502 / CHARLES LAMB
in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian; but, I know
not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the predominating dose
in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at
some episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us. He had
for many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or
five first years of their education, and his very highest form seldom proceeded
further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phaedrus.9 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.1 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.2 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.4 B. was a rabid
pedant. His English style was cramped to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for
his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel
pipes.5?He would laugh, aye, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's
quibble about Rex6?or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas,
of Terence7?thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had
vis8 enough to move a Roman muscle.?-He had two wigs, both pedantic, but
of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild
day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, angry caxon,9 denoting frequent
and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appear
ance in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer.1?-J. B. had a
9. A Roman of the 1st century C.E., author of a 'Ululantes': howling sufferers. verse translation of Aesop's fables. 5. Harsh pipes, an echo of Milton's 'Lycidas,' line
1. The Spartans exhibited drunken Helots (slaves) 124. as a warning example to their children. 6. In Horace's Satires 1.7 there is a pun on Rex as 2. Where the Israelites dwelled, protected from both a surname and the word for king. the swarms of flies with which the Lord plagued 7. In Terence's Andrea 5.2 one character says of
the Egyptians in Exodus 8.22. 'Samite': Pythago-a notorious liar that he has 'a sober severity in his
ras of Samos, Greek mathematician and philoso-countenance.' In his Adelphi 3.3, after a father has
pher (6th century B.C.E.), who forbade his pupils advised his son to look into the lives of men as a
to speak until they had studied with him five years. mirror, the slave advises the kitchen scullions 'to
3. Judges 6.37?38. As a sign to Gideon, the Lord look into the stew pans' as a mirror. soaked his sheepskin while leaving the earth 8. Force (Latin); a term in rhetorical theory.
around it dry. 9. A type of wig.
4. In the Aeneid 6.557?58 Aeneas hears the I. Comets were superstitiously regarded as omens groans and
