In David Copperfield’s recollections of the metallic Murdstone, Arthur Clennam’s of his childhood’s Sabbath and Alton Locke’s of his mother’s fearful bigotry, we get glimpses into the pathos of the old Puritan discipline. These are too sad for satire. Butler, no less sad, is also angry enough to brand it with his caustic wit. Theobald and Christina Pontifex are texts for a satiric sermon on parental incompetence, no less disastrous although “All was done in love, anxiety, timidity, stupidity, and impatience.” After the scene in which Theobald, having punished little Ernest severely and quite wantonly, rang the bell for prayers, “red-handed as he was,” his visitor reflects that perhaps it was fortunate for his host--[337] “* * * that our prayers were seldom marked by any very encouraging degree of response, for if I had thought there was the slightest chance of my being heard I should have prayed that some one might ere long treat him as he had treated Ernest.” The keynote of this most Christian system is unconsciously hit upon by the bewildered little lad himself, who later concludes,--[338] “* * * that he had duties towards everybody, lying in wait for him upon every side, but that nobody had any duties towards him.” Formal education naturally falls into the school and college divisions. We have the former presented dramatically by Brontë in _Jane Eyre_ (and more impressionistically in _Villette_), by Thackeray in _The Fatal Boots_ and _Vanity Fair_, by Butler in _The Way of All Flesh_, and by the zealous specialist in that field. It has been counted up that Dickens deals with twenty-eight schools and mentions a dozen others.[339] The most important are in _Nicholas Nickleby_, _Dombey and Son_, _David Copperfield_, and _Hard Times_. Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were “particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy,” and deduces that “it never pays to educate that sort of people.” Whereupon--[340] “The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating ‘The usual return!’ led the major away.” Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before the tribunal,--[341]