poetry he could get hold of. He never was flogged, but
it was a wonder how he escaped the whippingpost. When he had money he
spent it royally in tarts for himself and his friends, and had been known
to disburse nine and sixpence out of ten shillings awarded to him in a
single day. When he had no funds he went on tick. When he could get no
credit he went without, and was almost as happy. He had been known to
take a thrashing for a crony without saying a word; but a blow ever so
slight from a friend would make him roar. To fighting he was averse from
his earliest youth, and indeed to physic, the Greek Grammar, or any other
exertion, and would engage in none of them, except at the last extremity.
He seldom if ever told lies, and never bullied little boys. Those masters
or seniors who were kind to him, he loved with boyish ardour. And though
the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or could not construe his
Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a disgrace to the school, a
candidate for ruin in this world, and perdition in the next; a profligate
who would most likely bring his venerable father to ruin and his mother
to a dishonoured grave, and the like--yet as the Doctor made use of these
compliments to most of the boys in the place, little Pen, at first uneasy
and terrified by these charges, became gradually accustomed to hear them;
and he has not, in fact, either murdered his parents or committed any act
worthy of transportation or hanging up to the present day.

Thus with various diversions and occupations his school days passed until
he was about sixteen years old, when he was suddenly called away from his
academic studies.

It was at the close of the forenoon school, and Pen had been unnoticed
all the previous part of the morning till now, when the Doctor put him on
to construe in a Greek play. He did not know a word of it, though little
Timmins, his form-fellow, was prompting him with all his might. Pen had
made a sad blunder or two, when the awful chief broke out upon him.

"Pendennis, sir," he said, "your idleness is incorrigible and your
stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your
family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your country.
If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all evil, be
really what moralists have represented, what a prodigious quantity of
future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed!
Miserable trifler!