The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, page 9 by Cuthbert Bede
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ith blossoms; and then gently swelling hills that rose to close the scene and frame the picture.
Such was the view from the Manor Green. And full of inspiration as such a scene was, yet Mr. Verdant Green never accomplished (as far as poetical inspiration was concerned) more than an "Address to the Moon," which he could just as well have written in any other part of the country, and which, commencing with the noble aspiration,
"O moon, that shinest in the heaven so blue, I only wish that I could shine like you!"
and terminating with one of those fine touches of nature which rise superior to the trammels of ordinary versification,
"But I to bed must be going soon, So I will not address thee more, O moon!"
will no doubt go down to posterity in the Album of his sister Mary.
For the first fourteen years of his life, the education of Mr. Verdant Green was conducted wholly under the shadow of his paternal roof, upon principles fondly imagined to be the soundest and purest for the formation of his character. Mrs. Green, who was as good and motherly a soul as ever lived,
[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 11]
was yet (as we have shown) one of the Sappeys of Sapcot, a family that were not renowned either for common sense or worldly wisdom, and her notions of a boy's education were of that kind laid down by her favourite poet, Cowper, in his "Tirocinium" that we are
"Well-tutor'd ~only~ while we share A mother's lectures and a nurse's care;"
and in her horror of all other kinds of instruction (not that she admitted Mrs. Toosypegs to her counsels), she fondly kept Master Verdant at her own apron-strings. The task of teaching his young idea how to shoot was committed chiefly to his sisters' governess, and he regularly took his place with them in the school-room. These daily exercises and mental drillings were subject to the inspection of their maiden-aunt, Miss Virginia Verdant, a first cousin of Mr. Green's, who had come to visit at the Manor during M