or three of the introductory fables of Phaedrus.  How things were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess.  Boyer, who was the proper person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own.  I have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school.  We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans.  He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, “how neat and fresh the twigs looked.”  While his pale students were battering their brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen.  We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more reconcile us to our lot.  His thunders rolled innocuous for us; his storms came near, but never touched us; contrary to Gideon’s miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece was dry.[3] His boys turned out the better scholars; we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper.  His pupils cannot speak of him without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance of Field comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life itself a “playing holiday.”

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system.  We occasionally heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus.  B. was a rabid pedant.  His English style was crampt to barbarism.  His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[4]—­He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus’s quibble about Rex—­or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas, of Terence—­thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle.—­He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of differing omen.  The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day.  The other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution.  Woe to the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, or passionate wig.  No comet expounded surer.—­J.B. had a heavy hand.  I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a “Sirrah, do you presume to set your wits at me?”—­Nothing was more common than to see him make a head-long entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, “Od’s my life, Sirrah,” (his favourite adjuration) “I have a great mind to whip you,”—­then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into