 him that made him like to see Tom looking well and
enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with any deep sense of
the infinite issues belonging to everyday duties; not quite competent to his
high offices; but incompetent gentlemen must live, and without private fortune
it is difficult to see how they could all live genteelly if they had nothing to
do with education or government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental
constitution that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge
Mr. Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of
apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his congenital
deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg shorter than the other. A
method of education sanctioned by the long practice of our venerable ancestors
was not to give way before the exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely
living at the time then present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so
stupid at signs and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that
reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the practice of
our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument the thumb-screw, and
to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit non-existent facts; they had a
fixed opinion to begin with, that the facts were existent, and what had they to
do but to tighten the thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed
opinion that all boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular
thing to teach: if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened - the
exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of Virgil be
awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too languid inclination to
Latin verse.
    The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second half-year.
Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr. Stelling could
obtain credit by his facility, which required little help, much more easily than
by the troublesome process of overcoming Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad
chests and ambitious intentions do sometimes disappoint their friends by failing
to carry the world before them. Perhaps it is, that high achievements demand
some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;
perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their divinæ
particulum auræ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty appetite. Some
reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the execution of many
spirited projects - why he did not begin the
