BOSWELL.
[426] Cockburn (Life of Jeffrey, i. 4) says that the High School of Edinburgh, in 1781, 'was cursed by two under master, whose atrocities young men cannot be made to believe, but old men cannot forget, and the criminal law would not now endure.'
[427] Mr. Langton married the Countess Dowager of Rothes. BOSWELL.
[428] From school. See ante, ii. 62.
[429] See ante, i. 44.
[430] Johnson used to say that schoolmasters were worse than the Egyptian task-masters of old. 'No boy,' says he, 'is sure any day he goes to school to escape a whipping. How can the schoolmaster tell what the boy has really forgotten, and what he has neglected to learn?' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 209. 'I rejoice,' writes J. S. Mill (Auto. p. 53), 'in the decline of the old, brutal, and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them.'
[431] See ante, i. 373.
[432] See ante, ii. 74.
[433] The ship in which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander were to have sailed was the Endeavour. It was, they said, unfit for the voyage. The Admiralty altered it in such a way as to render it top-heavy. It was nearly overset on going down the river. Then it was rendered safe by restoring it to its former condition. When the explorers raised their former objections, they were told to take it or none. Ann. Reg. xv. 108. See also Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 18, 1773.
[434] I suspect that Raleigh is here an error of Mr. Boswell's pen for Drake. CROKER. Johnson had written Drake's Life, and therefore must have had it well in mind that it was Drake who went round the world.