DEATH OF DR. BENTLEY. 29 At no great distance of time from this period, which I have been now recording, Doctor Bentley died, and was buried in Trinity College chapel, by the side of the altar table, where a square, black stone records his name, and nothing more. It remains with the munificence of that rich society to award him other monumental honors, whenever they may think it right to grace his memory with a tablet. He was seized with a complaint that, in his opinion, seemed to indicate a necessity of immediate bleeding; Dr. Heberden, then a young physician, practising in Cambridge, was of a contrary opinion, and the patient acquiesced. His friend, Dr. Wallis, in whose skilful practice and experience he so justly placed his confidence, was, unfortunately, absent from Stamford, and never came upon the summons for any purpose but to share in the sorrows of his family, and lament the noncompliance with the process he had recommended, which, according to his judgment of the case, was the very measure he should himself have taken. I believe I felt as much affliction as my age was capable of when my master Kinsman imparted the intelligence of my grandfather's death to me, taking me into his private chamber, and lamenting the event with great agitation. Whilst I gave vent to my tears, he pressed me tenderly in his arms, and encouraging me to persist in my diligence, assured me of his favor and protection. He kept me out of school for a few days, gave me private instruction, and then sent me forth, ardently resolved to acquit myself to his satisfaction. From this time, I may truly say my task was my delight. I rose rapidly to the head of my class, and, in the whole course of my progress through the upper school, never once lost my place of head boy, though daily challenged by those who were as anxious to dislodge me from my post as I was to maintain myself in it. As I have the honor to name both Bishop Warren and his brother Richard, the physician, as two amongst the most formidable of my form-fellows, I may venture to say, that school-boy must have been more than commonly alert whom they could not overtake and depose; but the exertion of my competitors was such a spur to my industry and ambition, that my mind was perpetually in its business. Had I, in any careless moment, suffered a discomfiture, my mortification would have been most poignant; but the dread I had of that event caused me always to be prepared against it, and I held possession of my post under a suspended sword, that hourly menaced me without ever dropping. 6 much argument in the case.' Johnson said he did not think there was. 'Why truly,' said the king, when once it comes to calling names, argument is pretty well at an end.'-Boswell's Johnson, vol. ii. p. 39. Whilst I dwell on the detail of anecdotes like the above, I must refer myself to the candor of the reader, but though it behoves me to study brevity, where I cannot furnish amusement, it would be totally inconsistent with the plan I have laid down, to pass over in total silence this period of my life; an era in the history of every man's mind and character, only to be omitted when it is not to be obtained; a plea which those, who are their own biographers, are not privileged to make. My good old master was a hospitable man, and every Wednesday held a kind of public day, to which his friends and neighbors used to resort. On that day he drank his bottle of port and played his game of back-gammon, after which he came in gayety of heart to evening-school for one hour only. It was a gala day for all the boys, and for me in particular, as I was sure on all those occasions to be ordered up to the rostrum to recite and expound Juvenal, and he seldom failed to keep me so employed through the whole time. He had a great partiality for that nervous author, and I remember his reciting the following passage in a kind of rapturous enthusiasm in the ears of all the school, crying out that he defied the writers of the Augustan age to produce one equal to it. The classical reader very probably will not second his opinion, but I dare say he will not fail to anticipate the passage, which is as follows: Esto bonus miles, tutor bonus, arbiter idem Summum crede nefas animam preferre padori, This is unquestionably a fine passage and a sublime moral, but I rather suspect there is a quaintness, and something of what the Italians call concetto, in the concluding line, that is not quite in the style and cast of the purer age. The tasks of a school-boy are of three descriptions: he is to give the construction of his author, to study his repetitions, and to write what are called his exercises, whether in verse or prose. In the former two, the tasks of construing and saying by heart, it was the usage of our school to challenge for places in this province my good fortune was unclouded; in my exercises I did not succeed so well, for, by aiming at something like fancy and invention, I was too frequently betrayed into grammatical errors, whilst my rivals presented exercises with fewer faults, and, by attempting scarcely anything, hazarded little. These premature and imperfect sallies, which I gave way to, did me no credit with my master, and once in particular, upon my giving CRITICAL SEVERITY. 31 in a copy of Latin verses, unpardonably incorrect, though not entirely void of imagination, he commented upon my blunders with great severity, and in the hearing of my form-fellows threatened to degrade me from my station at their head. I had earned that station by hard labor and unceasing assiduity; I had maintained it against their united efforts for some years, and the dread of being at once deprived of what they had not been able to take from me, had such an effect on my sensibility, that I never perfectly recovered it, and probably should at no time after have gained any credit in that branch of my school business, had Inot been transplanted to Westminster. The exercise, for which I was reprehended, I well remember was a copy of verses upon Phalaris's bull, which bull I confess led me into some blunders, that my master might have observed upon with more temper. I stood in need of instruction, and he inflicted discouragement. Though I love the memory of my good old, master, and am under infinite obligations to his care and kindness, yet having severely experienced how poignant are the inflictions of discour agement to the feelings, and how repulsive to the efforts of the unformed