roof of this,
before I was eighteen, I wrote that essay on Education to be seen in my
first series of Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the
celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my
leave as a tractate useful to the present generation. And while there
was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in
Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those awkward verbs in "Mi," or
above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty
involved severe punishment), let us remember that all this time
Holywell Street was suffered to infect Charterhouse with its poison (I
speak of long ago, before Lord Campbell's wholesome Act), and that our
clerical tutors and governors professionally recognised no sort of sins
or shortcomings but those committed in class! They practically ignored
everything out of school, much as a captain knows nothing of his company
off duty. It was the idle system of boys set to govern boys, that the
masters might have no damage. I think the system was called Lancastrian.

One very noticeable trait in the parson-schoolmasters of those old days
(and perhaps it still survives) was the subserviency to rank and wealth
towards any pupils likely to give them livings, whereof more anon; at
present, an appropriate instance occurs to me. I was in my thirteenth
year monitor of the playground, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled
family, hunted and killed a stray dog there, and much to their credit
for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted _him_ into a dry
ditch or vallum, dug for the leaping-pole under a Captain Clias who
taught us athletics. I was technically responsible for this open insult
offered to Hibernian nobility, however well disposed to look another way
and let lynch-law take its course. Accordingly, the Doctor had me up for
punishment, and he inflicted an almost impossible imposition, Book
Epsilon of the Iliad (the longest of all) to be translated word for
word, English and Greek, and to be given to him in MS. within a month
(it would have been work for a year), that or expulsion. Had Mr. Dillon
been a plebeian, no notice would have been taken of the matter, but he
was an honourable, so Russell must avenge his righteous punishment.
However, the result of this outrageous set-task was curious and worthy
of this its first and only record. All the seventy boys in Irvine's
house and others elsewhere, volunteered to do the whole imposi