Essays Mock-Essays and Character Sketches ESSAYS MOCK- ESSAYS AND CHARACTER SKETCHES REPRINTED FROM THE "JOURNAL OF EDUCATION" WITH ORIGINAL CONTRIBU- TIONS BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE AND OTHERS LONDON WILLIAM RICE 86 FLEET STREET E.G. WHITTAKER & CO. PATERNOSTER SQUARE E.C. AND 66 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK PREFACE. A S a volume of reprints seems to need some apology, the Editor may venture to explain its genesis. Prizes offered about a year ago for the best imitations of essays by Bacon and other standard English essayists produced such a number of excellent compositions that it was impossible to find room for several of high merit, and disappointed candidates were consoled by the promise that they should appear in a fourth volume of the series of Prize Translations. But on second thoughts it seemed doubtful whether a book consisting solely of prose parodies would be much appreciated except by the authors, and thus these Mock Essays have devel- oped into Essays and Mock Essays, a mixture of seria ludo. With the material of twenty years to choose from, the task of selection has not been easy. The articles chosen may all be classed as educational in the widest sense of the word, but esoteric pedagogics have been eschewed, and nothing has been admitted but what is likely to appeal to lay as well as to professional readers. If education labours under the aspersion of dulness, one reason is that those who write and talk about it too v Preface. commonly know nothing of its actual working, and this volume may be taken as a practical vindica- tion of schoolmasters against Charles Lamb's too sweeping charge of pedantry and priggism. The Editor takes this opportunity of heartily thanking those staunch friends who supported the Journal of Education in its struggling years of infancy, and in particular his brethren of the " U. U." VI CONTENTS PREFACE ESS A YS RECOLLECTIONS OF MY GRANDFATHER'S LIBRARY 3 BY MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE ON TRIFLE-BLINDNESS ... 19 " BLESSED ARE THE STRONG, FOR THEY SHALL PREY ON THE WEAK" . . 34 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE MENTAL CULTURE . . . 7 a BY PROF. JAMES WARD ART IN SCHOOLS .... 99 BY DEAN FARRAR WHAT IS A COLLEGE? . . . .126 BY MARK PATTISON CHILDREN AND POETRY . - . . 140 GAMES: A "U. U." ESSAY ... 150 BY E. E. B. vii Contents PAGE THE HOUSE OF RIMMON 166 BY E. D. A. MORSHEAD IDEALS OF WOMANLINESS . . .189 BY SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc. MOCK-ESSA YS THE SPARROW COLONEL (After O. W. Holmes} 211 BY THE HON. MRS L. A. TOLLEMACHE OF CYNICISM (After Bacon} . . .215 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE ON THE SHAKING OF HANDS (After Charles Lamb} ...... 224 BY C. LAWRENCE FORD THE PERFECT HEADMISTRESS (After Bacon} 232 OF PARTING (After Bacon} . . 236 BY SYBIL WILBRAHAM OF CONTEMPT (After Bacon) . . .239 CHARACTER SKETCHES JOWETT AND HIS PERSONAL INFLUENCE 243 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE TOM HUGHES AND THE ARNOLDS . . 254 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE viii Contents PAGE REMINISCENCES OF LORD HOUGHTON AND PROFESSOR FREEMAN (In the man- ner of Hayward) . . . .259 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE THE REV. S. H. REYNOLDS ... 269 BY THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE HEAD-MASTERS I HAVE KNOWN . . 285 I. DR MOSTYN ... 285 II. DR RUTTY .... 295 C. S. CALVERLEY .... 304 THE NEW OLD MAID . . . .310 AN EPISODE . . . . . 322 BY J. W. LONGSDON POETRY THE HAMMERERS' STRIKE (Frai^ois Coppee's Greve des Forgerons) .... 333 BY F. STORR TERENCE MACRAN A HEDGE SCHOOL STUDY 341 BY JANE BARLOW THE DREAM OF MAXEN . . . , 353 BY GEORGE E. DARTNELL IX Essays. RECOLLECTIONS OF MY GRANDFATHER'S LIBRARY. 1 BY MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE. " A ND the Library What room will you make ^ a Library of?" I asked of a friend who was showing me over a handsome new house he was beginning to inhabit, and "claiming my admiration for a thousand and one ingenious contrivances for comfort, beauty, and convenience. I had praised the lift, and the electric bells, looked with respect at ventilators and speaking-tubes, and tried to believe that every grate would consume its own smoke with graceful economy. I had done my best to suppress every outward symptom of the sort of moral chill I was conscious of catching from surroundings of such faultless order and uniform newness. We had visited bedrooms, sitting-rooms, the kitchen, the billiard- room, and the smoking-room, and now at last we stood in the master's Study. So he told me, at least ; otherwise I should have thought we were in an office. So bare was the room of the books or even accommodation for the books I have been accustomed to regard as the indispensable furniture of a study. But I said to myself, " Habits differ as much as tastes. It is possible that B cannot 1 Journal of Education, September 1882. 