The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
quite at our ease to do justice to his merits in those days, are long
since over, ungrateful were we if we should refuse our testimony to that
unwearied assiduity with which he attended to the particular improvement
of each of us. Had we been the offspring of the first gentry in the
land, he could not have been instigated by the strongest views of
recompense and reward to have made himself a greater slave to the most
laborious of all occupations than he did for us sons of charity, from
whom, or from our parents, he could expect nothing. He has had his
reward in the satisfaction of having discharged his duty, in the
pleasurable consciousness of having advanced the respectability of that
institution to which, both man and boy, he was attached; in the honours
to which so many of his pupils have successfully aspired at both our
Universities; and in the staff with which the Governors of the Hospital
at the close of his hard labours, with the highest expressions of the
obligations the school lay under to him unanimously voted to present
him.
I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution of
this school, that the offices of steward and schoolmaster are kept
distinct; the strict business of education alone devolving upon the
latter, while the former has the charge of all things out of school, the
controul of the provisions, the regulation of meals, of dress, of play,
and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this division of
management, a superior respectability must attach to the teacher while
his office is unmixed with any of these lower concerns. A still greater
advantage over the construction of common boarding-schools is to be
found in the settled salaries of the masters, rendering them totally
free of obligation to any individual pupil or his parents. This never
fails to have its effect at schools where each boy can reckon up to a
hair what profit the master derives from him, where he views him every
day in the light of a caterer, a provider for the family, who is to get
so much by him in each of his meals. Boys will see and consider these
things; and how much must the sacred character of preceptor suffer in
their minds by these degrading associations! The very bill which the
pupil carries home with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with
elaborate though necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers
have other ends than the mere love to learning in the lessons which they
give him; and though they put into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca
or Epictetus, yet they themselves are none of those disinterested
pedagogues to teach philosophy _gratis_. The master, too, is sensible
that he is seen in this light; and how much this must lessen that
affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter
labour of instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcome
and uninteresting taskwork, many preceptors that I have conversed with
on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to acknowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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