 editing of his Greek play, or any
other work of scholarship, in his leisure hours, but, after turning the key of
his private study with much resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's
novels. Tom was gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less
rigour, and having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being cross-examined
into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral in the matter. He
thought school much more bearable under this modification of circumstances; and
he went on contentedly enough, picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from
things that were not intended as education at all. What was understood to be his
education, was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure in the
effort to learn by rote.
    Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this training;
perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing solely to illustrate
the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made of flesh and blood, with
dispositions not entirely at the mercy of circumstances.
    There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example, and some credit
on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster, who, being an
old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom - a source of high mutual
pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the company at the Black Swan to
have once struck terror into the hearts of the French, was no longer personally
formidable. He had rather a shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the
mornings, not from age, but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton
boys which nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes scrupulously brushed,
and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the Wednesday and Saturday afternoons,
when he came to Tom, he was always inspired with gin and old memories, which
gave him an exceptionally spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears
the drum. The drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike
narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of the Iliad;
for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and, besides, Tom had felt some disgust
on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly never have existed. But the
Duke of Wellington was really alive, and Bony had not been long dead - therefore
Mr. Poulter
