CHAPTER X.

FROM Beaulieu I proceeded to Win chester. This was a scene no less new to me; but how different from that which I had just quitted! Dr Pottinger, the headmaster, had been the acquaintance and fellow-collegiate of Mr Bradford. He felt therefore some respect for me on that account; but still more perhaps because I was the sole presumptive heir to the property of Mandeville. He examined me in my progress; he assigned me a class, and provided me with the implements of study. The school-room was a spacious and lofty building, and I looked round me, astonish

ed at every thing I saw. The pupils were about one hundred and fifty; and never in my life had I seen so numerous an assembly. But this was not an assembly, thrown together promiscuously and for a moment; but an assembly (subject to those changes incident to all human societies), with which I was to associate, with few interruptions, for several years to come. Some of the boys had already reached the full stature of manhood; and others were so young, that they seemed to hold their books with a faltering and uncertain hand, and rather to lisp, than articulately to pronounce, the inflections of their accidence. I also admired the garb of the scholars on the foundation, who wore black gowns of crape, and, when they went out into the air, placed upon their heads trencher-caps, like those belonging to the students in the universities.

This was indeed a busy scene. The murmuring labours of the boys, proceeding,

as it did, from the half-closed lips of one hundred and fifty human creatures, produ ced a united sound, low, monotonous, indistinct and perpetual, unlike every other sound, but more resembling the rustling of the waves under the dominion of a moderate breeze, than any thing else to which I can compare it. The loud, authoritative, stentor voice of the master, in its sudden impulses, made me start again, till practice had accustomed me to this abrupt breach of the ambient air. The character personated by the director of a great school, if referred to the nature of man, is wholly artificial; but in him it becomes in a short time a second nature, which it is almost impossible for him ever after to lay aside. The withdrawing of the head-master at any time, produced a sudden revolution; and the voices from every quarter became more acute, with a stirring and lively note. The government of a seminary of this sort is a curious theme for meditation: its subjects

are for the most part the most elastic, wild and thoughtless animals that can be conceived; yet they are governed, if you regard external appearances only, much like a machine; the machinist has to touch a spring only, and the whole is obedient.

After a few hours' labour, the assembly was dismissed. All care was then at an end; the signal was given for universal thoughtlessness and hilarity. The elder boys had an air of erectness, fearlessness and independence, that you would have thought they had never known restraint. But, in reality, their gait and their air were in part the growth of the restraint they had passed through. They were prisoners, dismissed indeed, but with some links of the chain still adhering to them. Their motions had not the ease and the grace of a creature in the state of nature; they had a stamp of pertness and insolence and petulance, that said, We are servants, but this is our Saturnalia. They had felt the

weight of the yoke upon their own necks; and they were resolved to retaliate their sufferings at the expence of the first victim they met. Thus they played alternately, from hour to hour, the parts of the despot and the subject, the commanded and the commander.

I, as a new comer, was exposed to a thousand ridiculous questions. The inquiries were wanton, and the inquirers had small care of the answers they received. All that I experienced in this sort was frolicsome; it had little consideration for the feelings of the person to whom it was addressed; but I must on the other hand confess, that it had little in it of malice or deliberate cruelty.

Many readers will consider the detail I have here given as frivolous and commonplace. Who has not had experience of the interior of a numerous school? The proposition however insinuated in this question, is not true. One half of the human spe