d professors who are stupid
themselves have a great preference for stupid fellows, and like to keep
down clever ones. A professor who was himself a dunce at college, and
who has been jobbed into his chair, being quite unfit for it, has a
fellow-feeling for other dunces. He is at home with them, you see, and
is not afraid that they see through him and despise him. The injustice
of the malignant blockhead who was my early instructor, and who
succeeded in making several months of my boyhood unhappy enough, was
taken up and imitated by several lesser blockheads among the boys. I
remember particularly one sneaking wretch who was occasionally set to
mark down on a slate the names of such boys as talked in school; such
boys being punished by being turned to the bottom of their class. I
remember how that sneaking wretch used always to mark my name down,
though I kept perfectly silent: and how he put my name last on the list,
that I might have to begin the lesson the very lowest in my form. The
sneaking wretch was bigger than I, so I could not thrash him; and any
representation I made to the malignant blockhead of a schoolmaster was
entirely disregarded. I cannot think but with considerable ferocity,
that probably there are many schools to-day in Britain containing a
master who has taken an unreasonable dislike to some poor boy, and who
lays himself out to make that poor boy unhappy. And I know that such may
be the case where the boy is neither bad nor stupid. And if the school
be one attended by a good many boys of the lower grade, there are sure
to be several sneaky boys among them who will devote themselves to
tormenting the one whom the master hates and torments.

It cannot be denied that there is a generous and magnanimous tone about
the boys of a school attended exclusively by the children of the better
classes, which is unknown among the children of uncultivated boors. I
have observed, that, if you offer a prize to the cleverest and most
industrious boy of a certain form in a school of the upper class, and
propose to let the prize be decided by the votes of the boys themselves,
you will almost invariably find it fairly given: that is, given to the
boy who deserves it best. If you explain, in a frank, manly way, to the
little fellows, that, in asking each for whom he votes, you are asking
each to say upon his honor whom he thinks the cleverest and most
diligent boy in the form, nineteen boys out of twenty will answer
hones