The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening,
when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the
cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk
at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a
century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was
measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never
premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from
a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still,
next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a
year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look
back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those
of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor
did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense,
except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject,
was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My
tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact
in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the
charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little
as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of
three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time
I possessed none.
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