"They brought one Pinch; a hungry lean-faced villain,
A meer anatomy, a mountebank,
A thread-bare juggler, and a fortune-teller;
A needy, hollow-eye'd, sharp-looking wretch,
A living dead man: this pernicious slave,
Forsooth, took him on as conjuror."[96:A]
Ben Jonson also alludes to this union of occupations when he says, "I would have ne'er a cunning schoolemaster in England, I mean a Cunningman as a schoolemaster; that is, a Conjurour."[96:B]
A less formidable figure of a schoolmaster has been given us by Shakspeare, under the character of Holofernes, in Love's Labour's Lost, where he has drawn a full-length caricature of the too frequent pedantry of this profession. Yet Holofernes, though he speak a leash of languages at once, is not deficient either in ability or discrimination; he ridicules with much good sense and humour the literary fops of his day, the "rackers of orthography;" and his conversation is described by his friend, Sir Nathaniel, the Curate, as possessing all the requisites to perfection. "Sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy."[96:C] "It is very difficult," remarks Dr. Johnson, "to add any thing to this character of the schoolmaster's table-talk, and perhaps all the precepts of Castiglione will scarcely be found to comprehend a rule for conversation so justly delineated, so widely dilated, and so nicely limited."[96:D]
The country-schoolmasters in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, were, however, if we trust to the accounts of Ascham and Peacham, in
general many degrees below the pedagogue of Shakspeare in ability; tyranny and ignorance appear to have been their chief characteristics; to such an extent, indeed, were they deficient in point of necessary knowledge, that Peacham, speaking of bad masters, declares, "it is a generall plague and complaint of the whole land; for, for one discreet and able teacher, you shall finde twenty ignorant and carelesse; who (among so many fertile and delicate wits as England affordeth) whereas they make one scholler, they marre ten."[97:A]