WAYSIDE
THOUGHTS
LB
41
T47
ARCY W.THOMPSON
VILLIAM P NIMMO
A 58216 1
WAYSIDE THOUGHTS
D'ARCY W. THOMPSON.

ARTES
1837.
SCIENTIA
VERITAS
LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
E-PLURIBUS UNUM
TUEBOR
SI QUAERIS PENINSULAM AMOENAM
CIRCUMSPICE


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Return to shelf though worn.
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LB
T47
WAYSIDE THOUGHTS.
學
​:

1
183-81
WAYSIDE THOUGHTS;
BEING A SERIES OF DESULTORY ESSAYS
ON EDUCATION;
BY
D'ARCY W. THOMPSON,
AUTHOR OF DAY-DREAMS OF A SCHOOLMASTER,'
ETC. ETC.
SALES ATTICI,
Ητοι τὸ θρέψαι γ' ἐν βροτοῖσι πολλάκις
πλείω πορίζει φίλτρα τοῦ φῦσαι τέκνα.
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM P. NIM. M, O.
1-868.
A

LB
41
T47
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH,
PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE.

ΤΟ
MR. JOHN AMERY LOWELL,
AN ENEMY TO PREJUDICĖ,
A FRIEND OF PROGRESS AND ENLIGHTENMENT,
THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS,
READ BY REQUEST
AT THE
THE LOWELL INSTITUTE, BOSTON, U.S.,
ARE RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED BY
THE AUTHOR.
1
CONTENTS.
I. INTRODUCTORY ESSAY,
2. SCHOOL MEMORIES,
3. COLLEGE Memories,
4. A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES,
5. OUR HOME CIVILISATION,
6. WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? .
7. YOUTH AND College,
8. BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL,
4
9. CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY,
10. GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD, AND HOME,
II. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY,
12. MANHOOD AND THE WORLD,
PAGE
I
34
84
II2
•
148
179
209
232
266
•
301
328
354
:
I.
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

ERFECT culture is fourfold: physical,
mental, moral, and spiritual; and it
is a holy thing, as being absolutely
requisite for the full and comprehensive under-
standing of God's infinitely manifold revela-
tions. A child in earliest infancy demands
our undivided attention for the healthy nurture
of his body; by and by, with no relaxation
of our previous care, we may employ his senses.
—his eyes especially—to aid us in conveying
mental impressions to his brain; gradually
and imperceptibly, with no relaxation of our
physical and mental training, we may bring
home to our little charge simple and elementary
rules of conduct and duty, drawn from his own
or from alien rights to boy-properties and from
the varied claims of the human or brute crea-
tures around him to reverence, obedience, love,
A
2
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
courtesy, kindness, and pity; and, finally, with
a continuous development of our physical, mental,
and moral culture, we may use the analogous
relationships of parent, brother, sister, and com-
panion, to lift up and expand the thoughts of
the child to the conception of the stupendous
but simple truths, that there is an universal
Father, and that all mankind are brethren.
Thus our training, at its commencement, is
partial and simple; as months or years ad-
vance, it becomes more and more complex; as
new faculties come into play, new material on
which to act must be supplied; as the faculties
develop, the material must be increased or
strengthened; when the organism is complete,
we must furnish a training perfect in its four
divisions, if we would secure for coming manhood
the inestimable blessing of a mens sana in corpore
sano.
By the exclusive development of his physical
powers a man will degenerate into animalism.
Mental speculations, carried on exclusively, or
for their intrinsic rather than their relative values,
are apt to fritter into subtle and impracticable
problems. The mental discipline of scientific
ethics must be called in to correct or supplement
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
3
:
the warping influences of convention, and to tone
down the extravagancies of sentiment. The over-
developed spiritualism of a few is seldom fraught
with advantage, is nearly always fraught with
peril, to the many. It is a grand thing to be
strong and healthy; it is a grander thing to be
refined and wise; it is grander still to be good.
and holy; but the grandest of all conditions is
to be at once healthy and wise and good. Such
a trebly-blest condition may be impossible of
achievement, or may be possible only for a
favoured few. It is the goal, however, towards.
which in the race of life every man is bound to
press forward. Nay, more; so peculiar are the
regulations of our race-course, that each one
competitor is bound to halt betimes and assist
to the utmost all other competitors within his
reach; and the joy and profit of victory to every
one winner is multiplied and intensified by the
numbers of those who share it with him.
