open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to
monks and nuns. Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of
the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing smoked glass to a high
premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and
stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good
Mr. Whitmore an usher, who gave a certain small boy a diamond
prayer-book, greatly prized then, though long since lost, and suitably
inscribed for him "_Parvum parva decent_;" and the speech days, wherein
the same small boy always signalised himself, to the general
astonishment, for he was usually a stammerer, owing much to the early
worries of Brentford; all these are agreeable reminiscences.

My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow
Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel
tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man
and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and
pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so
upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to
fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction
until past middle life. As for tuition, it must all have grown of itself
by dint of private hard grinding with dictionaries and grammars, for the
exercises, themes, and other lessons were notoriously difficult, and
those before me would be inextricable puzzles now; however, we had to do
them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry. As
for the masters in school, two more ignorant old parsons than Chapman
and "Bob Watki" could not readily be found; and though the four others,
Lloyd, Dickens, Irvine, and Penny were somewhat more intelligent, still
all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a "concio," if
the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Homer or Virgil or Horace
was haply in dispute between a monitor and his class. In the upper