Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of 'the old school' still talk and write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with 'the Doctor' in his study,--interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful room,--he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of these 'interviews with the Doctor,' in which he had figured as passive principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. 'And can you still remember what it felt like?' inquired one of the listeners. 'Remember it! It was like ----!' screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor's study,--interviews from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him 'how he liked it.' All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the poet's second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does not hold the birch largely accountable for _Queen Mab_, the present writer is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this matter, as they are on other matters of the poet's character and story.