the sound of the lash from Tartarus, of disaster.
the infernal place of punishment for the wicked.
.
CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 503
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
headlong entry into the schoolroom, from his inner recess, or library, and,
with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, 'Od's my life, sirrah' (his
favorite adjuration), 'I have a great mind to whip you'?then, with as sudden
a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair?and, after a cooling lapse of some
minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context)
drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been
some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell?'and I WILL, too.'?In his gentler
moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious
method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and
reading the Debates,2 at the same time; a paragraph, and a lash between; which
in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourish
ing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration
for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual from his
hand?when droll squinting W having been caught putting the inside of
the master's desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it,
to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the
thing had been forewarned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent
to the oral or declaratory struck so irrestibly upon the fancy of all who heard
it (the pedagogue himself not excepted)?that remission was unavoidable.
L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. Coleridge, in his literary life,3 has pronounced a more intelligible and ample encomium on
them. The author of the Country Spectator-4 doubts not to compare him with
the ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than
with the pious ejaculation of C.?when he heard that his old master was on
his deathbed: 'Poor J. B.!?may all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted
to bliss by little cherub boys all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach
his sublunary infirmities.' Under him were many good and sound scholars bred.?First Grecian5 of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co
grammar-master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edi
fying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the
antisocialities of their predecessors!?You never met the one by chance in the
street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate
sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm-in-arm, these kindly coadjutors
lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in
advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in
discovering that it suited him to lay down the fasces6 also. Oh, it is pleasant,
as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen
helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitia,7 or some tale of Antique Friend
ship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate!?Co
2. The record of debates in Parliament. 'Rabidus Cambridge) on a Christ's Hospital scholarship. furor': mad rage (Latin). 6. The bundle of rods, serving as the handle of an
3. I.e., Biographia Literaria. ax, carried before the Roman magistrates as a sym4. Thomas Middleton, who was at school with bol of office. This is a facetious reference to the Lamb and Coleridge, edited the magazine Country birch-rod a schoolmaster habitually carried at a
Spectator (1792?93) and later became bishop of time when flogging was almost part of the curric-
