ards, have always been very
decided controversialists. His theology was grim, solemn, and angular,
and he was as combative as one of Cromwell's disputatious troopers. In
his capacious pocket, he always carried a copy of the New Testament--as,
of old, the carnal controvertists bore a sword buckled to the side. Thus
armed, he was a genuine polemical "swash-buckler," and would whip out
his Testament, as the bravo did his weapon, to cut you in two without
ceremony. He could carve you into numerous pieces, and season you with
scriptural salt and pepper; and he would do it with a gusto so serious,
that it would have been no unreasonable apprehension that he intended to
eat you afterward. And the value of his triumph was enhanced, too, by
the consideration that it was won by no meretricious graces or
rhetorical flourishes; for the ease of his gesticulation was such as you
see in the arms of a windmill, and his enunciation was as nasal and
monotonous as that of the Reverend Eleazar Poundtext, under whose
ministrations he had been brought up in all godliness.

But he possessed other accomplishments beside those of the polemic. He
was not, it is true, overloaded with the learning of "the schools"--was,
in fact, quite ignorant of some of the branches of knowledge which he
imparted to his pupils: yet this was never allowed to become apparent,
for as we have intimated, he would frequently himself acquire, at night,
the lessons which he was to teach on the morrow. But time was seldom
wasted among the people from whom he sprang, and this want of
preparation denoted that his leisure hours had been occupied in
possessing himself of other acquirements. Among these, the most elegant,
if not the most useful, was music, and his favorite instrument was the
flute.

In "David Copperfield," Dickens describes a certain flute-playing tutor,
by the name of Mell, concerning whom, and the rest of mankind, he
expresses the rash opinion, "after many years of reflection," that
"nobody ever could have played worse." But Dickens never saw Strongfaith
Lippincott, the schoolmaster, nor heard his lugubrious flute, and he
therefore knows nothing of the superlative degree of detestable playing.

There _are_ instruments upon which even an unskilful performer may make
tolerable music, but the flute is not one of them--the man who murders
_that_, is a malefactor entitled to no "benefit of clergy:" and our
schoolmaster _did_ murder it in the most inhuman manner