became a great personage, and Lord Monmouth's man.

Mr. Rigby, who liked to be doing a great many things at the same time, and
to astonish the Tadpoles and Tapers with his energetic versatility,
determined to superintend the education of Coningsby. It was a relation
which identified him with the noble house of his pupil, or, properly
speaking, his charge: for Mr. Rigby affected rather the graceful dignity
of the governor than the duties of a tutor. The boy was recalled from his
homely, rural school, where he had been well grounded by a hard-working
curate, and affectionately tended by the curate's unsophisticated wife. He
was sent to a fashionable school preparatory to Eton, where he found about
two hundred youths of noble families and connections, lodged in a
magnificent villa, that had once been the retreat of a minister,
superintended by a sycophantic Doctor of Divinity, already well beneficed,
and not despairing of a bishopric by favouring the children of the great
nobles. The doctor's lady, clothed in cashmeres, sometimes inquired after
their health, and occasionally received a report as to their linen.

Mr. Rigby had a classical retreat, not distant from this establishment,
which he esteemed a Tusculum. There, surrounded by his busts and books, he
wrote his lampoons and articles; massacred a she liberal (it was thought
that no one could lash a woman like Rigby), cut up a rising genius whose
politics were different from his own, or scarified some unhappy wretch who
had brought his claims before parliament, proving, by garbled extracts
from official correspondence that no one could refer to, that the
malcontent instead of being a victim, was, on the contrary, a defaulter.
Tadpole and Taper would back Rigby for a 'slashing reply' against the
field. Here, too, at the end of a busy week, he found it occasionally
convenient to entertain a clever friend or two of equivocal reputation,
with whom he had become acquainted in former days of equal brotherhood. No