er
when some half-dozen of them set off from school, without map, card,
or compass, on a serious expedition to find out _Philip Quarll's
Island_.

The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly
tender and apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial
observances, and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict
obligations of the moral law. Those who were contemporaries with me
at that school thirty years ago, will remember with what more than
Judaic rigor the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats[1] was
interdicted. A boy would have blushed as at the exposure of some
heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden
portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he
was in health, was little more than sufficient to allay his hunger.
The same, or even greater, refinement was shown in the rejection of
certain kinds of sweet-cake. What gave rise to these supererogatory
penances, these self-denying ordinances, I could never learn;[2] they
certainly argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A little
excess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allowance
for the inevitable waste which comes in maturer years. But in the
less ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral
feelings which cannot be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what
took place in the year 1785, when Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I
must be pardoned for taking my instances from my own times. Indeed,
the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this subject,
almost bring back those times; they are present to me still. But I
believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I
speak of, the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little
changed. Their situation in point of many comforts is improved; but
that which I ventured before to term the _public conscience_ of the
school, the pervading moral sense, of which every mind partakes and
to which so many individual minds contribute, remains, I believe,
pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen, within this
twelvemonth almost, the change which has been produced upon a boy of
eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school;
how, from a pert young coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was
comprehended within his shallow brains, because a smattering of two
or three languages and one or two sciences were stuffed into him by
injudicious treatment at home,