n; making little sun-dials of paper; or
weaving those ingenious parentheses, called _cat-cradles_; or making
dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art
military over that laudable game "French and English," and a hundred
other such devices to pass away the time--mixing the useful with the
agreeable--as would have made the souls of Rousseau and John Locke
chuckle to have seen us.

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to
mix in equal proportion the _gentleman_, the _scholar_, and the
_Christian_; but, I know not how, the first ingredient is generally
found to be the predominating dose in the composition. He was engaged
in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at some episcopal levee, when
he should have been attending upon us. He had for many years the
classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or five first
years of their education; and his very highest form seldom proceeded
further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phaedrus. How
things were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the
proper person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps
felt, a delicacy in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I
have not been without my suspicions, that he was not altogether
displeased at the contrast we presented to his end of the school. We
were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. He would sometimes, with
ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, and then,
with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how neat and
fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their
brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that
enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our
little Goshen. We saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and
the prospect did but the more reconcile us to our lot. His thunders
rolled innocuous for us; his storms came near, but never touched us;
contrary to Gideon's miracle, while all around were drenched, our
fleece was dry.[9] His boys turned out the better scholars; we, I
suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him
without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance
of Field comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and
summer slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and
Elysian exemptions, and life itself a "playing holiday."

[Footnote 9: Cow