severely
reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was
fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new
nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen
bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and
delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of
unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks
were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having
resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his
particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into
supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light
ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several
swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain;
it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons,
that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were
to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught
to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of
stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the
particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely
ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of
it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school,
in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled
jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every
Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would
be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good
intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on
the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a
conventional volunteer boy as executioner's assistant. When and where it
first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant
in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when
and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in
operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it,
matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth,
and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants,
yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their
wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them
for a whiske