Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/241

 Major Bagstock is contemplating young Rob, a product of that school where they never taught honor, but were "particularly strong in the engendering of hypocrisy," and deduces that "it never pays to educate that sort of people." Whereupon—

"The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught, as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr. Dombey, angrily repeating 'The usual return!' led the major away."

Young David Copperfield profits little by losing Murdstone and gaining Creakle. The aspect of this pleasant pedagogue so fascinates the gaze of the boys that they cannot keep to their books. When a culprit is called before the tribunal,—

"Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at it,—miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!"

From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on