Could we live perfectly isolated lives, we might
expect to find the boundaries of free action so
far extended as to admit of every man's being
dirty, or miserable, or idle, or ignorant, according
to his taste; but we are gregarious beings, and
cannot by any effort attain to independence.
4
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
Poverty is allowed to fester in the foul alleys of
our great, overcrowded cities; and the poor man
dies, and oftentimes in dying exacts, all uncon-
sciously, a terrible retribution. The typhoid
fevers that here and there have taken up a per-
manent abode are the gloomy but appropriate
mementoes of suffering poverty and neglectful
wealth. Do we-industrious, well-to-do, well-
educated, respectable people-read with dis-
may concerning the prevalence in this or that
neighbouring district of idleness, misery, crime,
ignorance, or discontent? Let us, then, take
ourselves to task, and consider whether, to teach
ourselves more comfortably, we have closed the
school-door against our poorer brethren; whether,
to mount more rapidly or comfortably the social
ladder, we have kicked in the face our neighbour
as he followed; whether, to warm ourselves or
our young ones, we have robbed alien nests of
their twigs and straw. Of this we may be
sure, that wherever in a land we find idleness,
ignorance, vice, or discontent to prevail, either
separately or conjointly, there is a sin in that
land. We may not say with certainty, 'It is
here,' or, 'It is there;' but we can say with ab-
solute certainty, 'It is in the land somewhere ;'
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
5
20
and we may presume that the responsibility for
the sin rests with individual or class in exact
proportion to his or its share of social influence
and mental enlightenment.
Nor are we interconnected only man with
man, neighbour with neighbour, countryman
with countryman. The wars in one hemisphere
may carry famine into districts of the other,
and filthy fanatics in an Arabian desert may
set disease undulating to the shores of western
Europe. We are slowly opening our eyes to
the foolishness and short-sightedness of com-
mercial jealousies, local or international; we
are appreciating more and more the truth, that
the prosperity and enlightenment of others, even
though they be not our nearest neighbours, is,
directly or indirectly, our own gain. We are
found, in short, to be constituted by Nature's
own ordinance each man his brother's keeper;
and, in order to mind rightly our own business,
we are compelled to mind the business of other
people.
It is self-evident that a community gains by
the physical healthiness of its individual mem-
bers; it is equally self-evident that its happiness
is increased by every rise in the aggregate mo-
6
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
rality; and it would appear at first sight almost
equally evident that, to ensure such obviously
desirable results, the best method were to dis-
seminate sound and useful knowledge. Indeed,
it would appear that no community could shrink
from the imperative duty of scattering broadcast
such knowledge, without peril or detriment to
itself. Where, then, are we to fix the boundary-
line between social interference and individual
free-will? How are we to define and limit that
sound and useful knowledge which we are all
bound to take when offered us, and which, in
turn, we are bound to communicate to our neigh-
bours?
Perfect culture we defined as fourfold; but of
its four divisions one is of a composite nature,
and its constituent parts may be made to amal-
gamate with two of the others. Thus, there is a
morality of convention or imitation which is ex-
cellent in its effects, but, from the spontaneity of
its growth, deserving neither of praise nor blame;
there is a morality, drawn from experiment or
reflection, also excellent in itself, and usually
most commendable; and there is also a morality
of sentiment, akin to spiritualism, which may
soar to a sublimity of self-sacrifice and philan-
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
7
嘛
​thropy beyond the reach of scientific morality
to follow, or may sink to depths of absurdity
unfathomable to common sense. Conventional
morality, as being founded on almost intuitive.
observation, and scientific ethics, as being drawn
from experiment and thought, may come within
the scope of mental training; and the morality
of sentiment may be included in the spiritual
division; and we may now re-define complete
and perfect culture as threefold — physical,
mental, and spiritual.
