In a house, formerly a suburban seat of the unfortunate Earl of Essex--over a grocer’s shop--up two pair of stairs, there was a very select day-school, kept by a decayed Dominie, as he would have been called in his native land. In his better days, when my brother was his pupil, he had been master of one of those wholesale concerns in which so many ignorant men have made fortunes, by favour of high terms, low ushers, gullible parents, and victimised little boys. As our worthy Dominie, on the contrary, had failed to realise even a competence, it may be inferred, logically, that he had done better by his pupils than by himself; and my own experience certainly went to prove that he attended to the interests of his scholars, however he might have neglected his own. Indeed, he less resembled, even in externals, the modern worldly trading Schoolmaster, than the good, honest, earnest, olden Pedagogue--a pedant, perchance, but a learned one, with whom teaching was “a labour of love,” who had a proper sense of the dignity and importance of his calling, and was content to find a main portion of his reward in the honourable proficiency of his disciples. Small as was our College, its Principal maintained his state, and walked gowned and covered. His cap was of faded velvet, of black, or blue, or purple, or sad green, or as it seemed, of all together, with a _nuance_ of brown. His robe, of crimson damask, lined with the national tartan. A quaint, carved, highbacked, elbowed article, looking like an _émigré_, from a set that had been at home in an aristocratical drawing-room, under the _ancien régime_, was his Professional Chair, which with his desk was appropriately elevated on a dais, some inches above the common floor. From this moral and material eminence, he cast a vigilant yet kindly eye over some dozen of youngsters; for adversity, sharpened by habits of authority, had not soured him, or mingled a single tinge of bile with the peculiar red-streak complexion, so common to the healthier natives of the North. On one solitary occasion, within my memory, was he seriously yet characteristically discomposed, and that was by his own daughter, whom he accused of “forgetting all regard for common decorum;” because, forgetting that he was a Dominie as well as a Parent, she had heedlessly addressed him in public as “Father,” instead of “Papa.” The mere provoking contrariety of a dunce never stirred his spleen, but rather spurred his endeavour, in spite of the axiom, to make Nihil fit for anything. He loved teaching for teaching’s sake; his kill-horse happened to be his hobby: and doubtless, if he had met with a penniless boy on the road to learning, he would have given him a lift, like the charitable Waggoner to Dick Whittington--for love. I recall, therefore, with pleasure, the cheerful alacrity with which I used to step up to recite my lesson, constantly forewarned--for every true schoolmaster has his stock joke--not to “stand in my own light.”