The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 — John Shaqi
The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4Lamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4
Lamb, Charles
English essays; English poetry; Short stories, English
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 honors 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 labors, 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 school-master 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 control 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 labor of instruction, and convert the whole business into
unwelcome and uninteresting task-work, many preceptors that I have
conversed with on the subject are ready, with a sad heart, to
acknowledge.
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