could not be brought into exercise. As pain produces or elicits fortitude
and endurance; difficulty, perseverance; poverty, industry and ingenuity;
danger, courage and what not; so the very virtues, on the other hand,
will generate some vices: and, in fine, Mrs. Pendennis had that vice
which Miss Pybus and Miss Pierce discovered in her, namely, that of
pride; which did not vest itself so much in her own person, as in that of
her family. She spoke about Mr. Pendennis (a worthy little gentleman
enough, but there are others as good as he) with an awful reverence, as
if he had been the Pope of Rome on his throne, and she a cardinal
kneeling at his feet, and giving him incense. The Major she held to be a
sort of Bayard among Majors: and as for her son Arthur she worshipped
that youth with an ardour which the young scapegrace accepted almost as
coolly as the statue of the Saint in Saint Peter's receives the rapturous
osculations which the faithful deliver on his toe.

This unfortunate superstition and idol-worship of this good woman was the
cause of a great deal of the misfortune which befell the young gentleman
who is the hero of this history, and deserves therefore to be mentioned
at the outset of his story.

Arthur Pendennis's schoolfellows at the Greyfriars School state that, as
a boy, he was in no ways remarkable either as a dunce or as a scholar. He
did, in fact, just as much as was required of him, and no more. If he was
distinguished for anything it was for verse-writing: but was his
enthusiasm ever so great, it stopped when he had composed the number of
lines demanded by the regulations (unlike young Swettenham, for instance,
who, with no more of poetry in his composition than Mr. Wakley, yet would
bring up a hundred dreary hexameters to the master after a half-holiday;
or young Fluxmore, who not only did his own verses, but all the fifth
form's besides). He never read to improve himself out of school-hours,