[Footnote 1:  By Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne, surrounded by his courtiers,(all curious portraits,) receiving the mathematical pupils at their annual presentation:  a custom still kept up on New-year’s-day at Court.]

The Christ’s Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools.  There is pride in it, accumulated from the circumstances which I have described, as differencing him from the former; and there is a restraining modesty from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter.  His very garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect; as it is a badge of dependence, it restrains the natural petulance of that age from breaking out into overt acts of insolence.  This produces silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shyness which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up when spoken to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him.  Within his bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along with all the self-concentration of a young monk.  He is never known to mix with other boys; they are a sort of laity to him.  All this proceeds, I have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he carries about him, of the difference of his dress from that of the rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by overhastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should commit the dignity of his cloth.  Nor let any one laugh at this; for, considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress—­above all, where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of disparagement—­this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy.  That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself, by putting a question to any of these boys:  he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed.  Let him put the same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the ——­ cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasperate any more than the certain servility, and mercenary eye to reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and sadden him.