3 Essays. work among his books. Perhaps their crowding presences oppress him, and he prefers to take one or two apart and enjoy them in intimate privacy, as we do the society of chosen friends. Doubtless the Library adjoins the Study. . ." And I fixed my eye on a curtained recess, fondly persuading myself that there was the opening into the spacious chamber, in which I pictured the noble company of writers ranged in ordered dignity upon innumerable shelves. B followed my observation, and approached the curtain with a gait of happy eagerness. " This," he said, " is a dodge of my own, and I like it as well as anything in my house. It is simple enough, how- ever, and may very likely not take your fancy as much as it does mine." I hastened to assure him that simplicity would not prejudice it in my eyes ; but, before the words were well out of my mouth, the curtain was with- drawn, and my blank look confessed that B 's pet little dodge did not take my fancy as much as it did his. We stood jjefore a case of shelves con- trived so as to hold, with perfect economy of space, a year's issue of all the important papers and periodicals of the day. Each publication had its particular place allotted to it and labelled with its title, and every section was subdivided into monthly or weekly partitions. " One must keep up with the literature of one's time," said B , whom my unsympathetic manner had lowered precipitously to the level of apology. "One must read, you know, and I hate a litter of papers about the place." 4 My Grandfather's Library. " Oh, certainly," said I, " one must read." And then it was that I asked what room was to be the Library. " The Library ? I don't intend to have one," was the answer. "I consider the private library an exploded superstition. We have an excellent public library in the town, to which I make a point of sub- scribing liberally. Mudie sends us fifteen new books every week, and if I want to make anything like a study of a subject it is open to me to run up to London and spend a few days at the British Museum. To my mind, our modern civilization shows few more satisfactory symptoms than the tendency of the public library everywhere to displace the private one. It is good, every way. The pres- ence in a dwelling-house of a large collection of old books is extremely detrimental to health. Not only do they gather dust and so become nests for the breeding of fevers, but I am competently informed that the old leather of their bindings emits an odour that is directly productive of phthisis. I believe that, in nine cases out of ten, the family library is at the root of the consumption that carries off the children of the house. I am so firmly persuaded of this that nothing will ever induce me to stay with people who use their book-room for a general sitting-room. I would as soon dine with the skeleton in the cup- board, or sleep in the family vault. There is a peculiar atmosphere about such rooms that oppresses me morally and physically." "Ah," cried I, unable to hold silence any longer, "there is indeed an atmosphere peculiar to 5 Essays. the library of an old house an air of the past, a presence of the generations who went before us, a breath of antiquity. . . ." " Oh, come, come ! " broke in B . " Let us call things by their right names, and say at once a dusty, fusty mustiness, that no lungs can breathe healthily, and such an array of prejudice, error, dul- ness, and superstition, as may deter the most daring mind from the attempt to add to the stock of know- ledge, by confronting it with the reminder that these old fogies, whom nobody looks at now save as curiosities, were once the advanced spirits of the world, and the suggestion that a like fate may be in store for all the thinking and scribbling of our time." " For these writers of newspapers and magazines, certainly," said I with some heat. " For these worthless productions which you shrine religiously, and I consign, often without even opening them, to a handy waste-paper basket." " But pardon me," said B , with a politeness that betrayed a certain irritation, " Pardon me if I say that there is less difference than you think between our methods of dealing with ephemeral literature. You burn your papers at once. I store mine out of sight for one year, and then make them over to the waste-paper merchant. If I had not provided myself with these convenient shelves, I should probably do exactly as you do, and suffer the inconvenience of having to go outside my house every time I want to look up a fact or a remark that is older than four and twenty hours." 