Man lives for two worlds-—a present and a
future; with regard to the world of time, he is a
social being; with regard to that of eternity, an
unit. The claims upon him of neither world are
paramount. The twofold duties of actuality
and aspiration may be likened to two separate
and distinct plants whose stems are so inter-
twined that, if one plant be removed, the other
will fall to the ground and wither away.
In a country whose inhabitants are semi-
barbarous, or suffering from the pressure of alien
and unequal laws, or where the religion of one
class is permissively insulted by the religion of
another, the patriot may be wholesomely com-
bined with the ecclesiastic, as has been exem-
8
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
:
plified in the records of Scottish and Irish
history; but in a land striving constitutionally
after equality, with no violently disturbing alien
intermixture, as is the case with England, and in
a land wherein, as in America, the equality of all
men as citizens and absolute toleration in reli-
gion are elementary maxims, the statesman that,
in his capacity of statesman, would overleap
a spiritual boundary, should be held guilty of
sacrilege, and a fool to boot; and the ecclesiastic
that, in his official capacity, would intrude upon
secular domains, should, in all cases, be held
guilty of at least moral trespass. In lands thus
favourably conditioned it would appear to be
the duty of the state to interfere in the physical
and mental training of its childhood, boyhood,
and youth; whereas the spiritual training of
these latter would be the exclusive business of
parents and guardians, and of their specially
authorized ecclesiastical delegates; and the
spiritual development of a grown man would
be his own business entirely, and into this field
of culture the outer community could only then
have a just plea of entry, when spiritualism,
waxing morbid, scandalously defied universally
current conventionalities, or, with a mischievous,
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
9
though honestly-intentioned perversity, threw
obstacles in the obvious path of human pro-
gress.
While advocating state-interference in educa-
tion, we would deprecate an interference so
extensive as would destroy all individual free
action. The importance of wisely directing this
domestic institution is, undoubtedly, not inferior
to that of duly watching the course of foreign
affairs; but we should not desire that direction
to be carried as far as was done of late by a
French minister of education, who could state.
that, at one particular moment, the lads in every
public school of France were repeating one and
the same lesson. The addition of a minister of
education to our own Government would be an
incalculable blessing, if, for a while, his duties
were limited to the protection of the health and
morals of young children against the ignorance
and immorality of ignorant and immoral parents;
to the enforcement of elementary instruction in
reading, writing, and arithmetic upon every boy
in the empire; to the exaction of certificates of
instruction in the elementary laws that regulate
mental and physical health from all clergymen,
schoolmasters, and governesses, and in the ele-
ΙΟ
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
ments of agriculture and political economy from
all heirs or purchasers succeeding to, or entering
upon, any estate, the extent or populousness of
which might render its right management a
matter of public moment. In other words, we
would advocate state-interference, not for cut-
ting and clipping what were moderately good in
any systems in operation, but to extrude what
were radically bad, and supply what were con-
fessedly necessary. And we might venture to
assert that a minister of education would almost
in all cases need the co-operation and sympathy
of ecclesiastics, and that this general co-operation
could only be secured where religious equality
prevailed. At the same time, ecclesiastical
interference in matters purely secular should
be sternly interdicted. Indeed, the ecclesiastic
stands in a singular trio of relationships towards
free mental culture; his favouring unofficious
sympathy would operate refreshingly, like a
soft and penetrating rain; his hostility acts as
a drag upon the wheel of a carriage going up-
hill; his supremacy performs the office of an
extinguisher.
If we wandered back in imagination to a very
remote antiquity, we should probably find that
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
I I
the qualities of the hunter were the subject-
matter of all training; by and by, pastoral and
nomad life would intervene; a rude and simple
agriculture, united with a more settled pastoral
life, would follow; clustering villages would form
for mutual protection against beasts and men of
prey; villages would expand into towns; towns
would be amalgamated into petty kingdoms by
military adventurers; petty kingdoms would be
united into empires; and all this while the civilisa-
tion of mankind would be widening and rising.
