But another and more serious objection may be urged against the present strictness of scholastic discipline--which is, that it deprives the boy of a sense of free and independent agency. I speak this with limitations, for a master should be a monarch in his school, but by no means a tyrant; and decidedly the very worst species of tyranny is that which stretches the young mind upon the rod of too rigorous a discipline--like the despot who exacted from his subjects so many barrels of perspiration, whenever there came a long and severe frost. Do not familiarize the mind when young to the toleration of slavery, lest it prove afterwards incapable of recognizing and relishing the principle of an honest and manly independence. I have known many children, on whom a rigor of discipline, affecting the mind only (for severe corporal punishment is now almost exploded), impressed a degree of timidity almost bordering on pusillanimity. Away, then, with the specious and long-winded arguments of a false and mistaken philosophy. A child will be a child, and a boy a boy, to the conclusion of the chapter. Bell or Lancaster would not relish the pap or caudle-cup three times a day; neither would an infant on the breast feel comfortable after a gorge of ox beef. Let them, therefore, put a little of the mother's milk of human kindness and consideration into their straight-laced systems.
A hedge schoolmaster was the general scribe of the parish, to whom all who wanted letters or petitions written, uniformly applied--and these were glorious opportunities for the pompous display of pedantry; the remuneration usually consisted of a bottle of whiskey.
A poor woman, for instance, informs Mat that she wishes to have a letter written to her son, who is a soldier abroad. “An' how long is he gone, ma'am?”
“Och, thin, masther, he's from me goin' an fifteen year; an' a comrade of his was spakin' to Jim Dwyer, an' says his ridgiment's lyin' in the Island of Budanages, somewhere in the back parts of Africa.”
“An' is it a lotther of petition you'd be afther havin' me to indite for you, ma'am?”
“Och, a letthur, sir--a letthur, master; an' may the Lord grant you all kinds of luck, good, bad, an' indifferent, both to you and yours: an' well it's known, by the same token, that it's yourself has the nice hand at the pen entirely, an' can indite a letter or petition, that the priest of the parish mightn't be ashamed to own to it.”