old parsons than Chapman
and "Bob Watki" could not readily be found; and though the four others,
Lloyd, Dickens, Irvine, and Penny were somewhat more intelligent, still
all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a "concio," if
the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Homer or Virgil or Horace
was haply in dispute between a monitor and his class. In the upper
school the single really excellent teacher and good clergyman, Edward
Churton, had but one fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell,
who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly
Mr. Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief. What
should we think nowadays of an irate schoolmaster smashing a child's
head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose
bled, as I once saw? Or, in these milder times when your burglar or
garotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the
wisdom or equity of some slight fault of idleness or ignorance being
visited with the Reverend Doctor's terrible sentence, "Allen, three
rods, eighteen, and most severely"?

Let me comment on this line, one of a sharp satire by a boy named
Barnes, long since an Indian Judge and I suppose translated Elsewhere.
Allen was head-gown-boy, and so chief executioner, the three rods being
some five-feet bunches of birch armed with buds as sharp as thorns,
renewed after six strokes for fresh excoriation! sometimes the
exhibition was in medio, a public terror to evil-doers, or doers of
nothing, but usually in a sort of side chapel to the lower school where
the whipping-block stood. Who could tolerate such things now? and who
can wonder that I, as a lad, proclaimed that I would rather die than be
flogged, for I had resolved in that event to commit justifiable homicide
on my flogger? I do not mean Allen, who became Head of Dulwich College,
and with whom I have since dined, annually as donor of a picture there,
but Russell, concerning whom I vowed that if ever he was made a Bishop
(happily he wasn't) I would desert the Church of England; as yet I have
not, albeit it has lately become so papalised as to be little worth an
honest Protestant's adherence.

As to the exclusively classic education in my young days, to the
resolute neglect of all other languages and sciences, I for myself have
from youth upwards always protested against it as mainly waste of time
and of very little service in the battle of life. For p