The play was Lear. 'During the first three acts he said not a word. In a fine passage of the fourth he fetched a deep sigh, and turning to a friend, "I wish," said he, "the note was out of my book."' Horne's Essays, ed. 1808, p. 38. See post, under Dec. 24, 1783, and Garrick's letter in Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 23,1773.
[540] The farmer's son told Mr. Prior that 'he had felt much reluctance in erasing during necessary repairs these memorials.' Prior's Goldsmith, ii. 335.
[541] See ante, ii. 178.
[542] Here was a blank, which may be filled up thus:--'was told by an apparition;'--the writer being probably uncertain whether he was asleep or awake, when his mind was impressed with the solemn presentiment with which the fact afterwards happened so wonderfully to correspond. BOSWELL. 'Lord Hardinge, when Secretary at War,' writes Mr. Croker, 'informed me, that it appears that Colonel Sir Thomas Prendergast, of the twenty-second foot, was killed at Malplaquet, Aug. 31, 1709; but no trace can be found of any Colonel Cecil in the army at that period. Colonel W. Cecil, who was sent to the Tower in 1744, could hardly have been, in 1709, of the age and rank which Oglethorpe's anecdote seems to imply.' Prendergast, or Prendergrass, in the year 1696, informed the government of the plot to assassinate William III., in which Friend was one of the leaders. Macaulay (Hist. of Eng. chap. 21), calls Prendergrass 'a Roman Catholic gentleman of known courage and honour.' Swift, attacking Prendergast's son, attacks Prendergast himself:--
'What! thou the spawn of him who shamed our isle, Traitor, assassin, and informer vile.'
Swift's Works, xi. 319.
[543] Locke says:--'When once it comes to be a trial of skill, contest for mastery betwixt you and your child, you must be sure to carry it, whatever blows it costs, if a nod or words will not prevail.' He continues:--'A prudent and kind mother of my acquaintance was, on such an occasion, forced to whip her little daughter, at her first coming home from nurse, eight times successively the same morning, before she could master her stubbornness, and obtain a compliance in a very easy and indifferent matter.... As this was the first time, so I think it was the last, too, she ever struck her.' Locke on Education (ed. 1710), p. 96.
[544] Andrew Crosbie, arguing for the schoolmaster, had said:--'Supposing it true that the respondent had been provoked to use a little more severity than he wished to do, it might well be justified on account of the ferocious and rebellious behaviour of his scholars, some of whom cursed and swore at him, and even went so far as to wrestle with him, in which case he was under a necessity of subduing them as he best could.' Scotch Appeal Cases, xvii. p. 214. The judgment of the House of Lords is given in Paton's Reports of Cases upon Appeal from Scotland, ii. 277, as follows:--'A schoolmaster, appointed by the Magistrates and Town Council of Cambelton, without any mention being made as to whether his office was for life or at pleasure: Held that it was a public office, and that he was liable to be dismissed for a just and reasonable cause, and that acts of cruel chastisement of the boys were a justifiable cause for his dismissal; reversing the judgment of the Court of Session.... The proof led before his dismission went to shew that scarce a day passed without some of the scholars coming home with their heads cut, and their bodies discoloured. He beat his pupils with wooden squares, and sometimes with his fists, and used his feet by kicking them, and dragged them by the hair of the head. He had also entered into the trade of cattle grazing and farming--dealt in black cattle--in the shipping business--and in herring fishing.'
[545] These six Methodists were in 1768 expelled St. Edmund's Hall, by the Vice-Chancellor, acting as 'visitor.' Nominally they were expelled for their ignorance; in reality for their active Methodism. That they were 'mighty ignorant fellows' was shown, but ignorance was tolerated at Oxford. One of their number confessed his ignorance, and declined all examination. But 'as he was represented to be a man of fortune, and declared that he was not designed for holy orders, the Vice-Chancellor did not think fit to remove him for this reason only, though he was supposed to be one of "the righteous over-much."' Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics, pp. 51-57. Horace Walpole, Whig though he was, thought as Johnson. 'Oxford,' he wrote (Letters v. 97), 'has begun with these rascals, and I hope Cambridge will wake.'
[546] Much such an expulsion as this Johnson had justified in his Life of Cheynel (Works, vi. 415). 'A temper of this kind,' he wrote, 'is generally inconvenient and offensive in any society, but in a place of education is least to be tolerated ... He may be justly driven from a society, by which he thinks himself too wise to be governed, and in which he is too young to teach, and too opinionative to learn.'
[547] Johnson wrote far otherwise of the indulgence shown to Edmund Smith, the poet.