1830.] George Caiman's Random Records. 305 



be equalled only by its cruelty/ and whose continuance in any school is 

 the most unequivocal sign of the combination of blockheadism and 

 brutality in its managers. The public are beginning to be awake to 

 this .abominable system, which gives ruffianism every incentive, and 

 has broken the heart of many a boy, that might have been a hap- 

 piness and honour to society. " Fagging may inculcate subordination on 

 the one side, but it encourages tyranny on the other. It may perhaps 

 crush the overweening spirit of the heir-apparent to an earldom, when 

 the son of a rich shopkeeper sends him on a message ; but it may also 

 fill the child of a dealer with notions of equality unfit for his future 

 commerce; and as great boys fag the smaller, it seems that might 

 overcomes right, which is the principle of the African slave-trade. At 

 all events, it must strike the impartial that blacking shoes, and running 

 of errands, are rather redundant parts of a liberal education !" 



He might have added, that of all the systems hitherto devised to 

 make a boy miserable while he remains at school, and mischievous to 

 society when he conies into the world, a great school, on the present 

 general system, is the most complete. That it breaks down the sen- 

 sitive mind, while it hardens and ruffianizes the mind of ruder con- 

 struction ; that instead of giving boys the manliness that may be neces- 

 sary for their struggle through the world, it makes them at once sheep- 

 ish and self-willed ; and that so far from teaching them delicacy or 

 generosity in many matters, or a high spirited scorn of sycophancy, it 

 teaches them the most corrupt and basest uses of money, and the most 

 vulgar and palpable habits of subserviency to rank and fortune. The 

 profligacy and the tuft-hunting of our public schools are notorious ; and 

 it is impossible to doubt that the scandalous vices, and the scarcely less 

 scandalous servility of our public men and office-seekers of every kind, 

 the whole multitude who solicit their idle bread from the lavish ab- 

 surdities of the nobility, or the corrupt patronage of the State, are 

 plants from the hotbed of our public schools ! There are exceptions, 

 but the exceptions only prove the rule. The whole system cannot be 

 too speedily reformed. 



" At Westminster he was drowned." An ominous commencement for 

 a poet, and portentous of his prowess in the art of sinking ! " This sub- 

 mersion in the River Thames took place not far from Westminster 

 Bridge, immediately opposite to the premises of the well-known Dicky 

 Roberts, who for many years afterwards furnished school-boys with a 

 capital opportunity of undergoing the same ceremony. This chance he 

 provided at a moderate price, by letting out sailing boats, wherries, 

 punch-hawls, and other aquatic vehicles, calculated to convert horizontal 

 into perpendicular motion. 



" My young friend George Craustoun and I happened to be the only 

 boys who were then bathing : he swam like a duck, and I no better 

 than a pig of lead. It was low tide, and the channel of the river was 

 very near the bank from which I walked forward, up to my chin in the 

 water, and then turning round, I began to strike out with arms and 

 legs as an attempt at swimming, in order to regain the shore ; but 

 instead of approaching terra t firma, the current, which was very strong, 

 carried me out of my depth into the channel. It is a false notion that 

 drowning people rise only three times, at least I found it so in my case, 

 for my alternations of rising and sinking were many. Craustoun had 

 wandered in the water to a considerable distance from me, but he had 



M.M. New Series. VOL, IX, No. 51. 2 R 



