of the embryo college, but “marvellously deceived the expectations of good men concerning him.” He soon showed himself to be scandalously avaricious, and “his cruelty was more scandalous than his avarice.” (It was afterwards discovered that he was more than half a Jesuit.) For two years he bullied and starved the wretched children under his governance, “the sons of gentlemen and others of best note in the country,” until, his flock waxing and his duties increasing upon him, he doubled the teaching force by engaging an “usher,” or sub-master. Of this Mr. Briscoe, for such was his name, we know nothing save that he was “a gentleman born.” We may surmise that he was gentle in heart as well as in birth, and that he took his pupils’ part against the brutalities of his superior officer. At all events, Eaton fell foul of him with “a walnut tree cudgel, big enough to have killed a horse,” and beat him into insensibility.
One longs for a Dickens to dramatize the scene. It was Nicholas Nickleby at Dotheboys Hall, in the still more sinister setting of two hundred years earlier. Only Nicholas and Squeers were fiction, and this was history—the history of education, save the mark!
The thing made a great stir, as well it might. Eaton was summoned before the magistrates—the sole recorded instance of the head of Harvard College appear-
