an scarce make a guess between
seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to
promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject
thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive
Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when
he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty--a
life-long poverty, she thinks--could at no time have so effaced the
marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise
strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections of him, she
thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or
borrowed a half-penny. "If any of the girls," she says, "who were my
school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles,
tidings from the dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a
pang, as I do, at ever having teased his gentle spirit." They were big
girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence
necessary; and however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have
reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days
his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative: for, when he
was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was,
"Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven
can make you!" Once he was missing for a day or two: he had run away. A
little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back,--it was his
father,--and he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping
in a corner, with his hands before his face; and the girls, his
tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of that day forbore to
annoy him. "I had been there but a few months," adds she, "when Starkey,
who was the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us, as a
profound secret, that the tragedy of 'Cato' was shortly to be acted by
the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation."
That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she
remembers; and but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some
distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous
task of prompter assigned to him; and his feeble voice was heard clear
and distinct, repeating the text during the whole performance. She
describes her recollection of the cast of characters, even now, with a
relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards we