Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Europe -- Description and travel
and I was amused at the zeal and avidity with which the boys seized upon
and mastered them. Young England was evidently wide awake, and the prime
minister himself was not to catch them, napping. The little fellows'
eyes-glistened as they rattled off their solutions. As I know nothing
about mathematics, I was all the more impressed; but when they came to
be examined in the Bible, I was more astonished than ever. The masters
had said that they would be willing any of the gentlemen should question
them, and Mr. B. commenced a course of questions on the doctrines of
Christianity; asking, Is there any text by which you can prove this, or
that? and immediately, with great accuracy, the boys would cite text
upon text, quoting not only the more obvious ones, but sometimes
applying Scripture with an ingenuity and force which I had not thought
of, and always quoting chapter and verse of every text. I do not know
who is at the head of this teaching, nor how far it is a sample of
English schools; but I know that these boys had been wonderfully well
taught, and I felt all my old professional enthusiasm arising.
After the examination Lord John came forward, and gave the boys a good
fatherly talk. He told them that they had the happiness to live under a
free government, where all offices are alike open to industry and merit,
and where any boy might hope by application and talent to rise to any
station below that of the sovereign. He made some sensible, practical
comments, on their Scripture lessons, and, in short, gave precisely such
a kind of address as one of our New England judges or governors might to
schoolboys in similar circumstances. Lord John hesitates a little in his
delivery, but has a plain, common-sense way of "speaking right on,"
which seems to be taking. He is a very simple man in his manners,
apparently not at all self-conscious, and entered into the feelings of
the boys and the masters with good-natured sympathy, which was very
winning. I should think he was one of the kind of men who are always
perfectly easy and self-possessed let what will come, and who never
could be placed in a situation in which he did not feel himself quite at
home, and perfectly competent to do whatever was to be done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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