The preparation is as usual "to read a chapter of Oman." Some notes are read out from the master's "undergraduate" notebook very slowly and listlessly and as slowly and listlessly taken down by most of the form unless they have anything else to do such as drawing "Old Clothes-horse" (the nickname of the master), a proceeding sometimes fraught with danger for "Old Clothes-horse" has an uncomfortable habit of suddenly remembering his vocation, of saying to himself, "I must be stern." On such days he will demand of such a one the drawing, and bawl out at the top of his voice: "You disgraceful scoundrel, you son of a plough-boy--you--you--disgusting hound--you will write out the whole of the last hundred pages of the history"--a punishment naturally enough afterwards remitted to one-half, one-third, one-tenth, but even then fairly severe. His method of imparting history runs too much on the lines of doing the minimum of correcting work (which though he does not know it, is a step in the right direction, but done in his case from the wrong motive) and of placing implicit confidence in the reading of the work of one man. Dates and comparisons of characters, knowledge of laws and deft little paragraphs about things like Habeas Corpus, Barebones, and so on, with neat compartments at the end of each period containing the great names in literature of that period (as if it ever did a boy any good just to know the name of Dryden, Pope, Burke, and Johnson without having read a word of their works), these combine to form his stock in trade. His boys turn out fairly well in stereotyped examinations, but they leave school knowing no real history at all, worse still with a positive distaste for a subject with which they have really not even a nodding acquaintance.