"'Twas for all the world," he began, "like a cut
across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood--gave it a
suck, wrapt it up, and thought no more about it.... The story you told
me of Tristram's pretended tutor this morning"--(the scandal was, that
Warburton had been threatened with caricature in the next volume of
the novel, under the guise of the hero's tutor)--"this vile story, I
say, though I then saw both how and where it wounded, I felt little
from it at first, or, to speak more honestly (though it ruins my
simile), I felt a great deal of pain from it, but affected an air,
usual in such accidents, of feeling less than I had." And he goes on
to repudiate, it will be observed, not so much the moral offence of
corruption, in receiving money to spare Warburton, as the intellectual
solecism of selecting him for ridicule. "What the devil!" he
exclaims, "is there no one learned blockhead throughout the schools
of misapplied science in the Christian world to make a tutor of for
my Tristram--are we so run out of stock that there is no one
lumber-headed, muddle-headed, mortar-headed, pudding-head chap amongst
our doctors.
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