The dog, the ox, the ass, and the horse would
be domesticated; corn and wine would vary a
simple fare; fire would be used for the prepara-
tion of food and the smelting of a few metals;
the indefinite relationships of clan or tribe would
concentre into the more specific and more
humanizing relationships of the family; the rude
foundations of special, municipal, and imperial
law would be laid; religion would rise from the
rude worship of logs, stones, charms, and amu-
lets, to the adoration of the visible phenomena
of Nature; minstrels and priests would spin in-
extricable allegories; misunderstood allegories
would scatter broadcast innumerable supersti-
tions; and impossible representatives of natural
12
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
慑
​phenomena would be invoked by uninquiring
votaries.
During these ages, all teaching, moral and
mental, would be oral; the tent, the family hearth,
or the public market-place would be the school-
room; the enthusiasm of each succeeding gene-
ration would be kept alive by the recited sayings
and exploits of bygone sages and warriors; and
the most accomplished teacher would be he that
could chant the longest ballad, and repeat the
longest string of moral or utilitarian proverbs.
And the wisdom of such a teacher and the value
of his simple lessons should not be lightly
esteemed by the sharers of a more complete
civilisation. The ballad poetry of these simple
times would possess a freshness that would after-
wards be recovered only by geniuses of the
highest order; and men would discuss with a
singular clearness the problems of domestic and
social life in times when there was so little of
extraneous matter to divert attention.
From the general knowledge we possess of the
various systems of training or education pursued
by nations more or less civilised between the
dawn of history and the commencement of our
own epoch, we are warranted in inferring that
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
13
the systems previously in vogue were practical,
sensible, and explicable in all cases by inherent
and surrounding circumstances; that children
would be trained by a hunter to use the bow and
follow the track of beasts; by a shepherd, to
manage flocks and herds; by a smith, to work in
iron, tin, copper, silver, and gold; by a warrior,
to athletic exercises and the skilful use of arms;
by the minstrel, to cultivate the memory and to
play upon a stringed instrument; by a priest, to
a right understanding of parables dimly under-
stood by the outer world; and lastly, that some
amount of skill in music and dancing with a
limited knowledge of religious and romantic
legend would be communicated to all in com-
mon. And we have not the slightest reason for
presuming that the practical instruction in any
one single case would be communicated in any
other than the local vulgar tongue. At all
events, there is no one authentically recorded
instance of any ancient community wherein a
boy or youth would be taught to speak and
reason by the instrumentality of a language
never spoken by his teacher, and unintelligible
to his countrymen, to his neighbours, to his
kinsfolk, and to himself.
14
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
Among the ancient Hebrews a child in his
nursery would hear his mother sing the sweet
songs of Zion, would learn from her lips the
varied story of his people's sufferings and glories,
and through boyhood and youth he would learn
from father and from elder the maxims of
morality, the legal enactments, the ceremonial
ordinances, the religious doctrines, that had been
transmitted, orally or in writing, from a far dis-
tant ancestry. He would learn how to demon-
strate his love towards the brethren, his charity
and courtesy to the alien within his gates, his
tenderness towards the brute creation, from the
vivifying utterances of the aged and the wise.
For a Hebrew father was strictly enjoined to
expound these things to his children; they were
to be bound as a sign upon his hand, as a hem
to his robe, as a frontlet between his eyes; the
doorposts and gateways of his dwelling were not
of dumb wood, but with graven characters ad-
monished his children and himself, in their goings
out and their comings in, of their religion and
their nationality. O gentle English readers, in
the days of our forefathers were there no wise
men, no legislators, no prophets, no singers of
divine songs? In our own days are there none
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
15
amongst us to tell of bird and beast and creeping
thing; of trees and plants, from the cedar of Li-
banus to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall?
Have we no treasured wisdom of our own growth
to carry about with us as a familiar thing, and to
talk of with our little ones, as we sit with them
at table, as we walk with them by the way?
We have on record a notable history of one
instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.
From testimonies, direct and indirect, sacred and
profane, we should infer that such wisdom would,
indeed, be selfishly confined to a caste, that it
would too often be employed as an instrument
for acting with effect upon the ignorance of the
uninitiated; but that, apart from certain religious
mysteries, it would be conversant with things
practical; with the observed motions of heavenly
bodies; with the habits and uses of certain
birds, and beasts, and reptiles; with land measure-
ment, agriculture, architecture, and legislation.
