They say that claret is better now-a-days, and cookery much improved since the days of my monarch—­of George IV.  Pastry Cookery is certainly not so good.  I have often eaten half a crown’s worth (including, I trust, ginger-beer) at our school pastry-cook’s, and that is a proof that the pastry must have been very good, for could I do as much now?  I passed by the pastry-cook’s shop lately, having occasion to visit my old school.  It looked a very dingy old baker’s; misfortunes may have come over him—­those penny tarts certainly did not look so nice as I remember them:  but he may have grown careless as he has grown old (I should judge him to be now about ninety-six years of age), and his hand may have lost its cunning.

Not that we were not great epicures.  I remember how we constantly grumbled at the quantity of the food in our master’s house—­which on my conscience I believe was excellent and plentiful—­and how we tried once or twice to eat him out of house and home.  At the pastry-cook’s we may have over-eaten ourselves (I have admitted half a crown’s worth for my own part, but I don’t like to mention the real figure for fear of perverting the present generation of boys by my monstrous confession)—­we may have eaten too much, I say.  We did; but what then?  The school apothecary was sent for:  a couple of small globules at night, a trifling preparation of senna in the morning, and we had not to go to school, so that the draught was an actual pleasure.

For our amusements, besides the games in vogue, which were pretty much in old times as they are now (except cricket, par exemple—­and I wish the present youth joy of their bowling, and suppose Armstrong and Whitworth will bowl at them with light field-pieces next), there were novels—­ah!  I trouble you to find such novels in the present day!  O Scottish Chiefs, didn’t we weep over you!  O Mysteries of Udolpho, didn’t I and Briggs Minor draw pictures out of you, as I have said?  Efforts, feeble indeed, but still giving pleasure to us and our friends.  “I say, old boy, draw us Vivaldi tortured in the Inquisition,” or, “Draw us Don Quixote and the windmills, you know,” amateurs would say, to boys who had a love of drawing.  “Peregrine Pickle” we liked, our fathers admiring it, and telling us (the sly old boys) it was capital fun; but I think I was rather bewildered by it, though “Roderick Random” was and remains delightful.  I don’t remember having Sterne in the school library, no doubt because the works of that divine were not considered decent for young people.  Ah! not against thy genius, O father of Uncle Toby and Trim, would I say a word in disrespect.  But I am thankful to live in times when men no longer have the temptation to write so as to call blushes on women’s cheeks, and would shame to whisper wicked allusions to honest boys.  Then, above all, we had Walter Scott, the kindly, the generous, the pure—­the companion of what countless delightful hours; the