Note E — CRITICAL STRICTURES, &c.
Reading edition
(P. 22) "... a Simile of a Bundle of Twigs formed into a Rod ... Mr. Malloch's original Profession ..." Garrick's epilogue to Elvira contains the following lines:
A single critick will not frown, look big, Harmless and pliant as a single twig, But crouded here they change, and 'tis not odd, For twigs when bundled up, become a rod.
One of Mallet's duties, when he was janitor of the High School of Edinburgh, had been to assist in the floggings, either by applying the instrument of punishment himself (see LJ, p. 209) or by lifting the boys up on his back at the command of tollatur and exposing the proper portion of their anatomy to the master's birch (John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, Blackwood, Edinburgh and London, 1888, i. 24 n.)