Mr. Hunter.
53
sold the estate. There was also Lowe, afterwards Canon of Windsor[1].'
Indeed Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr, Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, 'My master whipt me very well. Without that. Sir, I should have done nothing.' He told Mr. Langton, that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, 'And this I do to save you from the gallows.' Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod[2]. I would rather (said he)
- ↑ A tradition had reached Johnson through his school-fellow Andrew Corbet that Addison had been at the school and had been the leader in a barring out. (Johnson's Works,vii. 419). Garrick entered the school about two years after Johnson left. According to Garrick's biographer, Tom Davies (p. 3),'Hunter was an odd mixture of the pedant and the sportsman. Happy was the boy who could slily inform his offended master where a covey of partridges was to be found; this notice was a certain pledge of his pardon.' Lord Campbell in his Lives of the Chief Justices, ii. 279, says:—'Hunter is celebrated for having flogged seven boys who afterwards sat as judges in the superior courts at Westminster at the same time. Among these were Chief Justice Wilmot, Lord Chancellor Northington. Sir T. Clarke, Master of the Rolls, Chief Justice Willes, and Chief Baron Parker. It is remarkable that, although Johnson and Wilmot were several years class-fellows at Lichfield, there never seems to have been the slightest intercourse between them in after life; but the Chief Justice used frequently to mention the Lexicographer as "a long, lank, lounging boy, whom he distinctly remembered to have been punished by Hunter for idleness."' Lord Campbell blunders here. Northington and Clarke were from Westminster School(Campbell's Chancellors,v. 176). The school-house, famous though it was, was allowed to fall into decay. A writer in the Gent. Mag. in 1794 (p. 413) says that ' it is now in a state of dilapidation, and unfit for the use of either the master or boys.'
- ↑ Johnson's observation to Dr. Rose, on this subject, deserves to be recorded. Rose was praising the mild treatment of children at school, at a time when flogging began to be less practised than formerly: 'But then,(said Johnson,) they get nothing else: and what they gain at one end, they lose at the other.' Burney. See Post, under Dec. 17. 1775.
have