Upon the walls of ancient Nineveh are still
visibly engraven-so travellers inform us the
records of grammatical and astronomical science.
Centuries before the historic period of Greece,
the learned of India had dissected their own
sacred language of the Vedas with more of ana-
16
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
tomical skill and industry than the learning of
modern times has even yet brought to bear upon.
the superstitiously cultivated languages of Greece
and Rome.
Of the Hellenic nations, the Lacedæmonians
for two noteworthy reasons are deserving our
special admiration. Woman, who in other and
more intellectually refined cities of Greece was
either a despised drudge or a petted plaything,
was in Sparta the teacher of children, the com-
panion, friend, and equal of man. Furthermore,
the native sagacity of this people, quickened by
the difficulties of their position, led them to
bestow unusual care upon the training of child-
hood and boyhood. This all-important period
of life seems with their neighbours to have been
almost universally undervalued and neglected;
and practically with these latter it was with
setting youth or dawning manhood that life
worth the name began. Not so in Lacedæmon;
the public meals, the sacred dance, the mimic
array of war, the hymn chanted in chorus at
the altar, the procession in the streets, the
reverence exacted by old age,—all would com-
bine to instil an early sense of co-operation and
duty and responsibility, to indurate the heart by
}
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
17
desuetude against considerations purely selfish,
and to mould it by habit and association to a
keen susceptivity of generous impulses and an
almost spontaneous proclivity to self-denial and
self-sacrifice.
My own lot is cast in a city in the streets of
which are daily seen strolling, lolling, and sprawl-
ing an apparently countless multitude of little
children. A stranger coming suddenly amongst
us would imagine that the metropolis of the island
had flooded us with an excursion train, crammed
with her youngest, poorest, raggedest, dirtiest,
merriest. It would be worth our while to take
a lesson from ancient Sparta, and with the
aid of fife music and measured movements in
child battalions to impress these purposeless
ragamuffins with a sense of order, obedience, and
co-operation. Indeed, such lessons would be
equally valuable to the better regulated children
of our wealthier classes. Regular troops would
ere long be superfluous for the protection of
Great Britain, if her children and boys and
youths went through drill as a compulsory part
of their training; and, if every grown man of
sound health could make an intelligent use of a
rifle, alone or in the ranks, there would be an
B
18
INTRODUCTORY, ESSAY.
universal sense of independence and citizenhood,
such as would doubtless disperse and clear away
a variety of cobwebs social and political.
And now I remember that, long ago, in a walk
through the streets of old Dunedin, I met a band
of little fellows marching two and two, all fife in
hand, with a drummer at their head. They were
the waifs and strays of society. From alleys,
lanes, and closes, from the waysides and the
hedges, had been gathered in these little human
weeds. By the beautiful and unseen coercion of
philanthropy they had been drawn into their
schoolrooms. They were now out upon a holiday
ramble, and were learning a lesson of good order
in their hours of leisure and in the midst of
merriment. My heart went with the urchins as
they tramped along. It is true the fifes were a
little shrill, and the drummer seemed possessed
by the very Genius of noise; but to the ears of
my understanding the music seemed to tell of
the crooked that was being made straight, of the
rough places that were being made smooth, and
of waste places that were being robbed of their
desolation. And here I would respectfully sug-
gest that the Jesuit Fathers, in whose hands is
vested the responsibility of teaching in my own
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
19
city of Galway, might profitably take a hint
from their Presbyterian brethren. They have
abundance of child-material at hand; they have
abundance of Christian charity in their hearts.
I would willingly assist them in the schoolroom, if
they would accept the aid of a heretic; I would
gladly spend a summer's day walking by their
child-squadrons, and would listen with feelings
of gratitude and reverence as the children at
eventide sang some hymn or canticle hallowed
by their own immemorial religion.