6 My Grandfather's Library. "But how when you want the thoughts whose age is counted by centuries?" "Then, as I said before, I think it worth while to go to town and burrow in the British Museum. But, between ourselves, I don't go there often. I repeat, I am not fond of old libraries, and like more modern surroundings. I feel myself a little out of it in such venerable company in such a consecrated air." " The company of the centuries," I said almost involuntarily ; " an air thick with the emotion of the generations that have made us what we are ; a place warm with their sympathies, stirring with their activi- ties, hallowed by their faith, damp with the tears and the blood of their martyrdom. . . ." " Oh, damp by all means," cried B , " damp as a charnel house, or a cathedral crypt where a rheumatic sexton asks you to believe that some oozing stone, which your nose tells you is the imperfectly cemented covering of a poisonous drain, is wet with the sacred blood of a meddling monk or priest, most righteously punished there some five or six hundred years ago. My dear fellow, believe me, all this sort of thing is the most unprofitable cant of sentiment with which you can possibly encumber your life. And as for the books, tell me frankly, did you ever in all your life do any reading that was of the smallest use in an old family library ? The book a practical man wants to read is the new work of the day, or the latest edition of the classic who is just in vogue. These you can get from your circulat- ing library. And, having got them in this way, you 7 Essays. will read them for three excellent reasons, first, because everybody else is reading them secondly, you have them in clean, handy volumes, with good type and modern spelling; and thirdly, your wife and daughters will give you no peace till you have done with them, and are ready to exchange them for something newer still." I laughed, and admitted that, for the purposes of getting books read and quickly read, there was cer- tainly much to be said in favour of the circulating library as opposed to the stationary library at home ; which concession B took as a surrender of the whole position, for, said he, " as reading is the only use books can be put to, it is obvious that whatever system promotes most reading is best." I was con- tent to let the subject drop, and shortly afterwards I took my leave of B , wishing him joy of his lifts, and his electric bells, and his pigeon-holes. But, as I walked home, my mind went back to the old library in my grandfather's house, where I first learned to reverence all books and love some, and acquired that taste for the company of a crowd of musty volumes, which B finds so senseless and so unwholesome. I can see the room now, and feel myself back in it. As I do so, I am conscious first of a general surrounding of brownness of a rather dingy brownness on dull days, but of a golden brown- ness that was truly glorious on days of sunshine, or whenever a fire was lighted to air the books and ward off damp and worm. I must confess, at once, that I never knew anybody but myself take a book down from the shelves of that library except to clean it. 8 My Grandfather's Library. In so far as to promote reading is the object of libraries, that of my grandfather was a failure. The house was not a reading house. It was a riding, driving, hunting, eating and drinking life that was led in it ; a life of genial hospitality and easy country manners. Nobody stayed much within the house. The garden doors front, back, and side had a trick of standing open at all seasons of the year ; a trick which would have been extremely unpleasant if the fires had not had a compensating way of burning with generous wastefulness, and equal disregard of the calendar. My grandfather lived on horseback ; my grandmother was always " about the place " ; my uncles and aunts were all either dead, or married and scattered, before I remember the house; but their rooms kept their names, and so did the super- annuated horses and dogs that had been favourites of this one or that. It was characteristic of the place that whatever came there, stayed, and whatever stayed there did as he or she or it liked, without regard to convenience or economy. Visitors came in hurriedly after breakfast to ask a favour, or deliver a message, and dawdled on till luncheon-time, then were seduced into staying to tea, and, having had that meal, to linger on till it was too late to get home to dinner. It was an aimless way of life without plan or order, thriftless, fruitless, stagnant. I dare not say that it was a good way ; and, as I look back upon it all with older eyes, I read between the lines my memory draws, much