embryo genius, I cannot state this circumstance in any better light than as an oversight in point of education, which, though well-intentioned on his part, could only operate to destroy what it was his object to improve. When the talents of a young and rising author shall be found to profit by the denunciations and browbeatings of his hypercritical contemporaries, then, and not till then, it will be right to train up our children according to this system, and discour agement be the best model for education, which the conductors of it can adopt. As our master had lately discontinued his custom of letting his boys act a play of Terence before the Christmas holidays, after the example of Westminster, some of us undertook without his leave, though probably not without his knowledge and connivance, to get up the tragedy of Cato at one of the boarding-houses, and invite the gentry of the town to be present at our childish exhibition. We escaped from school one evening, and climbed the wall that intercepted us from the scene of action, to prepare ourselves for this goodly show. A full-bottomed periwig for Cato, and female attire for Portia and Marcia, borrowed from the maids of the lodging house, were the chief articles of our scanty wardrobe, and of a piece with the wretchedness of our property was the wretchedness of our performance. Our audience, however, which was not very select, endured us, and we slept upon our laurels, till the next morning being made to turn out for the amusement of the whole school, and go through a scene or two of our evening's entertainment, we acquitted ourselves so little to the satisfaction of Mr. Kinsman, that after bestowing some hearty buffets upon the virtuous Marcia, who had towered above her sex in the person of a most ill-favored wry-necked boy, the rest of our dramatis persona were sentenced to the fine of an imposition, and dismissed. The part of Juba had been my cast, and the tenth satire of Juvenal was my portion of the fine inflicted. It was about this time I made my first attempt in English verse, and took for my subject an excursion I had made with my family in the summer holidays to visit a relation in Hampshire, which engaged me in a description of the docks at Portsmouth, and of the races of Winchester, where I had been present. I believe my poem was not short of a hundred lines, and was written at such times as I could snatch a few minutes from my business or amusements. I did not like to risk the consequences of confiding it to my school-fellows, but kept it closely secret till the next breaking up, when I exhibited it to my father, who received it after his gracious manner with unreserved commendation, and persisted in reciting it to his intimates, when I had gained experience enough to wish he had consigned it to oblivion. Though I have no copy of this childish performance, I bear in my remembrance two introductory couplets, which were the first English lines I every wrote, and are as follows: Since every scribbler claims his share of fame, All have a right to that, and why not I? One other lame and miserable couplet just now occurs to me, as being quoted frequently upon me by my mother as an instance in the art of sinking, and it is clear I had stumbled upon it in my description of the dock-yard, viz: 'Here they weave cables, there they main-masts form, My good father, however, was not to be put by from his defences by trifles, and stoutly stood by my anchors, contending that as they were unquestionably useful in a storm, I had said no more of them than was true, and why should I be ashamed of having spoken the truth? Yet ashamed I was some short time after, not indeed for having violated the truth, but for suppressing it, and my dilemma was occasioned by the following circumstance. I had picked up an epigram amongst my school-fellows, PARSONAGE HOUSE OF STANWICK. 33 which struck my fancy, and without naming the author (for I knew him not), I repeated it to my father-it was this Poets of old did Argus prize Because he had an hundred eyes, But sure more praise to him is due, In repeating this epigram, which perhaps the reader can find an author for, I did not give it out as my own, but it was so understood by my father, and he circulated it as mine, and took pleasure in repeating it as such amongst his friends and intimates. In this state of the mistake, when his credit had been affixed to it, I had not courage to disavow it, and the time being once gone by for saving my honor, I suffered him to persist in his error under the continual terror of detection. The dread of thus forfeiting his good opinion hung upon my spirits for a length of time; it passed, however, undiscovered to the end of his life, and I now implore pardon of his memory for the only fallacy I ever put upon him to the conviction of my conscience. After the death of Doctor Bentley, my family resided in the parsonage house of Stanwick near Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire; it had been newly built from the ground by my father's predecessor, Doctor Needham, from a plan of Mr. Burroughs, of Caius College, an architect of no small reputation; it was a handsome square of four equal fronts, built of stone, containing four rooms on a floor, with a gallery running through the centre; it was seated on the declivity of a gentle hill, with the village to the south, amongst trees and pasture grounds in view, and a small stream in the valley between; on the north, west and south were gardens, on the east the church at some little distance, and in the intermediate space an excellent range of stables and coach houses, built by my father, and forming one side of a square court laid out for the approach of carriages to the house. The spire of Stanwick Church is esteemed one of the most beautiful models in that style of architecture in the kingdom; my father added a very handsome clock and ornamented the chancel with a railing, screen and entablature upon three-quarter columns, with a singing gallery at the west end, and spared no expense to keep his church not only in that neatness and decorum which befits the house of prayer, but also in a perfect state of good and permanent repair. Here in the hearts of his parishioners, and the esteem of his neighbors, my good father lived tranquil and unambitious, never soliciting other preferment than this for the space of thirty years, holding only a small prebend in the church of Lincoln, given to |