CHAPTER II.

THE PRIORY.

To teach is to learn: according to an old experience, it is the very best mode of learning the surest, and the shortest. And hence, perhaps, it may be, that in the middle ages by the monkish word scholaris was meant indifferently he that learned and he that taught. Never in any equal number of months had my understanding so much expanded as during this visit to Laxton. The incessant demand made upon me by Lady Carbery for solutions of the many difficulties besetting the study of divinity and the Greek Testament, or for such approximations to solutions as my resources would furnish, forced me into a preternatural tension of all the faculties applicable to that purpose. Lady Carbery insisted upon calling me her "Admirable Crichton;" and it was in vain that I demurred to this honorary title upon two grounds-first, as being one towards which I had no natural aptitudes or predisposing advantages; secondly (which made her stare), as carrying with it no real or enviable distinction. The splendour, supposed to be connected with the attainments of Crichton, I protested against as altogether imaginary. How far that person really had the accomplishments ascribed to

him, I waived as a question not worth investigating. My objection commenced at an earlier point: real or not real, the accomplishments were, as I insisted, vulgar and trivial. Vulgar, that is, when put forward as exponents or adequate expressions of intellectual grandeur. The whole rested on a misconception; the limitary idea of knowledge was confounded with the infinite idea of power. To have a quickness in copying or mimicking other men, and in learning to do dexterously what they did clumsily, ostentatiously to keep glittering before men's eyes a thaumaturgic versatility such as that of a rope-dancer, or of an Indian juggler, in petty accomplishments, was a mode of the very vulgarest ambition: one effort of productive power, a little book, for instance, which should impress or should agitate several successive generations of men, even though far below the higher efforts of human creative art as, for example, the "De Imitatione Christi," or "The Pilgrim's Progress," or "Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield "- -was worth any conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of any thing that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply instal him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine under every angle, it would have been ungrateful in me to refuse my co-operation with her plans, however little they might wear a face of promise. Accordingly I surrendered myself for two hours daily to the lessons in horsemanship of a principal groom who ranked as a first-rate rough-rider; and I gathered manifold experiences amongst the horses-so different from the wild, hardmouthed horses at Westport, that were

often vicious, and sometimes trained to vice. Here, though spirited, the horses were pretty generally gentle, and all had been regularly broke. My education was not entirely neglected even as regarded sportsmanship, that great branch of philosophy being confided to one of the keepers, who was very attentive to me, in deference to the interest in myself expressed by his idolised mistress, but otherwise regarded me probably as an object of mysterious curiosity rather than of sublunary hope.

Equally, in fact, as regarded my physics and my metaphysics; in short, upon all lines of advance that interested my ambition, I was going rapidly ahead. And, speaking seriously, in what regarded my intellectual expansion, never before or since had I been so distinctly made aware of it. No longer did it seem to move upon the hour-hand, whose advance, though certain, is yet a pure matter of inference, but upon the seconds'-hand, which visibly comes on at a trotting pace. Everything prospered, except my own present happiness, and the possibility of any happiness for some years to come. About two months after leaving Laxton, my fate in the worst shape I had anticipated was solemnly and definitively settled. My guardians agreed that the most prudent course, with a view to my pecuniary interests, was to place me at the Manchester Grammar School; not with a view to further improvement in my classical knowledge, though the head-master was a sound scholar, but simply with a view to one of the school exhibitions. Amongst the countless establishments, scat

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"Exhibitions: "This is the technical name in many cases, corresponding to the bursæ or bursaries of the Continent; from which word bursæ is derived, I believe, the German term Bursch, that is, a bursarius, or student, who lives at college upon the salary allowed by such a bursary. Some years ago the editor of a Glasgow daily paper

tered all over England by the noble munificence of Englishmen and English-women in past generations, for connecting the provincial towns with the two royal universities of the land, this Manchester school was one: in addition to other great local advantages (viz., inter alia, a fine old library and an ecclesiastical foundation, which in this present generation has furnished the materials for a bishopric of Manchester, with its deanery and chapter), this noble foundation secured a number of exhibitions at Brasenose College, Oxford, to those pupils of the school who should study at Manchester for three consecutive years. The pecuniary amount of these exhibitions has since then increased considerably through the accumulation of funds, which the commercial character of that great city had caused to be neglected. At that time I believe each exhibition yielded about forty guineas a-year, and was legally tenable for seven successive years. Now, to me this would have offered a most seasonable advantage, had it been resorted to some two years earlier. My small patrimonial inheritance gave to me, as it did to each of my four brothers, exactly £150 a-year: and to each of my sisters

called upon Oxford and Cambridge, with a patronising flourish, to imitate some one or more of the Scottish universities in founding such systems of aliment for poor students otherwise excluded from academic advantages. Evidently he was unaware that they had existed for centuries before the state of civilisation in Scotland had allowed any opening for the foundation of colleges or academic life. Scottish bursaries, or exhibitions (a term which Shakspere uses, very near the close of the first act in the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," as the technical expression in England) were few, and not generally, I believe, exceeding £10 a-year. The English were many, and of more ancient standing, and running from £40 to £100 a-year. Such was the simple difference between the two countries: otherwise they agreed altogether.

exactly £100 a-year. The Manchester exhibition of forty guineas a-year would have raised this income for seven years to a sum close upon £200 a-year. But at present I was half-way on the road to the completion of my 16th year. Commencing my period of pupilage from that time, I should not have finished it until I had travelled half-way through my 19th year. And the specific evil that already weighed upon me with a sickening oppression was, the premature expansion of my mind; and, as a foremost consequence, intolerance of boyish society. I ought to have entered upon my triennium of schoolboy servitude at the age of thirteen. As things were, a delay with which I had nothing to do myself, this and the native character of my mind had thrown the whole arrangement awry. For the better half of the three years I endured it patiently. But it had at length begun to eat more corrosively into my peace of mind than ever I had anticipated. The headmaster was substantially superannuated for the duties of his place. Not that intellectually he showed any symptoms of decay: but in the spirits and physical energies requisite for his duties he did: not so much age, as disease, it was that incapacitated him. In the course of a long day, beginning at 7 A.M. and stretching down to 5 P.M., he succeeded in reaching the farther end of his duties. But how? Simply by consolidating pretty nearly into one continuous scene of labour the entire ten hours. The full hour of relaxation which the traditions of this ancient school and the bye-laws had consecrated to breakfast, was narrowed into ten or even seven minutes. The two hours' interval, in like manner prescribed by the old usages from 12 to 2 P.M., was pared down to forty minutes, or less. In this way he walked conscientiously through the services of the day, fulfilling to the letter every section the minutest