must be at Flaccus's quibble
about _Rex_--or at the _tristis severitas in vultu_, or _inspicere in
patinas_, of Terence--thin jests, which at their first broaching could
hardly have had _vis_ enough to move a Roman muscle.--He had two wigs,
both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh
powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured,
unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to
the school, when he made his morning appearance in his _passy_, or
_passionate wig_. No comet expounded surer.--J.B. had a heavy hand. I
have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the
maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume
to set your wits at me?"--Nothing was more common than to see him make
a head-long entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or
library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, "Od's
my life, Sirrah," (his favourite adjuration) "I have a great mind to
whip you,"--then, with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into
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 am