The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
In the village of Enfield, in Middlesex, ten miles on the north road
from London, was my father, John Clarke's school. The house had been
built by a West India merchant, in the latter end of the seventeenth or
beginning of the eighteenth century. It was of the better character of
the domestic architecture of that period,--the whole front being of the
purest red brick, wrought, by means of moulds, into rich designs of
flowers and pomegranates, with heads of cherubim over two niches in
the centre of the building. The elegance of the design and the perfect
finish of the structure were such as to secure its protection, when a
branch railway was brought from the Ware and Cambridge line to Enfield.
The old school-house was converted into the station-house, and the
railway company had the good taste to leave intact one of the few
remaining specimens of the graceful English domestic architecture of
long-gone days. Any of my readers who may happen to have a file of the
London "Illustrated News," may find in No. 360, March 3, 1849, a not
prodigiously enchanting wood-cut of the edifice.
Here it was that John Keats all but commenced and did complete his
school-education. He was born on the 29th of October, 1795; and I think
he was one of the little fellows who had not wholly emerged from the
child's costume upon being placed under my father's care. It will be
readily conceived difficult to recall from the "dark backward and
abysm" of nearly sixty years the general acts of perhaps the youngest
individual in a corporation of between seventy and eighty youngsters;
and very little more of Keats's child-life can I remember than that he
had a brisk, winning face, and was a favorite with all, particularly
with my mother.
His maternal grandfather, Jennings, was proprietor of a large
livery-stable, called "The Swan and Hoop," on the pavement in
Moorfields, opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus. He had two sons
at my father's school. The elder was an officer in Duncan's ship in the
fight off Camperdown. After the battle, the Dutch Admiral, De Winter,
pointing to young Jennings, told Duncan that he had fired several
shots at that young man, and always missed his mark;--no credit to his
steadiness of aim; for Jennings, like his own admiral, was considerably
above the ordinary dimensions of stature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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