Page:Paul Clifford Vol 1.djvu/110

80 to his present situation, was his intimacy with Mac Grawler; for when Paul's increasing years and roving habits had put an end to the sage's instructions, there was thereby lopped off from the preceptor's finances the weekly sum of two shillings and sixpence, as well as the freedom of the Dame's cellar and larder; and as, in the reaction of feeling, and the perverse course of human affairs, people generally repent the most of those actions once the most ardently incurred; so poor Mrs. Lobkins, imagining that Paul's irregularities were entirely owing to the knowledge he had acquired from Mac Grawler's instructions, grievously upbraided herself for her former folly, in seeking for a superior education for her protegé; nay, she even vented upon the sacred head of Mac Grawler himself her dissatisfaction at the results of his instructions. In like manner, when a man who can spell comes to be hanged, the anti-educationists accuse the spelling-book of his murder. High words between the admirer of ignorant innocence and the propagator of intellectual science ensued, which ended in Mac Grawler's final expulsion from the Mug.