To return to Hellas, from which I have inad-
vertently wandered. In other Grecian states
than Sparta childhood would be passed under
the care of women; and Grecian women would
there be but little fitted to lay the first founda-
tions of an intellectual or a manly training. Men
of wealth and position would employ a some-
thing between a male nurse and a foster-father
to superintend their boys; but from tutor, nurse,
or mother an ordinary Greek child would learn
little but an unconscious familiarity with his own.
exquisite language, and a string of impossible
and fantastic stories, such as were imbedded in a
then unintelligible mythology and would meet
him in after-life as the subject-matter of lyric
20
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
verse, comedy, tragedy, painting, and sculpture.
The teaching, however, for all its quaintness and
fantasticality, was still practical, as being homo-
geneous with the civilisation into which he was
destined by and by to enter.
The teaching of an Athenian lad would pro-
bably be confined to numeration, elementary
mental arithmetic, elementary geometry with
its figures traced on sand; the committal to
memory of battle scenes from Homer, of favourite
lyrics, and of passages selected from tragedies
on account of their proverb-wisdom or their
undramatic but graphic and elocutionary charac-
teristics.
It was only in youth or early manhood that
the higher culture was enjoyed in such cities
as Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Rhodes. The
son of a father of independent means would
frequent the gymnasium to develop his muscular
powers; would learn dancing and music for the
attainment of corporeal and mental grace; would
attend the class-room of a fashionable rhetorician
to acquire fluency of utterance, correctness and
elegance of expression, turns and twists of ora-
tory, and facility in debate; and eventually
would follow the lectures of some distinguished
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
2I
philosopher, and would hear discussed-always
with ingenuity, if not always with effect-the
ethical relationships of man to man, the charac-
teristics of varied polities, the end and object of
human endeavour, the mysterious co-existence of
good and evil, the nature of man, the immor-
tality of the soul, the existence or non-existence
of God. Much of what he would hear would
seem as desultory arrows shot from a large
circumference; but every arrow would be aimed
inwards, either at or towards the centre of prac-
tical utility, and no arrow would be shot out into
space blindly and at nothing.
Making due allowances for the limited field
of ancient mental research, an Athenian youth
might be considered as comparatively more
broadly and wholesomely instructed than the
majority of modern academic students. Physi-
cal training, elocutionary grace, and debating
skill are little, if at all, heeded in the universities
of Scotland and Germany, or in the university
to which I myself now belong. In the wealthy
universities of Cambridge and Dublin the most
valuable prizes are monopolized by the students
of pure ancient classics and pure mathematics.
At Oxford, a somewhat more generous pabulum
22
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
"
is given, and logic and ethics are held in esteem;
but in all these three great academies, science,
social, political, legal, and physical, is either
regarded as subsidiary or omitted altogether.
The chief characteristic of modern education
is the predominance of the grammatical and
linguistic element-and that, too, only partially
applied, and the partial or absolute exclusion
of other obviously useful and indispensable
branches of knowledge. This system of instruc-
tion, now anachronistically strait-waistcoated,
is more than two thousand years of age. It
had its rise in Alexandria, in the centuries im-
mediately preceding our era, at a period when,
owing to the Macedonian conquests, the Greek
language had spread over the eastern world,
and when in that language all the intellectual
treasures of the world were contained. The
works that here would influence most power-
fully the minds of students and teachers would
be the speculations of Plato, the logical, ethical,
and physical treatises of Aristotle, and, what
were probably of still greater value, the mathe-
matical investigations of Aristarchus, Eratos-
thenes, Hipparchus the disputant with Aris-
totle for the grand title of 'wisest and greatest,'——
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
23
and, in much later days, of the Ptolemy whose
name is more familiarly on our lips, and whose
speculations and collections were the scientific
encyclopædia of Europe for some fifteen hundred
years. For the use of foreigners Greek gram-
marians invented means of facilitating the study
of their own intricate tongue by improving upon
ancient typography, by separating the words
upon the printed or written page, by devising
stops and accentual signs, and by drawing up
codes of right or fashionable speech. The sys-
tem was only amplified when, in the chief pro-
vincial cities of the Roman empire, the language
and literature of the imperial city would be
additional ingredients in the education of literary
and professional men. But still, during the times
of the early Cæsars, the schools of York, Lyons,
Marseilles, Cordova, Naples, Syracuse, Athens,
Rhodes, and Alexandria would all be in keep-
ing and harmony with an actual outer-lying
civilisation. The student and the man would
breathe the same mental atmosphere; on the
part of teachers there would be no years wasted
in the vain endeavour to teach little fish to fly
and little birds to swim.
