occupation as a pedagogue, Dominie Sampson. He was of low birth,
but having evinced, even from his cradle, an uncommon seriousness
of disposition, the poor parents were encouraged to hope that
their bairn, as they expressed it, 'might wag his pow in a pulpit
yet.' With an ambitious view to such a consummation, they pinched
and pared, rose early and lay down late, ate dry bread and drank
cold water, to secure to Abel the means of learning. Meantime, his
tall, ungainly figure, his taciturn and grave manners, and some
grotesque habits of swinging his limbs and screwing his visage
while reciting his task, made poor Sampson the ridicule of all his
school-companions. The same qualities secured him at Glasgow
College a plentiful share of the same sort of notice. Half the
youthful mob of 'the yards' used to assemble regularly to see
Dominie Sampson (for he had already attained that honourable
title) descend the stairs from the Greek class, with his lexicon
under his arm, his long misshapen legs sprawling abroad, and
keeping awkward time to the play of his immense shoulder-blades,
as they raised and depressed the loose and threadbare black coat
which was his constant and only wear. When he spoke, the efforts
of the professor (professor of divinity though he was) were
totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of
the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long,
sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared
not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and
hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner
man, the harsh and dissonant voice, and the screech-owl notes to
which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more
distinctly,--all added fresh subject for mirth to the torn cloak
and shattered shoe, which have afforded legitimate subjects of
raillery against the poor scholar from Juvenal's time downward. It