Blackwood's Magazine

cessive Sundaysin consequence; and I remember well, too, how I then used to envy those happier juveniles who were at church at home-that is to say, with their friends, and at liberty. I fear I did not say my prayers so earnestly as I ought to have done on those few weary Sundays; at any rate it would be useless to deny that my name is still legible, carved at full length on the back of the bench before that on which my seat was allotted. What a broad, kind, sheltering back hadst thou, long lost, but not forgotten, -, under whose concealing shade I plied my unseen labour! What a magnificent snore was thine, O most irreverent! which did divert the watchful ear of pastor and master from heeding the cautious chisellings of the sculptor, alas, no less irreverent!

Would that the mirth of the child recalled, the pride of the man awakened, were the only feelings stirred up within us by a ramble about the wellremembered precincts! We leave a large public school, and, though but one short year has departed to swell the number of its vanished brethren, we cannot return to it for an odd half hour, without being visited by remembrances which have, at the very least, some tinge of sadness. In the natural course of things it must be so. In the course of four years passed within these walls, I must have had, at a moderate computation, about eight hundred schoolfellows. What wonder that of so great a number,

"Some are dead and some are gone,
And some are scatter'd and alone,
And some are in a far countrie,
And some all restlessly at home?"

I do not mean to say that of that eight hundred I could call one-eighth, or even one-sixteenth part my friends: to half of them, perhaps, I never so much as spoke twenty words during the whole period of our common pupillage; but they were all my schoolfellows - all Carthusians; - and for such, when I hear of unlooked for sorrows or untimely death, I have ever a sigh the more. It is as good as a score of homilies to walk by one's self in holiday time round the old haunts. In the quarter, when the playground is full and noisy, when the eye can turn nowhere but it lights upon some laughing face, and the ear can hear nothing save sounds of merriment, these

things do not strike one with such force, though even then they will at times intrude; but in vacation-time, when master and scholar are alike holidaymaking-and it would be difficult to say which enjoys the release with the keener relish there is a silence and a solitude about the place, a desolation -not of ruins, but as though some enchanter's wand had whisked away from it every thing with the breath of life in its nostrils-which chills my spirits at the very outset, and disposes me to sad and serious contemplations. The old gate-porter at his lodge, dozing in his elbow-chair, starts from his slumbers at the unwonted sound of a footfall, as I pass through. The boards of the fine old carved oak staircase that leads up to the terrace, are as unstained as though they had been laid down but an hour ago. The long broad terrace itself has lost half of its attractions. There is no pleasure in walking along it now. There is no admiring eye below to look up at me as I pace along it, envious of the high privilege denied to the status pupillaris; no enquiring group to speculate on the name and business of the stranger who seems to be so much at home in their domain. The old cloister strikes damp, and cold, and cheerless; I almost wonder how I ever could have taken such pleasure in vaulting in and out at its broad high windows. The green shows not, through all its extent, a vestige of its absent denizens, save, perchance, four or five hoops dexterously swung up to rot upon some projecting branch of the old, decaying, smoke-blackened trees, or a broken tennis-bat thrown aside on a heap of rubbish in some neglected corner, and serving only by its presence to impress upon us more forcibly the utter desertion of the place. I rattle the handles of the schoolroom doors in vain, and I growl and grumble that I am not able to get in, where I formerly thought it the greatest earthly happiness to get out. It would be a satisfaction to me to look even upon the old floggingblock-a sort of chastened pleasure, renovare dolorem. I would fain satisfy myself, also, as to the truth of a rumour which has reached my ears, that that venerable relic has in its old age met with a "heavy blow and a great discouragement;" that it holds now only a divisum imperium where

it once was alone in its glory; that a second parvenu flogging-block has been of late introduced to share, perchance erelong to usurp, its long unquestioned prerogatives. But the attempt is vain. There is absolutely nothing to see but bare walls and close shuttered windows---nothing to hear but the distant hum and buzz of the "world shut out;"_around me silence and solitude, and beneath me the dead! I am treading at every step over the common grave of thousands, unconsecrated by the voice of Holy Church, unvisited by the gloomy pageantry which waits on death in its ordinary forms-a vast charnel-house of undistinguished bones-a huge garner for the harvest of a pestilence, reaped five centuries ago! At such times it is that the sadness of the place inspires a kindred feeling; at such times do I think of, and

and poor

-, gone from among us in the bright warm springtime of life; of -, a solitary toiler in a land far from the home and the friends of his early years;-of many a one on whose undeserving head the world has dealt its merciless buffets-many a weary struggler, in vain many a bright prospect dimmed and overcloudedmany a soaring spirit checked and broken, and I turn away from the spot with a less careless footstep, "a sadder and (I trust) a wiser man." But I did not mean to be mournful when I began this paper.

Of all the days in the year, commend me most especially to that on which we meet to do honour to the memory of our Founder-a day long anticipated and fondly remembered

a day of hand-shakings and heartwarmings-a day on which they who were friends of old strengthen their friendship, and they who were foes forget their enmity-a day of unin

troduced acquaintanceships, when we need no master of the ceremonies to present one Carthusian to anothera day of merry tales and side-shaking reminiscences, when all our juvenile delinquencies and escapades are called up in review before us, only to make us wish that we could once more have an opportunity of being guilty of them-when the old school-stories of our time are told, failing not, though for the twentieth time, to elicit the accustomed peal of merriment, and the old hall echoes again to the cheers which follow the prime toast of the evening, the time-honoured heartfelt toast of "Domus," and the uproarious but merry controversy to whichit never fails to give rise. It must be a tempting lure, indeed, that would keep me away from that day's meeting-a most unexceptionable excuse that would salve my conscience for the breach of duty. It was but the other day that I heard of a little knot of Carthusians, who had met together and celebrated " Founder's Day" in Australia. I would I knew their names, for they must be men after my own heart; but though unknown, I honour them none the less. I will answer for it, there is not a single one of that "band of brothers" whom Charter-House need blush to acknowledge as her son.

But I must lay a strong hand upon myself. The cacoëthes scribendi is increasing upon me too rapidly-crescit indulgens sibi-and I forget that I am not yet quite sufficiently stricken in years to claim the privilege of unlimited garrulity. I would not willingly become ad extremum ridendus, though I have wind and bottom enough for a mile or two more yet. It is better to pull up at the distance than to break down before the judge.

T. V. R.