Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian IslandsYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Religion
Life of John Coleridge Patteson : Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Missions -- Melanesia; Patteson, John Coleridge, 1827-1871
'The scholarship was decided last night; Smith, a Rugby man, got
the first, and Grant, a Harrow man, the second.... I saw the Master
afterwards; he said, "I cannot congratulate you on success, Mr.
Patteson, but you have done yourself great credit, and passed a very
respectable examination. I shall be happy to allow you to enter without
a future examination, as we are all quite satisfied of your competency."
He said that I had better come up to matriculate next term, but should
not have another examination. We were in about nine hours a day, three
hours in the evening; I thought the papers very hard; we had no Latin
elegiacs or lyrics, which was rather a bore for the Eton lot. I am very
glad I have been up now, but I confess it was the longest week I ever
recollect. I feel quite seedy after a whole week without exercise....
The very first paper, the Latin Essay (for which we were in six hours),
was the worst of all my papers, and must have given the examiners an
unfavourable impression to start with. The rest of my papers, with the
exception of the Greek prose and the critical paper, I did very fairly,
I think.'
A greater disappointment than this was, however, in store for Coley. He
failed in attaining a place among the 'select,' at his last examination
for the Newcastle, in the spring of 1845. Before the list was given out
he had written to his father that the Divinity papers were far too easy,
with no opportunity for a pretty good scholar to show his knowledge,
'the ridicule of every one of the masters,' but the other papers very
difficult.
'Altogether,' he adds, 'the scholarship has been to me unsatisfactory. I
had worked hard at Greek prose, had translated and re-translated a good
deal of Xenophon, Plato, and some Demosthenes, yet to my disappointment
we had no paper of Greek prose, a thing that I believe never occurred
before, and which is generally believed to test a boy's knowledge well.
My Iambics were good, I expect, though not without two bad faults. In
fact, I cannot look back upon a single paper, except my Latin prose,
without a multitude of oversights and faults presenting themselves to
me... I almost dread the giving out of the select. Think if my name was
not there. It is some consolation that Hawtrey, yesterday, in giving me
an exercise for good, asked how I liked the examination. Upon my saying,
"It was not such a one as I expected, and that I had done badly," he
said "That is not at all what I hear," but this cannot go for much...
I want exercise very badly, and my head is very thick and stupid, as I
fear this last paper must show the examiners.'
The omission of Patteson's name from among the select was a great
mortification, not only to himself but his father, though the Judge
kindly wrote:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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