There was not a tree in the village, except a willow that wept over a mud pond on the roadside by the church, as some sanctified parties do over the worthless dead; yet Denton could be compared to nothing but the backwoods of a colony, so rugged an aspect did the Gwynne boys give to the place. They were the talk of the neighbourhood for miles around. They could, nevertheless, satirize and very cleverly mock those who looked down on their doings. One or two of them, once on a visit at the Wallingers’, followed their aunt, by invitation, up to the drawing-room. She knew them of old, and while they ascended the stairs she turned round suddenly, when she met the sight she expected—one was making hideous faces at her, the other was squaring his fists at her back.
“Dear me! You seem amused,” was her only reproof; but she secretly enjoyed it, for everything was grateful to her that stamped others as her inferiors.
I was now to enter on a new life. My home was to be a monastic one, which three hundred years before had been the residence of mitred abbots. A king had expelled these from their Gothic dominion; another and a better king had given it to his children, among whom in these latter days were Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. And now I was to be there, to tread in their steps, to pace the same ancient cloisters, to catch the same earnest mood in pacing them.
The place was more like a university than a school. Four classical masters to teach us the languages of Athens and Rome; two writing-masters, who themselves wrote like copper-plate, and made us do likewise, besides teaching us figures.
Then we had playgrounds by the acre. One looking on Little Britain through lofty palisades, on which same ground were the residences of the masters and of certain dignitaries, among them that of the treasurer, always a City magnate, and to us inscrutably great. The counting-house was in the grounds, as well as the head and junior master’s houses, together with the office and house of the steward. With all these buildings, the playground was not crowded; and apart, in the large open space on the north side, stood the grammar school.
Now that the institution is to be removed, the character of the boys will change, and all its traditions end. The cloisters and garden within their quadrangle, with the monkish dormitories and other old places, have hitherto shaped the minds of the boys, and this influence will cease, and the feeling will vanish that the school owed its foundation to a king. It was in this feeling that the pride of the boys lay; it indulged them in the belief that they were superior to all other boys. They thought of their royal founder almost as if they were descended from him, and honoured their very dress from its similarity to that which the youthful sovereign himself wore.