of sad and even tragic explanation of the causes that made the place the temple of chance and drift I found it. I dare not 9 Essays. say that it was a good way, or, for those most con- cerned, a happy way of life ; but I cannot deny that to me, in my childhood, it was very pleasant, and I think that there were features in it which were worth reproducing in modern houses, if we could but find time and space for them in our arrangements of organised economy. And, chief among these, I rank the presence, within doors and without, of so many things having no direct reference to the tastes and convenience of the actual occupants. This was the point of contrast between my grandfather's house and my father's. At home, we were busy, purpose- ful, modern. We bought things because we wanted them ; we used them, and, when we had done with them, we cast them away. We had one horse and a wagonette, which took my father daily to the station, and my mother out shopping and visiting. We had two maid-servants, who did the work inside the house efficiently, and a man, who was a miracle of general usefulness in the garden and the stable, besides doing a thousand things that women could not do within doors. At my grandfather's, there were any number of men-servants and maid-servants, and nothing was ever done punctually or well. On the same principle, there were a dozen horses and ponies, and very often not one that was available for necessary work. There was a lumbering old carriage that had belonged to George the Third, and another that had held Buonaparte; there was a battered landau in which my great grandmother had sat to see Bliicher pass, on the occasion of his visit to London; but, for purposes of actual use, the only 10 My Grandfather's Library. available thing on wheels was a very small and dilapidated pony-carriage, in which a pair of old Shetland ponies went, whenever one or both of them was not ill, or supposed to be so. And so it was with everything about the place. A willow, of which the sapling had been brought from Napoleon's tomb, struck its roots into the well from which we drank, and hindered our water-supply ; and this tree, which no one ever thought of removing, has become to my mind the type of the whole way of living in my grandfather's house. It cannot have been a comfortable house for people who had business to get through ; but for me, who had no business, I say again it was a very pleasant house, and I think an educating one. I do not, however, pretend that I got much solid information or regular instruction out of my grandfather's library. All that was given me at home. Ours was much the better educated house of the two, and we had plenty of books and shelves to put them in. The difference was, that we had no one room given up to them. Moreover, I knew the story of them all, when they had been bought, and why; each set marked an epoch that I knew about, either by memory or hear- say. There were the well-bound books in calf and gold, which were especially " papa's books," " your college-books " my mother used always to call them, in speaking of them to him. And there was a case full of law-books, which represented daily work and the means of living. Then there were the " drawing- room books " in pretty bindings, which my mother read. And there were the prizes my elder brothers ii Essays. had got at school; besides a shabby lot of lesson and story-books which were called the " school-room books." On the whole, I believe we possessed a very fair collection of books, and I know that I made a very fair use of them, and had a genuine affection for many of them at a very early age. But neither from some of them, or all of them, did I imbibe anything like the sentiment that gathered about the shelves of my grandfather's library. There was a mystery about the books at the older house. Their origin was unknown to me; the purpose of their presence I vainly tried to understand. It seemed to me that they must have been there always. I could not imagine either my grandfather or my grandmother buying them. I knew that they never read them. Nor yet my uncles and aunts, when they came back now and again to the family home. The books existed, as far as I could see, for their own sakes. They were religiously dusted and aired. There was a complete catalogue of them, which looked to me as old and brown as the oldest of them all. I liked reading this as much as any volume on the shelves. It was like a game to look up the names of books in it, and then hunt down the actual volumes according to the neat directions given. Though I must have made some thousands of experiments in this species of verification, I cannot remember any single occasion on which I failed to find the book in the place where the