One
little incident about this early verse-making is worth mentioning in
this place. I was staying for a few days with a school-fellow at a house
near Doncaster, when I dreamed a new ballad about a shipwreck, and on
awaking wrote it down at once. The thing would not be worth quoting, if
it were possible to remember it; but it was correct enough in rhymes and
metre.
My life at Doncaster was not on the whole unhappy, and the steady
discipline of the school was doing me much good. Mr. Cape was a very
severe master, and he used the cane very freely; but to a boy who had
lived under the tyranny of my father Mr. Cape's severity seemed a light
affliction. He kept up his dignity by seldom appearing in the
schoolroom; he sat in his library or in the dining-room in a large
morocco-covered arm-chair, holding a book in one hand whilst the other
was always ready to clasp the cane that he kept close by. Any failure of
memory would cause him to dart a severe look at the delinquent, a false
quantity made him scowl, and when he suspected real carelessness the
cane was resorted to at once. Unfortunately he could not apply it and
keep his temper at the same time. The exercise roused him to fury, and a
punishment which in his first intention was to have been mild became
cruel through the effect of his own rapidly increasing irritation. Mr.
Cape's health was not good, and no doubt this added to the natural
irritability of his temper.
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