, or even
word of reproof fell upon me. My mind was fed upon praise, and my heart
nourished with caresses. In the school I had no equal, and my vanity
whispered that such was the case without. However, this vanity I did
not show, for I was humble from excessive pride.

There are two animals that are almost certain to be spoiled--a very
handsome young man, and the "cock of the school." Being certainly in
the latter predicament, I was only saved from becoming an utter and
egregious ass by the advent of one, the cleverest, most impudent,
rascally, agreeable scoundrel that ever swindled man or deceived woman,
in the shape of a wooden-legged usher. He succeeded my worthy friend of
the guitar, Mr Sigismund Pontifex. His name was Riprapton, and he only
wanted the slight requisite of common honesty to have made himself the
first man of any society in which fate might happen to cast him--and
fate had been pleased to cast him into a great many. He was a short,
compactly-made, symmetrically-formed man, with a countenance deeply
indented with the small-pox, and in every hole there was visibly
ensconced a little imp of audaciousness. His eyes were such intrepid
and quenchless lights of impudence, that they could look even Irish
_sang froid_ out of countenance. And then that inimitable wooden leg!
It was a perfect grace. As he managed it, it was irresistible. He did
not progress with a miserable, vulgar, dot-and-go-one kind of gait; he
neither hopped, nor halted, nor limped; and though he was wood from the
middle of his right thigh downwards, his walk might almost have been
called the poetry of motion. He never stumped, but he stole along with
a glissade that was the envy and admiration, not exactly of surrounding
nations, but of the dancing-master. It was a beautiful study to see him
walk, and I made myself master of it. The left leg was inimitably
formed; the calf was perhaps a little too round and Hibernian--a fault
gracious in the eyes of the fair sex; his ankle and foot were
exquisitely small and delicately turned; of course he always wore shorts
with immaculate white cotton or silk stockings.

I shall not distinguish the two legs by the terms, the living and the
dead one--it would be as great an injustice to the carved as to the
calfed one--for the former had a graceful life, _sui generis_, of its
own. I shall call them the pulsating and the gyrating leg, and now
proceed to describe how they bare along, in a man