Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/243

 Palaemon; suffer some diminution of your wage, like the hawker who sells rags and white Gallic blankets for winter wear, if only it do not go for nothing that you have sat from early dawn in a hole which no blacksmith would put up with, no workman who teaches how to card wool with slanting tool; that it do not go for nothing to have snuffed up the odour of as many lamps as you had scholars in your class thumbing a discoloured Horace or a begrimed Virgil.

But it is seldom that the fee can be recovered without a judgment of the Court. And yet be sure, ye parents, to impose the strictest laws upon the teacher: he must never be at fault in his grammar; he must know all history, and have all the authorities at his finger-tips. If asked a chance question on his way to the baths, or to the establishment of Phoebus, he must at once tell you who was the nurse of Anchises, what was the name and birth-place of Anchemolus' step-mother, to what age Acestes lived, how many flagons of Sicilian wine he presented to the Trojans. Require of him that he shall mould the young minds as a man moulds a face out of wax with his thumb; insist that he shall be a father to the whole brood, so that they shall play no nasty game, and do no nasty trick—no easy matter to watch the hands and sparkling eyes of so many youngsters! "See to all this," you say, "and then, when the year comes round, receive the golden piece which the mob demands for a winning jockey." 157