Thomas Tusser, author of the _Points of Good Husbandry_, admits us in his metrical autobiography to an acquaintance with the severity of treatment which awaited pupils in his time at public schools, and which, in fact, lingered, as part of the gross and ignorant system, down to within the last generation. We have all heard of the renowned Dr. Busby; but that celebrated character was merely a type which has happened from special circumstances to be selected for commemoration. Tusser, describing his course of training, says:-- "From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, To learn straightways the Latin phrase; Where fifty-three stripes given to me At once I had. For fault but small, or none at all, It came to pass that beat I was: See, Udall, see the mercy of thee To me, poor lad!" But this kind of experience was too common; and it had its advocates even outside the professional pale: for Lord Burleigh, as we learn from Ascham, was on the side of the disciplinarians. Sir Richard Sackville, Ascham's particular friend, on the contrary, bitterly deplored the hindrance and injury which he had suffered as a boy from the harshness of his teacher; and Udall himself carried his oppression so far as to offend his employers and procure his dismissal. Nash, in _Summer's Last Will and Testament_, 1600, makes Summer say:--"Here, before all this company, I profess myself an open enemy to ink and paper. I'll make it good upon the accidence, body of me! that in speech is the devil's paternoster. Nouns and pronouns, I pronounce you as traitors to boys' buttocks; syntaxis and prosodia, you are tormentors of wit, and good for nothing, but to get a schoolmaster twopence a week!" In a French sculpture of the end of the fourteenth century we have probably as early a glimpse as we are likely to get anywhere graphically of a scene in a school, where a mistress is administering castigation to one of her pupils laid across her knees, the others looking on. But it soon became a favourite subject for the illustrator and caricaturist. The strictness of scholastic discipline existed in an aggravated form, no doubt, in early days, and formed part of a more barbarous system of retribution for wrong done or suffered. The principle of wholesale and indiscriminate flagellation for offences against the laws of the school or for neglect of studies marched hand in hand with the vindictive legislation of bygone days; and doubtless, from the first, the rod often supplied a vent for the temper or caprice of the pedagogue. At Merchant Taylors' in my time the cane was freely used, and the forms of chastisement were the _cut on the hand_ and _the bender_, for which the culprit had to stoop.