l hail! great Punch.

Bernard Blackmantle.

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THE WESTMINSTER SCHOLAR.

Reminiscences of former Times--Lamentations of Old Crony--
Ancient Sports and Sprees--Modern Im-provements--Hints to
Builders and Buyers--Some Account of the School and its
Worthies--Recollections of old Schoolfellows--Sketches of
Character--The Living and the Dead.

"Fast by, an old but noble fabric stands,
No vulgar work, but raised by princely hands;
Which, grateful to Eliza's memory, pays,
In living monuments, an endless praise."

From a poem by a Westminster Scholar, written during Dr. Friend's
Mastership, in 1699.

~67~~

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"What say you to a stroll through _Thorney Island_,{1} this morning?"
said old Crony, with whom I had been taking a _dejeune a la fourchette_;
"you have indulged your readers with all the whims and eccentricities
of Eton and of Oxford, and, in common justice, you must not pass by
the _Westminster blacks_."{2} Crony had, I learned, been a foundation
scholar during the mastership of Dr. Samuel Smith; when the poet
Churchill, Robert Lloyd, (the son of the under-master) Bonnel Thornton,
George Colman the elder, Richard Cumberland, and a host of other
highly-gifted names, were associated within the precincts of the abbey
cloisters. Our way towards

1 The abbey ground, so called by the monkish writers; but,
since Busby's time, more significantly designated by the
scholars _Birch Island.--Vide Tidier_.

2 Black------s from Westminster; ruff--s from Winchester;
and gentlemen from Eton.--_Old Cambridge Proverb_.

~68~~Westminster from the Surrey side of Vauxhall bridge, where
Crony had taken up his abode, lay through the scene of his earliest
recollections; and, not even Crockery himself could have been more
pathetic in his lamentations over the improvements of modern times.
"Here," said Crony, placing himself upon the rising ground which
commands an uninterrupted view of the bank, right and left, and fronts
the new road to Chelsea, and, the Grosvenor property; "here, in my
boyish days, used the Westminster scholars to congregate for sports
and sprees. Many a juvenile frolic have I been engaged in beneath the
shadowy willows that then o'ercanopied the margin of old father Thames;
but they are almost all destroyed, and with them disappears the fondest
recollections of my you