Vivian Grey | Page 7

deputy, and was soon equally detested.
This tyranny had continued through a great part of the long half-year,
and the spirit of the school was almost broken, when a fresh outrage
occurred, of such a nature that the nearly enslaved multitude conspired.
The plot was admirably formed. On the first bell ringing for school, the
door was to be immediately barred, to prevent the entrance of Dallas.
Instant vengeance was then to be taken on Mallett and his
companion--the sneak! the spy! the traitor! The bell rang: the door was
barred: four stout fellows seized on Mallett, four rushed to Vivian Grey:

but stop: he sprang upon his desk, and, placing his back against the
wall, held a pistol at the foremost: "Not an inch nearer, Smith, or I fire.
Let me not, however, baulk your vengeance on yonder hound: if I could
suggest any refinements in torture, they would be at your service."
Vivian Grey smiled, while the horrid cries of Mallett indicated that the
boys were "roasting" him. He then walked to the door and admitted the
barred-out Dominie. Silence was restored. There was an explanation
and no defence; and Vivian Grey was expelled.
CHAPTER VI
Vivian was now seventeen; and the system of private education having
so decidedly failed, it was resolved that he should spend the years
antecedent to his going to Oxford at home. Nothing could be a greater
failure than the first weeks of his "course of study." He was perpetually
violating the sanctity of the drawing-room by the presence of Scapulas
and Hederics, and outraging the propriety of morning visitors by
bursting into his mother's boudoir with lexicons and slippers.
"Vivian, my dear," said his father to him one day, "this will never do;
you must adopt some system for your studies, and some locality for
your reading. Have a room to yourself; set apart certain hours in the
day for your books, and allow no consideration on earth to influence
you to violate their sacredness; and above all, my dear boy, keep your
papers in order. I find a dissertation on 'The Commerce of Carthage'
stuck in my large paper copy of 'Dibdin's Decameron,' and an 'Essay on
the Metaphysics of Music' (pray, my dear fellow, beware of magazine
scribbling) cracking the back of Montfaucon's 'Monarchie.'"
Vivian apologised, promised, protested, and finally sat down "TO
READ." He had laid the foundations of accurate classical knowledge
under the tuition of the learned Dallas; and twelve hours a day and
self-banishment from society overcame, in twelve months, the ill
effects of his imperfect education. The result of this extraordinary
exertion may be conceived. At the end of twelve months, Vivian, like
many other young enthusiasts, had discovered that all the wit and
wisdom of the world were concentrated in some fifty antique volumes,

and he treated the unlucky moderns with the most sublime spirit of
hauteur imaginable. A chorus in the Medea, that painted the radiant sky
of Attica, disgusted him with the foggy atmosphere of Great Britain;
and while Mrs. Grey was meditating a visit to Brighton, her son was
dreaming of the gulf of Salamis. The spectre in the Persae was his only
model for a ghost, and the furies in the Orestes were his perfection of
tragical machinery.
Most ingenious and educated youths have fallen into the same error,
but few have ever carried such feelings to the excess that Vivian Grey
did; for while his mind was daily becoming more enervated under the
beautiful but baneful influence of Classic Reverie, the youth lighted
upon PLATO.
Wonderful is it that while the whole soul of Vivian Grey seemed
concentrated and wrapped in the glorious pages of the Athenian; while,
with keen and almost inspired curiosity, he searched, and followed up,
and meditated upon, the definite mystery, the indefinite development;
while his spirit alternately bowed in trembling and in admiration, as he
seemed to be listening to the secrets of the Universe revealed in the
glorious melodies of an immortal voice; wonderful is it, I say, that the
writer, the study of whose works appeared to the young scholar, in the
revelling of his enthusiasm, to be the sole object for which man was
born and had his being, was the cause by which Vivian Grey was saved
from being all his life a dreaming scholar.
Determined to spare no exertions, and to neglect no means, by which
he might enter into the very penetralia of his mighty master's meaning,
Vivian determined to attack the latter Platonists. These were a race of
men, of whose existence he knew merely by the references to their
productions which were sprinkled in the commentaries of his "best
editions." In the pride of boyish learning, Vivian had limited his library
to Classics, and the proud leaders of the