Читать книгу The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne онлайн

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As the Duchess of Newcastle is said to have consulted her husband about her writings, and as he is reported to have helped her considerably in writing them, it is highly probable that her account of the education of a boy of the period describes Newcastle’s own experiences. In her Nature’s Pictures by Fancy’s Pencil, she says: “His education, in the first place, was to learn the horn-book, from that his primer, and so the Bible, by his mother’s chambermaid or the like. But after he came to ten years old or thereabouts he went to a free school where the noise of each scholar’s reading aloud did drown the sense of what they read, burying the knowledge and understanding in the confusion of many words, and several languages; yet was whipt for not learning by their tutors, for their ill-teaching them, which broke and weakened their memories with the over-heavy burthens, striving to thrust in more learning than could be digested or kept in the brain.... After some time he was sent to the University, there continuing from the age of fourteen to the years of eighteen; at last considering with himself that he was buried to the world and the delights therein, conversing more with the dead than the living, in reading old authors, and that little company he had, was only at prayers, and meat; wherein the time of the one was taken up in devotion, the other in eating, or rather fasting; for their prayers were so long and their commons so short, that it seemed rather an humiliation and fasting, than an eating and thanksgiving. But their conversation was a greater penance than their spare diet; for their disputations, which are fed by contradictions, did more wrack the brain, than the other did gripe the belly, the one filling the head with vain opinions and false imaginations, for want of the light of truth, as the other with wind and rude humours, for want of a sufficient nourishment. Where upon these considerations he left the University.”