This boy had been expelled from one of the most ill-managed schools in Ireland, although, of course, the fact had been most treacherously concealed from the authorities at Roslyn; and now he was let loose, without warning or caution, among the Roslyn boys.
Better for them if their gates had been open to the pestilence! the pestilence could but have killed the body, but this boy--this fore-front fighter in the devil's battle--did ruin many an immortal soul.

He systematically, from the very first, called evil good and good evil, put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

He openly threw aside the admission of any one moral obligation.

Never did some of the Roslyn boys, to their dying day, forget the deep, intolerable, unfathomable flood of moral turpitude and iniquity which he bore with him; a flood, which seemed so irresistible, and the influence of such boys as Montagu and Owen to stay its onrush seemed as futile as the weight of a feather to bar the fury of a mountain stream.

Eric might have done much, Duncan might have done much, to aid the better cause, had they tried; but they resisted at first but faintly, and then not at all, until they too were swept away in the broadening tide of degeneracy and sin.
Big, burly, and strong, though much younger than he looked (if he stated his age correctly, which I doubt), Brigson, being low in the school, naturally became the bully and the Coryphaeus of all the lower forms--the bully if they opposed him, the Coryphaeus if they accepted his guidance.