[28] Corn Market: one of the principal streets of Oxford.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.
"They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think.
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three."
Lowell, "Stanzas on Freedom."
THE LOWER FOURTH.
The lower-fourth form, in which Tom found himself at the beginning of the next half-year, was the largest form in the lower school, and numbered upward of forty boys. Young gentlemen of all ages, from nine to fifteen, were to be found there, who expended such part of their energies as was devoted to Latin and Greek, upon a book of Livy, the Bucolics[1] of Virgil, and the Hecuba[2] of Euripides, which were ground out in small daily portions. The driving of this unlucky lower fourth must have been grievous work to the unfortunate master, for it was the most unhappily constituted of any in the School. Here stuck the great stupid boys, who for the life of them could never master the accidence;[3] the objects alternately of mirth and terror to the youngsters, who were daily taking them up, and laughing at them in lesson, and getting kicked by them for so doing in play-hours. There were no less than three unhappy fellows in tail coats, with incipient down on their chins, whom the Doctor and the master of the form were always endeavoring to hoist into the upper school, but whose parsing and construing resisted the most well-meant shoves. Then came the mass of the form, boys of eleven and twelve, the most mischievous and reckless age of British youth, of whom East and Tom Brown were fair specimens. As full of tricks as monkeys, and of excuses as Irish women, making fun of their master, one another, and their lessons, Argus[4] himself would have been puzzled to keep an eye on them; and as for making them steady or serious for half an hour together, it was simply hopeless. The remainder of the form consisted of young prodigies of nine or ten, who were going up the school at the rate of a form a half-year, all boys' hands and wits being against them in their progress. It would have been one man's work to see that the precocious youngsters had fair play; and as the master had a good deal besides to do, they hadn't, and were forever being shoved down three or four places, their verses stolen, their books inked, their jackets whitened, and their lives otherwise made a burden to them.
The lower fourth, and all the forms below it, were heard in the Great School, and were not trusted to prepare their lessons before coming in, but were whipped into school three-quarters of an hour before the lessons began by their respective masters, and there, scattered about on the benches, with dictionary and grammar, hammered out their twenty lines of Virgil and Euripides in the midst of Babel.[5] The masters of the lower school walked up and down the Great School together during this three-quarters of an hour, or sat in their desks reading or looking over copies, and keeping such order as was possible. But the lower fourth was just now an overgrown form, too large for any one man to attend to properly, and consequently the elysium[6] or ideal form of the young scapegraces who formed the staple[7] of it.