and the interference of the Grecian, who may be considered as the spiritual power, was not unfrequently called for, to mitigate by its mediation the heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or monitor.  In fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school.  Eras were computed from their time;—­it used to be said, such or such a thing was done when S——­ or T——­ was Grecian.

As I ventured to call the Grecians, the Muftis of the school, the King’s boys,[1] as their character then was, may well pass for the Janissaries.  They were the terror of all the other boys; bred up under that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathematician and conavigator with Captain Cook, William Wales.  All his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were destined to encounter.  Frequent and severe punishments which were expected to be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance.  To make his boys hardy, and to give them early sailor-habits, seemed to be his only aim; to this everything was subordinate.  Moral obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recompense, for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let slip; but the effects expected to be produced from it were something very different from contrition or mortification.  There was in William Wales a perpetual fund of humor, a constant glee about him, which, heightened by an inveterate provincialism of north-country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from his severities.  His punishments were a game at patience, in which the master was not always worst contented when he found himself at times overcome by his pupil.  What success this discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon the after-lives of these King’s boys, I cannot say:  but I am sure that, for the time, they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school.  Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in the whole mass; older and bigger than the other boys, (for, by the system of their education they were kept longer at school by two or three years than any of the rest, except the Grecians,) they were a constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some who may read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the cloisters, that the First Order was coming—­for so they termed the first form or class of those boys.  Still these sea-boys answered some good purposes, in the school.  They were the military class among the boys, foremost in athletic exercises, who extended the fame of the prowess of the school far and near; and the apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the butchers’ boys in the neighboring market, had sad occasion to attest their valor.

[Footnote 1:  The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the foundation of Charles the Second.]