Christophero Sythersett, Armiger, relative to
the charities he founded injunctions how
observed, oh ye prebendaries and
Somebodies!—these were the most remarkable
features of the exterior of Accidentium
Grammar School. There had once been a
garden in front, and a pretty garden, too; but
the palings were broken down, and the
flowers had disappeared long since, and the
weeds had it all their own way. Moreover,
a considerable number of the latticed panes
were broken; there were great gaps in the
stone-masonry; the river frequently got into
the garden and wouldn't get out again; the
thatch was rotten and the belfry nearly
tumbling down; but what was that to
anybody. Borax said it was a shame: but so is
slavery a shame, and war, and poverty, and
the streets by night—all of which nobody
we know is accountable for, or in fault about.

The first thing you heard when you
entered the long low stone schoolroom, with its
grand carved oak roof all covered with
cobwebs, and falling down piecemeal through
neglect, was a din—a dreadful din. Latin
was the chiefest thing learned in Accidentium
School, and a Latin noise is considerably more
deafening than an English noise. Every
boy learnt his lesson out loud—at least
every boy who chose to learn,—the rest
contenting themselves with shouting out
terminations as loud as they could, and rocking
themselves backwards and forwards on
their forms, after the manner of studious
youths, learning very hard indeed. There
was a considerable amount of business
transacted in the midst of this din, in
rabbits, silkworms, hedgehogs, tops, marbles,
hardbake, and other saccharine luxuries.
Autumnal fruits were freely quoted at easy
rates between the moods of the verb Amo
and the declensions of nouns and adjec-
tives. One Jack a killer of giants, and seven
shameless, swaggering, fire- eating blades,
who called themselves champions, and of
Christendom, forsooth, together with a
genteel youth in complete mail, young Valentine,
indeed, with his brother Orson (not yet
accustomed to polite society), were often welcome
though surreptitious guests at the dogs-eared
tables, where none but the grim Vocito, the
stern Vocitas, and the redoubtable Vocitavi,
or at most the famous chieftains Mars,
Bacchus, and Apollo, should have feasted.

After the din, the next thing you heard
was the voice of Doctor Pantologos. And
it was a voice. It rolled like the Vesuvian
lava—fierce, impetuous and fiery, at first;
and then, still like lava, it grew dry; and
then, to say the truth, like lava again, it
cracked. Grandiloquent was Doctor
Pantologos in diction; redundant in simile, in
metaphor, in allegory, irony, diæresis, hyperbole,
catachresis, periphrasis, and in all
other figures of rhetoric. Rarely did he deal in
comparatives—superlatives were his delight.
But though his voice rolled and thundered—
though he predicted the gallows as the
ultimate reward of bad scanning, and the hulks
as the inevitable termination of a career
commenced by inattention to the As in præsenti;
though his expletives were horrible to hear
(all in Latin, and ending with issimus);
though he threatened often, he punished
seldom. His voice was vox et præterea
nihil—gentle, and kind, and lamb-like,
for all his loud voice and fierce talk; and
the birchen rod that lay in the dusty
cupboard behind him might have belonged to
Doctor Busby, so long had it been in disuse.

Doctor Pantologos was a very learned man.
He could not measure lands nor presage tides
and storms, nor did the rumour run that he
could gauge; but he was as full of Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew, as an egg is popularly
said to be full of meat. He was a walking
dictionary. A Thesaurus in rusty black. A
lexicon with a white neckcloth. Bayle,
Erasmus, the Scaligers, Bentley, Salmasius,
and the Scholiast upon Everybody, all rolled
up together. The trees, clad with leafy
garments to meaner mortals, were to him hung
only with neat little discs, bearing derivations
of words and tenses. The gnarled oaks had
no roots to him but Greek roots. He despised
the multiplication-table, and sighed for the
Abacus back again. He thought Buffon and
Cuvier, Audubon and Professor Owen,
infinitely inferior, as natural historians, to
Pliny. He had read one novel the Golden
Ass of Apuleius; one cookery-book, that of
Apicius. Galen, Celsus, Esculapius, and
Hippocrates, were the whole of the faculty
to him. Politics were his abomination;
and he deemed but three subjects worthy of
argument—the bull of Phalaris, the birthplace
of Homer, and the Æolic Digamma.

On this last subject he had written a work
—a mighty work—still in manuscript, from
which he frequently read extracts, which
nobody could understand, and which Borax
the Sceptic declared the Doctor didn't
understand himself. Either, said Borax the
Ironical, the old Doctor was mad before he
began the work, or he would go mad before
he finished it. It was a wondrous book.
Written on innumerable fragments of paper,
from sheets of foolscap to envelopes of letters
and backs of washing-bills. The title-page,
and some half-dozen sheets besides were
fairly copied out and ready for press. A
Treatise on the Origin and History of the
Æolic Digamma (with strictures upon the
Scholiast upon Everybody, of course), by
Thoukydides Pantologos, head-master at the
Free Grammar School at Accidentium. Thus
classically did he write his name: he was of
the Grotian creed, and scorned the mean,
shuffling, evasive Thucydides nomenclature.

Whenever things went contrariwise with,
the Doctor, he flew for consolation to
the treatise. He made a feint of not
employing himself upon it in school-hours; but,
almost every afternoon, and frequently in the