example. It is to men like our honourable friend, and to contests
like those from which he comes triumphant, that we are mainly
indebted for that ready interest in politics, that fresh enthusiasm
in the discharge of the duties of citizenship, that ardent desire
to rush to the poll, at present so manifest throughout England.
When the contest lies (as it sometimes does) between two such men
as our honourable friend, it stimulates the finest emotions of our
nature, and awakens the highest admiration of which our heads and
hearts are capable.
It is not too much to predict that our honourable friend will be
always at his post in the ensuing session. Whatever the question
be, or whatever the form of its discussion; address to the crown,
election petition, expenditure of the public money, extension of
the public suffrage, education, crime; in the whole house, in
committee of the whole house, in select committee; in every
parliamentary discussion of every subject, everywhere: the
Honourable Member for Verbosity will most certainly be found.
OUR SCHOOL
WE went to look at it, only this last Midsummer, and found that the
Railway had cut it up root and branch. A great trunk-line had
swallowed the playground, sliced away the schoolroom, and pared off
the corner of the house: which, thus curtailed of its proportions,
presented itself, in a green stage of stucco, profilewise towards
the road, like a forlorn flat-iron without a handle, standing on
end.
It seems as if our schools were doomed to be the sport of change.
We have faint recollections of a Preparatory Day-School, which we
have sought in vain, and which must have been pulled down to make a
new street, ages ago. We have dim impressions, scarcely amounting
to a belief, that it was over a dyer’s shop. We know that you went
up steps to it; that you frequently grazed your knees in doing so;
that you generally got your leg over the scraper, in trying to
scrape the mud off a very unsteady little shoe. The mistress of
the Establishment holds no place in our memory; but, rampant on one
eternal door-mat, in an eternal entry long and narrow, is a puffy
pug-dog, with a personal animosity towards us, who triumphs over
Time. The bark of that baleful Pug, a certain radiating way he had
of snapping at our undefended legs, the ghastly grinning of his
moist black muzzle and white teeth, and the insolence of his crisp
tail curled like a pastoral crook, all live and flourish. From an
otherwise unaccountable association of him with a fiddle, we
conclude that he was of French extraction, and his name FIDELE. He
belonged to some female, chiefly inhabiting a back-parlour, whose
life appears to us to have been consumed in sniffing, and in
wearing a brown beaver bonnet. For her, he would sit up and
balance cake upon his nose, and not eat it until twenty had been
counted. To the best of our belief we were once called in to
witness this performance; when, unable, even in his milder moments,
to endure our presence, he instantly made at us, cake and all.
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
Why a something in mourning, called ‘Miss Frost,’ should still
connect itself with our preparatory school, we are unable to say.
We retain no impression of the beauty of Miss Frost – if she were
beautiful; or of the mental fascinations of Miss Frost – if she
were accomplished; yet her name and her black dress hold an
enduring place in our remembrance. An equally impersonal boy,
whose name has long since shaped itself unalterably into ‘Master
Mawls,’ is not to be dislodged from our brain. Retaining no
vindictive feeling towards Mawls – no feeling whatever, indeed – we
infer that neither he nor we can have loved Miss Frost. Our first
impression of Death and Burial is associated with this formless
pair. We all three nestled awfully in a corner one wintry day,
when the wind was blowing shrill, with Miss Frost’s pinafore over
our heads; and Miss Frost told us in a whisper about somebody being
‘screwed down.’ It is the only distinct recollection we preserve