ancestress in the court of Elizabeth, the very Virgin Queen of Blues;
and under her guidance Master Verdant was dragged with painful
diligence through the first steps of the road that was to take him to
Parnassus. It was a great sight to see her sitting stiff and
straight, - with her wonderfully undeceptive "false front" of
(somebody else's) black hair, graced on either side by four
sausage-looking curls, - as, with spectacles on nose and dictionary in
hand, she instructed her nephew in those ingenuous arts which should
soften his manners, and not permit him to be brutal. And, when they
together entered upon the romantic page of Virgil (which was the
extent of her classical reading), nothing would delight her more than
to declaim their sonorous Arma-virumque-cano lines, where the
intrinsic qualities of the verse surpassed the quantities that she
gave to them.

Fain would Miss Virginia have made Virgil the end and aim of an
educational existence, and so have kept her pupil entirely under her
own care; but, alas! she knew nothing further; she had no
acquaintance with Greek, and she had never flirted with Euclid; and
the rector persuaded Mr. Green that these were indispensable to a
boy's education. So, when Mr. Verdant Green was (in stable language)
"rising" sixteen, he went thrice a week to the Rectory, where Mr.
Larkyns bestowed upon him a couple of hours, and taught him to
conjugate {tupto}, and get over the ~Pons Asinorum~. Mr. Larkyns
found his pupil not a particularly brilliant scholar, but he was a
plodding one; and though he learned slowly, yet the little he did
learn was learned well.

Thus the Rectory and the home studies went hand and hand, and
continued so, with but little interruption, for more than two years;