Tom Brown at Rugby. Thomas Smart Hughes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ both; serving also as director in co-operative banks, coal mines, cotton mills, machine shops, grocery stores, land and building associations; besides being chief manager of the Crystal Palace company, and colonel in a volunteer rifle corps.

      Yet well known as Mr. Hughes is for his manifold political and philanthropic services, he is still better known by his books. Though with him literature has been rather a recreation than a vocation, yet his fame seems destined to rest on it, and especially on his "Tom Brown," which has been pronounced "the best description of public school life that ever has been, or is ever likely to be, written." This famous work, published in 1858, was followed the next year by "The Scouring of the White Horse," a story of his favorite White Horse Hill. Three years later came "Tom Brown at Oxford," then "The Life of Alfred the Great," and lastly his "Memoirs of a Brother" and his "Manliness of Christ," besides scores, if not hundreds, of magazine and review articles and letters to London and American papers.

      In 1870 Mr. Hughes made the tour of this country, receiving such a welcome from his many friends as "Tom Brown" was sure to get from both old and young. Ten years afterward he undertook to establish an English colony in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee. It was called Rugby, and it was founded in the hope that it might be useful to many educated young men of good families who could find no opening worthy of their powers at home. As he said, "Of the many sad sights in England there is none sadder than this, of first-rate human material going helplessly to waste, and in too many cases beginning to sour and taint, instead of strengthening the national life." A hundred years before, Franklin had expressed the same conviction in his pithy maxim, "'Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright." It was to fill these vacant lives with honest work and its rewards that Thomas Hughes started his emigration to the wilds of Tennessee. There, co-operation was to be tried in farming, cattle-raising, lumbering, and trade, thus saving the community of workers from that "infinite terror of not making money," which Carlyle declared was the only thing that now stirred deep fear in the souls of his countrymen. Many an ardent young man fresh from the old Rugby of "Tom Brown" fame fondly hoped that the new, western Rugby might enable him to say with Tennyson's "Northern Farmer," as he listened to the music of his horse's hoofs on the road home from market,—

      "Proputty, proputty, proputty,—that's what I 'ears 'em saäy";

      but, unfortunately, the "proputty" will not always come even at the bidding of hard work and active brains. The Tennessee enterprise has not commanded success, though doubtless, as Addison would say, it has done better—it has deserved it.

      Since the inauguration of the movement Mr. Hughes has been appointed county judge of Cheshire, and now makes his home in the quaint old town of Chester, the county seat. He is verging on the limit of that threescore and ten which the Psalmist allotted as the measure of human life. Few men in our day can look back over a busier or more fruitful career. The awkward and timid boy has shown the world what rare force of self-conquest, of persevering growth, of grappling with difficulties, and of successful achievement was to come out of that unpromising beginning. Because of this, we are all debtors to the author of "Tom Brown"; not only for his books, but still more because we see that these books are the frank expression of a brave, earnest, and untiring spirit.

      D. H. M.

Tom Brown's School Days.

       Table of Contents

PART I.

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

THE BROWN FAMILY.

       Table of Contents

      "I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,

       With liberal notions under my cap."—Ballad.

The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle,[1] within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now matriculating[2] at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's[3] work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft[4] at Cressy and Agincourt[5]—with the brown bill[6] and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby—with culverin and demi-culverin[7] against Spaniards and Dutchmen—with hand-grenade[8] and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under Rodney[9] and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty, which was, on the whole, what they looked for, and the best thing for them; and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots[10] and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and such-like folk have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded—if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken—to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns.

These latter, indeed, have until the present generation rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their "sacer vates,"[11] having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on tight to, whatever good things happened to be going—the foundation of the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and moreover having the honor of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone[12] on to the pile.

      THE BROWN CHARACTER.

However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them; and then if you don't like the sort, why cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other. In the first СКАЧАТЬ