catalogue said it should be. Whose, I often wonder, was the careful hand that made that faultless list, and placed the volumes where they stood? I never knew, and now I hardly desire to know. To 12 My Grandfather's Library. refer the arrangements of that old library to anything so arbitrary as an individual will, would, I think, break the spell by which it holds my affection. I prefer that its history should begin and end with the two words, // was. On the other hand, my memory holds and cherishes every detail of its arrangement. No room that I have lived in since, not my own bed-room or study of to-day, is so clearly pictured in my mind as is that old haunt of my childhood. It was a square room by how many feet square, I cannot pretend to say, that is a point on which childish recollection is not to be trusted but I remember it as a large, though not a very large, room. The book-shelves ran unbroken round two sides of it ; on a third side, they were interrupted in the middle by a wide win- dow that opened into a conservatory from which, it seemed to me, a scent of heliotrope came in con- tinually through all the seasons of the year. (Per- haps it is because the odour of heliotrope mingles in my fancy with that of worn leather and paper, that I am unable to think as B does of the smell of an old library.) On the fourth side, was a large old- fashioned fire-place, with an arched window on either side of it. There were seats in the sills, and outside was a wooden verandah, heavily laden with jessamine and cottage clematis. These windows must have looked west, for I remember that the afternoon sunshine used to stream through them pleasantly ; so pleasantly, that I never could resist the tempta- tion of pulling the blinds right up, at the risk of taking a little more colour out of the dim Turkey 13 Essays. carpet and the curtains, which had once been claret colour, but were now a yellow pink, and the backs of the books, and the stamped velvet of the chairs. This was the only subject on which I was ever scolded by my grandmother. Hardly a sunny day passed without my being admonished by her on this point admonitions to which it never occurred to me to pay practical attention, though in all other matters I obeyed her religiously. But on this point I not only disregarded her wishes, but disregarded them without compunction. If the books themselves could have spoken, or the prints on the wall, I should have obeyed unhesitatingly, or if I had found it written in the catalogue as a rule of the room; but, without any articulate process of reasoning on the matter, I had arrived at the conclusion that the library was subject to the authority of no living per- son. And I knew that, in so far as use and know- ledge and enjoyment make a title of possession, I was more the owner of the place than any actual inhabitant of the house. But I must not give an impression that I read very deeply, or thoroughly, in the books about me. Though, I believe, there was not a volume in the collection of which I did not know the name and position so well, that I could have found it almost in the dark had anyone asked for it, there were very few that I read through or knew well internally. I was fond of skimming metaphysics and moral philo- sophy, and of making sudden dives into poetry. I liked making journeys upon maps, and constructing historical characters on the lines of portraits ; and of My Grandfather's Library. these there were a great many, both in the books and on the walls above the ten feet of book-shelves. But, for purposes of connected reading, I eschewed solid books, I preferred novels and essays. The British Essayists, in dark red morocco and innumer- able array of volumes, delighted me especially. So did the British Novelists, bound to match. I liked these outside and in. Among the Waverley novels, I remember reading again and again the " Talisman," " Ivanhoe," " The Antiquary," "Kenilworth," " Wood- stock," and " The Fair Maid of Perth." But I never opened any other volume of the set. I had a passion for " King John," and " Julius Caesar," and " Romeo and Juliet," and I am quite unable to say what accidents directed my choice to these plays. I only know that at these I stopped. I knew no more Shakespeare till I was grown up. I read " Paradise Lost," and found my way to the " Life of Milton " in a crumbling edition of Johnson's " Lives of the Poets," bearing the date 1783. An early edition of " Cecilia," with portraits of the principal characters, and a carefully accurate plan of Delvile Castle, I was particularly fond of. And I positively loved two big volumes of " ^Esop's Fables," printed in noble type, and "embellished," as the title-page had it, " with one hundred and twelve plates." Other books I remember