ley.]

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were
near enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We
occasionally heard sounds of the _Ululantes_, and caught glances of
Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His English style was cramped to
barbarism. His Easter anthems (for his duty obliged him to those
periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.[10]--He would
laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it 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 different 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 headlong entry into the schoolroom, 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.

[Footnote 10: In this and everything B. was the antipodes of his
coadjutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems,
worth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the
more flowery walks of the Muses. A