out to various scales of pauperism, with open door and a common staircase.
After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and
saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly
clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secured
their victim. They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred,
and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward
(for this happened a little after my time), with that patient sagacity which
tempered all his conduct, determined to investigate the matter before he pro
ceeded to sentence. The result was that the supposed mendicants, the receiv
ers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of ?, an honest couple come to decay?whom this seasonable supply had, in all
2. Antonio Verrio, Italian painter of the 17th cen-paintings in Dido's temple to Juno. tury. While living in England, he painted a large 4. Pleasing.
picture of the mathematics students of Christ's 5. Loosely quoted from Shakespeare's Antony and Hospital being received by James II. Cleopatra 1.4.67.
3. Virgil's Aeneid 1.464; Aeneas is inspecting the
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500 / CHARLES LAMB
probability, saved from mendicancy; and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds!? The governors on this occasion, much to their honor, voted a present relief to the family of ? ?, and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to? , I believe would not be lost upon his auditory.?I had left school then, but I well remember . He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast'in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite
so well by himself as he had done by the old folks.
I was a hypochondriac6 lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day
of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the
natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven; and
had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told
he had run away. This was the punishment for the first offense.?As a novice
I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam7
cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket?a
mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted?with a peep of light, let in
askance, from a prison orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor
boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who
brought him his bread and water?who might not s-peah to him?or of the
beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chas
tisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him for a brief
interval from solitude?and here he was shut up by himself of nights out of
the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and super
stition incident to his time of life, might subject him to. This was the penalty
for the second offense. Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the next degree?
The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire?all trace of his late 'watchet weeds'8 carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket resembling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante9 had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall (L.'s favorite state room), where awaited him the whole number of his schoolfellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible. These were governors; two of whom by choice, or charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Su-p- plicia;' not to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one occasion,
6. Melancholy, heretics under the Spanish Inquisition. 7. St. Mary of Bethlehem, an insane asylum in 9. I.e., of the sinners in Dante's inferno-, see canto London. 20. 8. Blue clothes. 'Auto da fe': act of faith (literal 1. Extreme punishments (Latin). trans.); the ceremony before the execution of
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CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 501
