and his compeers would have attained a notoriety that would have stopped their trade.  I cannot imagine how any one, with the spirit of a man in him, could sleep and wake within sight of one of these schools without lifting a hand or a voice to stop what was going on there.  But without supposing these extreme cases, I can remember what I have myself seen of the incompetence and injustice of teachers.  I burn with indignation yet, as I think of a malignant blockhead who once taught me for a few months.  I have been at various schools; and I spent six years at one venerable university (where my instructors were wise and worthy); and I am now so old, that I may say, without any great exhibition of vanity, that I have always kept well up among my school- and college-companions:  but that blockhead kept me steadily at the bottom of my class, and kept a frightful dunce at the top of it, by his peculiar system.  I have observed (let me say) that masters and professors who are stupid themselves have a great preference for stupid fellows, and like to keep down clever ones.  A professor who was himself a dunce at college, and who has been jobbed into his chair, being quite unfit for it, has a fellow-feeling for other dunces.  He is at home with them, you see, and is not afraid that they see through him and despise him.  The injustice of the malignant blockhead who was my early instructor, and who succeeded in making several months of my boyhood unhappy enough, was taken up and imitated by several lesser blockheads among the boys.  I remember particularly one sneaking wretch who was occasionally set to mark down on a slate the names of such boys as talked in school; such boys being punished by being turned to the bottom of their class.  I remember how that sneaking wretch used always to mark my name down, though I kept perfectly silent:  and how he put my name last on the list, that I might have to begin the lesson the very lowest in my form.  The sneaking wretch was bigger than I, so I could not thrash him; and any representation I made to the malignant blockhead of a schoolmaster was entirely disregarded.  I cannot think but with considerable ferocity, that probably there are many schools to-day in Britain containing a master who has taken an unreasonable dislike to some poor boy, and who lays himself out to make that poor boy unhappy.  And I know that such may be the case where the boy is neither bad nor stupid.  And if the school be one attended by a good many boys of the lower grade, there are sure to be several sneaky boys among them who will devote themselves to tormenting the one whom the master hates and torments.