liking chiefly, if not only, for their pic- tures. Among these was a many-volumed Gibbon, with plates, on which a number of heads, each a separate medallion, were grouped together in pat- terns ; a Hume, with portraits of all the Kings and Queens ; a life of Fox, with a good collection of Essays. contemporary statesmen and wits and beauties ; and a Pope's Homer, with Flaxman's illustrations. Other books, again, I loved as mere objects. There was a Latin " Utopia " of which I could not understand a word, save the name " Thomae Mori," and the date 1563. But I delighted in it none the less. I liked the type and the paper, the square blocks of orna- mentation that held the initial letters of the chapters, and the pretty disposition of their concluding lines. And, above all, I liked the elaborate working of the vellum binding with the portraits in relief of Queen Elizabeth on its two sides, and the massive ridges across the back. I also liked very much the sixty volumes of Voltaire in very red and shiny leather, with gold edges and gold lettering in large sloping italics ; the little Rousseau, too, in twenty - five volumes of smaller size. But, indeed, what books in that room did I not note and love, and do I not now remember, if not the contents, at least the out- ward appearance of? Cut bono ? B asks. And I do not attempt to answer him. Of what use to do so ? All super- stitions are not for all men. He believes in his pigeon-holes of daily papers : I in my grandfather's library. I doubt not he derives good from his super- stition : I know that I connect mine with all that I value most in my culture. From companionship with those old volumes that nobody used and no- body talked of, I got in earliest childhood a sense of an imposing world behind me and beyond me. I learned to associate feelings of reverence and awe with the names of thinkers whose thoughts I could 16 My Grandfather's Library. not understand ; and, if in many cases my reverence was misplaced in respect to individual writers, I do not think that matters much. It is better to give reverence sometimes where it is not due, than to grow up in the habit of not giving it at all save under compulsion. And not this only. That little used and yet care- fully kept library carried into the region of intellec- tual and spiritual things the wholesome lesson, which was suggested by all the other arrangements of the house. Like all else about the place, from George the Third's coach, and the willow from Napoleon's tomb, to the old straw hat that had belonged to an uncle long since lost at sea, the books stood on their shelves, and got their regular dusting and airing, not because they were wanted by anyone of the living generation, but out of recognition of some right of such high sanctity, as to override all considerations of utilitarian economy. My grandmother's wardrobe was exiguous, her ponies were infirm, her carriage was shabby and inadequate ; all the appointments of the house showed that money was not over-abundant. The books have since been sold, and have realized a sum that would have been undeniably convenient to my grandparents in their lifetime. But, till both were under the ground, no article of property that had come down from the past ever went to the hammer. They wanted many things ; for instance, I often heard my grandmother express a wish for some modern book, but I never knew her suggest that an old one should be given in exchange for it. Such sacrifice of convenience to tradition is not B 17 Essays. according to the spirit of modern life, and I grant that there are excellent reasons for not attempting to bring the fashion of it back. But, just because it is a fashion so faded, and one not likely to be revived, it delights me now and again to recall the influence it had on the beginnings of my mental life ; and I do not think that there can be any danger in express- ing a wish, that the present generation of educators might see their way, without turning their backs upon recent improvements in the machinery of instruction, to finding place in their admirable systems for some corresponding monument of the past, under the shadow of which children might, unguided and unchecked, save by their own happy instinct of sympathy, "walk in spirit" with the immortal dead, and "fathom hidden wonders, and explore the essence of great bosoms now no more." 18 ON TRIFLE-BLINDNESS. 1 " Hereby I learned not to despise, Whatever thing seems small in common eyes." Spenser. ea iro\\& (J.e\urcrdwi> Herpes t'/c y\avpTJs alfl vtbv tpxofJ.fv6.ui>, the dense swarms of bees as they flew out of their hives in the hollow rock, or hung in grapelike clusters on the blossoms of the spring. Even ^schylus sings with delight Tijs dvOefj-ovpyov a-rdy/jia, Tra/J.