Indeed, the reasons which justified the limited
24
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
educational curriculum of a young Roman student
are as obvious as the reasons which condemn
the like limitation in our own times. A young
patrician in the days of Tiberius would hear
treated in his own language the elements of law
and statesmanship; but in almost every depart-
ment of theoretic and speculative learning it
would be impossible for him, by any ambitious
stretch of intellectual effort, to push beyond the
limits of Greek thought. The higher literature
of his own country numbered less than a score
of names.
He might have read the comedies of
Plautus and Terence, the historic fragments of
Sallust, the campaigns of Julius Cæsar, some few
of the 500 volumes of encyclopædic Varro, many
of the speeches and general treatises of Cicero,
the picturesque historic-novel of Livy, the poems
entire of Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Pro-
pertius, and Tibullus, and, perhaps, the few satires
of cotemporary Persius. But of these writers
only Cæsar, Varro, and Persius were thoroughly
Roman; and even the latter of these was writing
in a borrowed metre. Plautus and Terence had
stolen plots and metres wholesale from Athenian
comedy; Sallust was a poor imitator of the
terse and philosophic Thucydides; Cicero had
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
25
gathered showy but not invaluable gleanings
from Greek philosophy; Lucretius was indebted
to Empedocles and Epicurus for his philosophy;
Virgil to Homer for his story; Hellenic mytho-
logy had kindled the fancy of Ovid; Horace
was an imitator of Alcæus and Sappho; and
every metre of every one of the Roman poets
was Hellenic. Greek, occasionally, would be the
language used by the rhetorician in enunciating
rules of grammar, or stratagems of oratory, or
tricks of elocution. Greek would invariably be
the language spoken in the lecture-room, the
garden, or the portico, when by a grave and
dogmatic teacher the various claims were weighed
of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Chrysippus.
Our student, in a sentimental mood, would ad-
dress Greek anacreontics to a real or imaginary
mistress; in a serious humour, would flatten
some moral platitude beneath the weight of
mediocre Greek elegiacs.
elegiacs. Greek, moreover,
would be the language in which he might freely,
in the presence of domestics, communicate a
secret over the triclinium at home; and at his
university of Athens he would receive from time
to time a letter from his father or uncle, crammed
with excellent, if not original, moral sentiments,
26
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
and interlarded with Greek expressions for
which Latin equivalents might easily have been
found; and the words in these Greek scraps,
to the youth's amusement, would very often be
wrongly spelt and wrongly accentuated. All
this while, then, our youth would be breathing
a natural atmosphere. He would be drinking
in from living, if not always from limpid, waters.
The works he chiefly studied were the most
perfect extant specimens of wit, grace, subtlety,
dignity, and beauty, and were all more or less.
practically connected with the rise in civilisation
and refinement of his own land.
From the establishment of Christianity to the
conquest of Constantinople, the capitals of the
two empires were centres of diverse civilisations.
In character the eastern capital seems a hybrid
mixture of Athens and Bagdad. We have there
Hellenic subtlety and elegance, combined with
the mysticism and barbaric splendour of the far
east. We have a ready-made civilisation, social,
political, and ecclesiastical, prolonging an arti-
ficial life through a thousand years, and thus
reminding us of those weakly human constitu-
tions that, from time to time, belie the fears of
friends and the prognostications of physicians,
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
TROD
27
by continuing a precarious life to the limits of
extreme age.
We feel but little interested in a
civilisation that has left so insignificant an im-
press upon European thought; we can only
presume that in Christian Constantinople the
ordinary training of youth would be conversant
with abstruse, unpractical, metaphysico-religious
dogmas, with theories of the divine right of
emperors, and with regulations of etiquette as
intricate and unedifying as the rites and cere-
monies of Almacks or Pekin. Such training, how-
ever, would be so far superior to that of our own
children in that it would be congenially artificial
in an atmosphere of universal artificiality.
