his lair—­and, after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some Devil’s Litany, with the expletory yell—­“and I WILL, too.”—­In his gentler moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time; a paragraph, and a lash between; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourishing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces of rhetoric.

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual from his hand—­when droll squinting W——­ having been caught putting the inside of the master’s desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing had been forewarned.  This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to the oral or declaratory, struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was unavoidable.

L. has given credit to B.’s great merits as an instructor.  Coleridge, in his literary life, has pronounced a more intelligible and ample encomium on them.  The author of the Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the ablest teachers of antiquity.  Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with the pious ejaculation of C.—­when he heard that his old master was on his death-bed—­“Poor J.B.!—­may all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach his sublunary infirmities.”

Under him were many good and sound scholars bred.—­First Grecian of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co-grammar-master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T——­e.  What an edifying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti-socialities of their predecessors!—­You never met the one by chance in the street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate sub-appearance of the other.  Generally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in discovering that it suited him to lay down the fasces also.  Oh, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitia, or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate!—­Co-Grecian with S. was Th——­, who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts.  Th——­