the School Library, with its patch of greensward
separating it from the dust and traffic of the road. There was the Old
School with its Fourth Form Room, of which one had heard so much that
the actual sight of it made one half inclined to laugh and half to cry
with surprise and disappointment. There was the twisting High Street,
with its precipitous causeway; there was the faithful presentment of the
fashionable "tuck-shop," with two boys standing in the road, and the leg
of a third caught by the camera as he hurried past; and, wandering
through all these scenes in the album as one had wandered through them
in real life, I reached at last my boarding-house, once a place of
mystery and wonderful expectations and untried experiences; now full of
memories, some bright, some sad, but all gathering enchantment from
their retrospective distance; and in every brick and beam and cupboard
and corner as familiar as home itself.
The next picture, a view of the School Bathing-place, carried me a stage
onward in memory to my first summer quarter. Two terms of school life
had inured one to a new existence, and one began to know the pleasures,
as well as the pains, of a Public School. It was a time of cloudless
skies, and abundant "strawberry mashes," and _dolce far niente_ in that
sweetly-shaded pool, when the sky was at its bluest, and the air at its
hottest, and the water at its most inviting temperature.
And then the Old Speech-Room, so ugly, so incommodious, where we stood
penned together like sheep for the slaughter, under the gallery, to hear
our fate on the first morning of our school life, and where, when he had
made his way up the school, the budding scholar received his prize or
declaimed his verses on Speech Day. That was the crowning day of the
young orator's ambition, when there was an arch of evergreens reared
over the school gate, and Lyonness was all alive with carriages, and
relations, and grandees,
"And, as Lear, he poured forth the deep imprecation,
By his daughters of Kingdom and reason deprived;
Till, fired by loud plaudits and self-adulation,
He regarded himself as a Garrick revived."
Opposite the Old Speech-Room was the interior of the Chapel, with its
roof still echoing the thunder of the Parting Hymn; and the pulpit with
its unforgotten pleadings for truthfulness and purity; and the organ,
still vocal with those glorious psalms. And, high over all, the
Churchyard Hill, with its heaven-pointing spire, and the Poet's Tomb;
and, below, the incomparable expanse of pasture and woodland stretching
right away to the "proud keep with its double belt of kindred and coeval
towers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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