Walter Scott

Old Mortality Walter Scott

"Most readers," says the Manuscript of Mr Pattieson, "must have witnessed with delight thejoyous burst which attends the dismissing of a village-school on a fine summer evening. Thebuoyant spirit of childhood, repressed with so much difficulty during the tedious hours of discipline, may then be seen to explode, as it were, in shout, and song, and frolic, as the little urchins join ingroups on their play-ground, and arrange their matches of sport for the evening. But there is oneindividual who partakes of the relief afforded by the moment of dismission, whose feelings are notso obvious to the eye of the spectator, or so apt to receive his sympathy. I mean the teacher himself, who, stunned with the hum, and suffocated with the closeness of his school-room, has spent thewhole day (himself against a host) in controlling petulance, exciting indifference to action, striving toenlighten stupidity, and labouring to soften obstinacy; and whose very powers of intellect have beenconfounded by hearing the same dull lesson repeated a hundred times by rote, and only varied bythe various blunders of the reciters. Even the flowers of classic genius, with which his solitary fancyis most gratified, have been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by their connexion with tears, with errors, and with punishment; so that the Eclogues of Virgil and Odes of Horace are eachinseparably allied in association with the sullen figure and monotonous recitation of someblubbering school-boy. If to these mental distresses are added a delicate frame of body, and a mindambitious of some higher distinction than that of being the tyrant of childhood, the reader may havesome slight conception of the relief which a solitary walk, in the cool of a fine summer evening, affords to the head which has ached, and the nerves which have been shattered, for so many hours, in plying the irksome task of public instru