Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL F1VE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO In Mr. Lamb's Works, published a year or two since, I find a magnificent eulogy on my old school,1 such as it was, or new appears to him to have been, between the years 17'? and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own standing at Christ's was nearly corresponding with his ; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument most ingenuously. I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand ; and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to us. The present worthy sub treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf our crug moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of ' extraordinary bread and butter,' from the hot loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant (we had three banyan to four meat days in the week) was endeared to his palate with a lump of double refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina), with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth our scanty mu...
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