CONTENTS

 Say, should the philosophic mind disdain That good which makes each humbler bosom vain? Let school-taught pride dissemble all it can, These little things are great to little man! 

In pursuance of the vicar’s advice, I hied me without delay to the tutor whom he had specially recommended; and, setting to work diligently, crammed, as hard as I could, for my expected examination.

“Cramming,” nothing more nor less, was, undoubtedly, the system pursued by this modern instructor of maturity—I cannot say ‘of youth,’ as the majority of his pupils were men who had long cut their wisdom teeth, and worn the virile toga almost threadbare:—stalwart men, “bearded like the pard,” in the fashion of Hamlet’s warrior, which has now become so general that heroes and civilians are indistinguishable the one from the other.

The crammer dosed these with facts and figures at a five-hundred-horse-power rate, interlarding them with such stray skeleton scraps of popular information as mendicant scholars may pick up from the sumptuously-spread tables of the learned, through those crumb-like compilations of chronology and history, with which we are familiar, styled “treasures of knowledge:”—thus, he injected into the brain of his neophytes dates by the dozen and proper names—geographical ones in particular—by the score, impressing them on stubborn memories through the aid of some easily-learnt rhyme, or comic association, that made even the dullest comprehension retentive for awhile.

His entire curriculum consisted, mainly, in the getting by heart, with their answers, of sundry old civil service examination papers which he kept in stock—continually increasing his store as fresh ones were issued by the examining board, until he was at length master of every question which had ever puzzled a candidate from the era of the first competition down to the present day.

His motive in this was very obvious. The crammer argued, not only wisely, but well, that a certain proportion of these questions were pretty safe to be again propounded in subsequent contests, just as one sees antique Joe Millers appear again and again, at regular recurring intervals, in the excruciating “Facetiae” columns of those penny serials, of limited merit and “unlimited circulation,” that delight the eyes and ears of below-stairs readers, the staple of whose mental pabulum they principally form.

The crammer was right in his premises, as I’ve said, the old queries being so 

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