empted to combine so many
things. He wanted a gentleman, a schoolmaster, a curate, a matron, and a
lady,--we may say all in one. Curates and ushers are generally unmarried.
An assistant schoolmaster is not often in orders, and sometimes is not a
gentleman. A gentleman, when he is married, does not often wish to
dispose of the services of his wife. A lady, when she has a husband, has
generally sufficient duties of her own to employ her, without undertaking
others. The scheme, if realised, would no doubt be excellent, but the
difficulties were too many. The Stantiloups, who lived about twenty miles
off, made fun of the Doctor and his project; and the Bishop was said to
have expressed himself as afraid that he would not be able to license as
curate any one selected as usher to the school. One attempt was made
after another in vain;--but at last it was declared through the country
far and wide that the Doctor had succeeded in this, as in every other
enterprise that he had attempted. There had come a Rev. Mr. Peacocke and
his wife. Six years since, Mr. Peacocke had been well known at Oxford as
a Classic, and had become a Fellow of Trinity. Then he had taken orders,
and had some time afterwards married, giving up his Fellowship as a matter
of course. Mr. Peacocke, while living at Oxford, had been well known to a
large Oxford circle, but he had suddenly disappeared from that world, and
it had reached the ears of only a few of his more intimate friends that he
had undertaken the duties of vice-president of a classical college at
Saint Louis in the State of Missouri. Such a disruption as this was for a
time complete; but after five years Mr. Peacocke appeared again at Oxford,
with a beautiful American wife, and the necessity of earning an income by
his erudition.

It would at first have seemed very improbable that Dr. Wortle should have
taken into his school or into his parish a gentleman who had chosen the
United States as a field for his classical labours. The Doctor, whose
mind was by no means logical, was a thoroughgoing Tory of the old school,
and therefore considered himself bound to hate the name of a republic. He
hated rolling stones, and Mr. Peacocke had certainly been a rolling stone.
He loved Oxford with all his heart, and some years since had been heard to
say hard things of Mr. Peacocke, when that gentleman deserted his college
for the sake of establishing himself across the Atlantic. But he was one
wh