Note 10 — THACKERAY'S "GRAY FRIARS."
Reading edition
Footnote 10:
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In what is known as "The Charter-House Play," which describes some boyish orgies and their subsequent punishment, the latter is described in the pathetic lines:
Now the victim low is bending, Now the fearful rod descending, Hark a blow! Again, again Sounds the instrument of pain. Goddess of mercy! oh impart Thy kindness to the doctor's heart: Bid him words of pardon say— Cast the blood-stained scourge away. In vain, in vain! he will not hear: Mercy is a stranger there. Justice, unrelenting dame, First asserts her lawful claim. This is aye her maxim true: "They who sin must suffer too." When of fun we've had our fill, Justice then sends in her bill, And as soon as we have read it, Pay we must: she gives no credit.
There is some rather fine doggerel too, in which the doctor—the Dr. Portman Pendennis—apostrophizes a monitor in whom he had believed, but finds to have been as bad as the rest. The Doctor (with voice indicative of tears and indignation):
Oh, Simon Steady! Simon Steady, oh! What would your father say to see you so?— You whom I always trusted, whom I deemed As really good and honest as you seemed. Are you the leader of this lawless throng, The chief of all that's dissolute and wrong?
Then with awful emphasis:
Bad is the drunkard, shameless is the youth Who dares desert the sacred paths of truth; But he who hides himself 'neath Virtue's pall, The painted hypocrite, is worse than all!
In acting this play the manner of the real doctor (Mr. Gladstone's old tutor, now dean of Peterborough) was often imitated to the life, which of course brought down the house.