Let me comment on this line, one of a sharp satire by a boy named Barnes, long since an Indian Judge and I suppose translated Elsewhere.  Allen was head-gown-boy, and so chief executioner, the three rods being some five-feet bunches of birch armed with buds as sharp as thorns, renewed after six strokes for fresh excoriation! sometimes the exhibition was in medio, a public terror to evil-doers, or doers of nothing, but usually in a sort of side chapel to the lower school where the whipping-block stood.  Who could tolerate such things now? and who can wonder that I, as a lad, proclaimed that I would rather die than be flogged, for I had resolved in that event to commit justifiable homicide on my flogger?  I do not mean Allen, who became Head of Dulwich College, and with whom I have since dined, annually as donor of a picture there, but Russell, concerning whom I vowed that if ever he was made a Bishop (happily he wasn’t) I would desert the Church of England; as yet I have not, albeit it has lately become so papalised as to be little worth an honest Protestant’s adherence.

As to the exclusively classic education in my young days, to the resolute neglect of all other languages and sciences, I for myself have from youth upwards always protested against it as mainly waste of time and of very little service in the battle of life.  For proof of this, before I was eighteen, I wrote that essay on Education to be seen in my first series of Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my leave as a tractate useful to the present generation.  And while there was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those awkward verbs in “Mi,” or above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty involved severe punishment), let us remember that all this time Holywell Street was suffered to infect Charterhouse with its poison (I speak of long ago, before Lord Campbell’s wholesome Act), and that our clerical tutors and governors professionally recognised no sort of sins or shortcomings but those committed in class!  They practically ignored everything out of school, much as a captain knows nothing of his company off duty.  It was the idle system of boys set to govern boys, that the masters might have no damage.  I think the system was called Lancastrian.

One very noticeable trait in the parson-schoolmasters of those old days (and perhaps it still survives) was the subserviency to rank and wealth towards any pupils likely to give them livings, whereof more anon; at present, an appropriate instance occurs to me.  I was in my thirteenth year monitor of the playground, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled family, hunted and killed a stray dog there, and much to their credit for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted him into a dry ditch or vallum, dug for the leaping-pole under a Captain Clias who taught us athletics.