Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/130

120 Hartley Coleridge, he belongs to the category of "foiled potentialities." Physically and intellectually, there was much in common between them. As, at school, Hartley paid "the usual penalty of helpless oddity;" so, in the Etonian career of Walker, "his defective eyesight, the awkwardness and oddity of his manners, his extreme slovenliness in dress and person, were peculiarities such as are certain to incur ridicule, and the last of which provokes inevitable persecution at the hands of schoolboys." But he was not a speechless martyr, nor an unprotesting sufferer; for a sarcastic humour, and a dogged temper, and an even aggressive war of words, distinguished him among his fellows, and provoked on their part a system of chronic persecution, which otherwise might have taken the form of acute but fitful and intermittent bullying. Nevertheless, his present biographer declines to ratify Mr. Coleridge's view of the radical damage wrought on Walker's whole being by this unrelenting persecution, and doubts whether he sustained lasting injury, either morally or intellectually, from the annoyances in question, which do not appear ever to have penetrated much more than skin deep. "Certainly, they neither crushed his spirit, nor materially, if at all, retarded or distorted the development of his genius." And so far from entertaining, like Hartley, a distressing revulsion from the remembered associations of his school-days, he ever looked back upon them with a fondness not to be marred by their darker shadows, and numbered Eton among his "Goshen spots, aye bright with spiritual sunshine," and furnishing only pleasant imagery to his dreams, and sweet music to his voices of the night.

Born at Pembroke, in 1795, William Sidney Walker (so named after his godfather, Sir W. Sidney Smith), too soon and too prominently became notable as a precocious child. At eighteen months repeating ore rotundo, a host of nursery rhymes; at two years giving a semi-public reading of the history of England at Liverpool; at five, a veteran adept at history in general; at six, applying to his tailor for the exegesis of a hard line in Milton, and, on being assured by the perplexed sartor that he knew nothing about such things, making rejoinder, "I am so sorry you do not know about such books, they would make you so happy." Henceforth the petticoated moralist must have cordially acquiesced in the philosophy of Queen Elizabeth's greeting, as the legend goes, to a deputation of eighteen tailors: " Good morning to you, gentlemen both!" But seriously, these premature fruits of the child's inner life have only too evident a relation to the apples of Sodom; and could he have then shared in his tailor's serene opacity of vision in matters critical, he might have turned out a more robust and healthy and effective thinker. At ten years old, Sidney goes about with exuberantly stuffed pockets, which attract attention by their unseemly plethora, and are found to contain "many translations of the odes of Auacreon, and very ably done." In a few months he sets to work at an epic poem, and his nerves have a grand crash. Anon we find him at Eton, carrying off prizes and scholarships, more than are good for his constitution. Dr. Keate has to invent a new class of "impositions," with a special reference to this lad, who knows every line of Homer by rote; and Sir James Mackintosh, ironically proposing the "Court Guide" as a subject for Greek verse, is taken at his word, and a page of the work is presented in unexceptionable iambics for