TORONTO OF OLD. 261 



coaches and guards and genuine coachmen were extant there ; while yet the time-honoured 

 watchman was to be heard patrolling the streets at night and calling the hours. Deprived of 

 this personal experience, how tamely would have read "School-days at Eugby," for example, 

 or "The Scouring of the White Horse," and many another healthy classic in recent English 

 literature — to say nothing of "The Sketch Book," and earlier pieces, which involve numerous 

 allusions to these now vanished entities ! — Moreover, we found that our boyish initiation in the 

 Eton formularies, however little they may have contributed to the intellectual furniture of the 

 mind at an early period, had the effect of putting us en rapport, in one relation at all events, 

 with a large class in the old country. We found that the stock quotations and scraps of Latin 

 employed to give an air of l^^ming to discourse, "to point a moral and adorn a tale," among 

 the country-clergy of England and among members of Parliament of the ante-Eeform-bUl 

 period, were mostly relics of school-boy lore derived from Eton books. Fragments of the as in 

 prcesenti, of the propria qicce marihus ; shreds from the Syntax, as vir honus est quis, ingenuas 

 didicisse, and a score more, were Instantly recognized, and constituted a kind of fcalismanic 

 mode of communication, making the quoter and the hearer, to some extent, akin. Further- 

 more : in regard to our honoured and beloved master. Dr. Phillips himself : there is this advan- 

 tage to be named as enjoyed by those whose lot it was, in this new region, to pass a portion of 

 their impressible youth in the society of such a character ; it furnished them with a visible 

 concrete illustration of much that otherwise would have been a vague abstraction in the pic- 

 tures of English society set before the fancy in the Spectator, for instance, or Boswell's Johnson, 

 and other standard literary productions of a century ago. As it is, we doubt not that the 

 experience of many of our Canadian coevals corresponds with our own. Whenever we read of 

 the good Vicar of Wakefield, or of any similar personage ; when in the Biography of some dis- 

 tinguished man, a kind-hearted old clerical tutor comes upon the scene, or one moulded to be 

 a college-fellow, or one who had actually been a college-fellow, carrying about with him, when 

 down in the country, the tastes and ideas of the academic cloister — it is the figure of Dr. Phil- 

 lips that rises before the mental vision. And without doubt he was no bad embodiment of the 

 class of English character just alluded to. — He was thoroughly English in his predilections 

 and tone ; and he uneonscionsly left on our plastic selves traces of his own temperament and 

 style. — It was from him we received our first impressions of Cambridge life ; of its outer form, 

 at all events ; of its traditions and customs ; of the Acts and Opponencies in its Schools, and 

 other quaint formalities, still in use in our own undergraduate day, but now abolished : from 

 him we first heard of Trumpington, and St. Mary's, and the Gogmagogs ; of Lady Margaret and 

 the cloisters at Queen's ; of the wooden bridge and Erasmus' walk, in the gardens of that col- 

 lege ; and of many another storied object and spot, afterwards very familiar. A manuscript 

 Journal of a Johnsonian cast kept by Dr. Phillips when a youth, during a tour of his on foot in 

 Wales, lent to us, for perusal, marks an era in our early experience, awakening in us, as it did, 

 our first inldings of travel. The excursion described was a trifling one in itself— only from 

 Whitchurch, in Herefordshire, across the Severn into Wales — but to the unsophisticated fancy 

 of a boy it was invested with a peculiar charm ; and it led, we think, in our own case, to many 

 an ambitious ramble, in after years, among cities and men, — In the time of Dr, Phillips there 

 was put up, by subscription, across the whole of the western end of the school-house, over the 

 door, a rough lean-to, of considerable dimensions. A large covered space was thus provided 

 for purposes of recreation in bad weather. This room Is memorable as being associated with 

 our first acquaintance with the term " Gymnasium :" that was the title which we were directed 

 to give it. — There is extant, we believe, a good portrait in oil of Dr. Phillips. 



We here close our notice of the Old Blue School at York. In many a brain, from time to 

 time, the mention of its name has exercised a spell like that of Wendell Holmes's Mare Rubrum; 

 as potent as that was, to summon up memories and shapes from the Red Sea of the Past — 



" Where clad in burning robes are laid 

 Life's blossom'd joys untimely shed. 

 And where those cherish'd forms are laid 

 We miss awhile, and call them dead." 

 The building itself has been shifted bodily from its original position to the south-east corner 

 of Stanley and Nelson Street. It, the centre of so many associations, is degraded now into 

 Tseing a depot for " General Stock ;" in other words a receptacle for Rags and Old Iron. 



