Facing him in the album, and most appropriately contrasted, was the portrait of a young master—­the embodiment of all that Mr. Rhomboid most heartily loathed.  We will call him Vivian Grey.  Vivian Grey was an Oxford Double First of unusual brilliancy, and therefore found a special charm and a satisfying sense of being suitably employed in his duty at Lyonness, which was to instil [Greek:  tupto] and Phaedrus into the five-and-thirty little wiseacres who constituted the lowest form.  Over the heads of these sages his political and metaphysical utterances rolled like harmless thunder, for he was at once a transcendentalist in philosophy and a utilitarian Radical of the purest dye.  All of which mattered singularly little to his five-and-thirty disciples, but caused infinite commotion and annoyance to the Rhomboids and Rhadamanthuses.  Vivian Grey at Oxford had belonged to that school which has been described as professing

    “One Kant with a K,
    And many a cant with a c.”

At Lyonness he was supposed to have helped to break the railings of Hyde Park in the riot of 1866, and to be a Head Centre of the Fenian Brotherhood.  As to personal appearance, Mr. Grey was bearded like the pard—­and in those days the scholastic order shaved—­while his taste in dress made it likely that he was the “Man in the Red Tie” whom we remember at the Oxford Commemoration some thirty years ago.  In short, he was the very embodiment of all that was most abhorrent to the old traditions of the schoolmaster’s profession; and proportionately great was the appositeness of a practical joke which was played me on my second or third morning at Lyonness.  I was told to go for my mathematical lesson to Mr. Rhomboid, who tenanted a room in the Old School.  Next door to his room was Mr. Grey’s, and I need not say that the first boy whom I asked for guidance playfully directed me to the wrong door.  I enter, and the Third Form suspend their Phaedrus, “Please, sir, are you Mr. Rhomboid?” I ask, amid unsmotherable laughter.  Never shall I forget the indignant ferocity with which the professor of the new lights drove me from the room, nor the tranquil austerity with which Mr. Rhomboid, when I reached him, set me “fifty lines” before he asked me my name.

On the same page I find the portrait of two men who have before now figured in the world of school-fiction under the names of Rose and Gordon.[39] Of Mr. Rose I will say no more than that he was an excellent schoolmaster and a most true saint, and that to his influence and warnings many a man can, in the long retrospect, trace his escape from moral ruin.  Mr. Gordon is now a decorous Dean; at Lyonness he was the most brilliant, the most irregular, and the most fascinating of teachers.  He spoilt me for a whole quarter.  I loved him for it then, and I thank him even now.