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However feared and, accordingly, respected an English teacher may be by his scholars, he is nevertheless an ogre to most of them to the aristocrat a plebeian pedagogue to whom he must defer, just as, when he is a little older and sports a scarlet tunic, he must submit to the unlettered sergeant-major who teaches him his goose-step; to the rich parvenu more intolerable still, as the pruner of his obtrusive vulgarities of speech and manner, the index of his social inferiority and the standing menace to his innate rudeness, that is only intensified by his consciousness of wealth; to the poor man's son essentially a "schoolmaster" a wielder of the ferule and a bloodless automaton, to whom, as Southey wrote,
All this was easy enough while John Clare went through his first martial exercises: nothing more simple, while learning the goose-step, than to hold his big trousers with one hand and his tight helmet with the other. But at the end of four weeks, his superiors gave John Clare a gun, and with it came blank despair.
You must have superintended a course of instruction in the goose-step in your day?" "Rather so!" said he. "Very well, then. You are Instructor in Military Exercises in her B.M. Forces! You are all right! Come along!" And if I had said that he was Trumpeter Major of the 600th Regiment in the British Army, it would doubtless have been equally all right. So said, so done!
In unspotted field uniforms, and helmets still without the green-gray canvas service covering, they clattered past the reviewing officers, each right leg coming down with the thumping goose-step salute, until halls and barracks echoed with the staccato tread of thousands of hob-nailed boots.
"I wasn't destined to do much soldiering, however. I had just got past the goose-step, and learned to handle my musket, when I was fool enough to go swimming in the Ganges. Luckily for me, my company sergeant, John Holder, was in the water at the same time, and he was one of the finest swimmers in the service.
Not a game of croquet can be begun, nor a blue ribbon worn instead of a pink one, without maternal interference; so that the bloom is rubbed off every enjoyment, and life becomes reduced to a kind of goose-step, with mamma for the drill-sergeant prescribing the inches to be marked.
Subsequently I discovered that the youngest among them was fifty-four years of age, but the average was between sixty and seventy. The reverend fathers with clasped hands moved precisely as if they were conducting some religious ceremonial among their flocks in their beloved churches. But the pace was too funereal for the advocates of the goose-step.
Pius V, and, most serious of all, the orthodoxy of one of Newman's own essays had appeared to be doubtful. He resigned, and in the anguish of his heart, determined never to write again. One of his friends asked him why he was publishing nothing. 'Hannibal's elephants, he replied, 'never could learn the goose-step. Newman was now an old man he was sixty-three years of age.
The poor proprietor blinked and swallowed hard for a moment and said nothing. The city was literally packed with troops going in all directions. Uhlans, chasseurs, artillery and the infantry, singing and executing that foolish-looking goose-step it probably has its advantages, but at eight A. M. in the pouring rain it did appear ridiculous.
Now the butterfly dance followed the others. This was danced by the boys and girls together, and the pairs were equal in size, age and the color of their garments. When all the dances had ended, the dancers marched out with the goose-step. The willow-spray dancers followed the swallow dancers, and Aduan hastened in advance of his company, while Rose of Evening lingered along after hers.
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