Of the western empire and its mental condi-
tion we can speak with more of eulogy and less
of arbitrary presumption. While Europe was
echoing to the tread of southward-pouring bar-
barians, wit and genius fled for refuge to the
sanctuary, and, at times, laid hold upon the holy
things with unsanctified hands, eating the shew-
bread that the priests alone should eat. Beneath
impartial folds the mantle of the church covered
priest and musician and poet and painter and
lawyer and physician and man of letters and
philosopher. The imperial majesty of Rome
28
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
settled slowly and imperceptibly upon the head
of the Roman pontiff; the ritual of the church.
was worded in the old imperial dialect; in the
hierarchy were conserved the legal and pontifical
traditions of an ancient and exclusive patriciate.
For centuries the church was a confederacy of
the men of brain as opposed to the men of force.
The earnest devotee, the patrician lawyer, the
scholastic dialectician, the semi-pagan artist, all
united their efforts to erect an edifice that should
shelter them until the storm were overpast.
Meanwhile the shattered empire of the West
formed gradually into new crystals; feudal insti-
tutions arose naturally and spontaneously out of
universal insecurity; chivalric sentiment was the
precipitate formed by the fusion of military pride
with the softening worship of the Virgin Mother;
the noble was trained from boyhood to courtesy,
truth, and skill in martial exercises-a noble.
education; the plebeian would move as a pawn
upon a similar war chessboard; but the artist
and the scholar would owe all their inspiration
and their knowledge to their ecclesiastical
mother. In speaking of medieval Europe we
are now-a-days too prone to speak flippantly
concerning supposedly dark ages; we view with
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
29
We should in fairness
amazement their cathedrals and abbeys; with a
little envy their glass, their wood-carving, and
their tapestries; but these and the like material
marvels are, to our thinking, counterbalanced by
beliefs in witchcraft, dogmatic subtleties, and
religious materialism.
remember that, until the revival of Greek litera-
ture, the culture of Europe was abreast of her
intellectual resources and in keeping with the
spirit of the times; its component elements were
drawn from Christian doctrines, from Roman
law, from the logic and ethics of Aristotle,-in
other words, from the best, or rather from all the
good materials within reach. With this utilisa-
tion of all available advantages we must con-
trast our educational neglect of the accumulated
scientific knowledge of three hundred years; with
the generous spirit of European brotherhood
then inculcated, the narrowness of our national
and local prejudices; and, when we speak dis-
paragingly of scholastic absurdities, let us think
humbly of our hexameters, pentameters, alcaics,
and iambics, or peruse with a subdued and
chastened spirit some of the portentous conun-
drums in mathematic analysis with which our
Cambridge examiners annually rack the brains
30
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
of her wearied, and, alas! too often her stupefied
wranglers.
But in the medieval days, if Christian Europe
lay beneath an atmosphere of tempered light, an
almost noonday brightness shone over Saracenic
Spain; and, by a singular turn of the scales, the
land that now under Christian rule lingers far
behind the forward-moving kingdoms of Europe
was in Mohammedan hands the cradle and the
nursery of European science. Nay, the route of
civilisation is herein shown as indirect even to
fantasticality. Long after Greece had sunk into
provincial insignificance, and the library of Alex-
andria had been destroyed by Mohammedan
fanaticism, the philosophy of Athens and the
physical science of Alexandria were compul-
sorily sent in Greek volumes from the Bosphorus
to the Tigris; and from Bagdad the resuscitated
learning spread to Ægypt once again, and thence
to Morocco, and thence to Spain, and thence, in
feeble radiance for a while, it scintillated upon
Christian Europe. To the Arab of Spain we are
indebted for his keeping alight through centuries
the Alexandrine lamp of science, until from it a
new lamp was lit by Nicholas Zepernic of Thorn.
For some considerable period after the intro-
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
31
duction of Protestantism into England and
Scotland, learning was restricted to within its.
traditional limits, and was almost a perquisite of
the clergy. Nay, until within the memory of
men now living, the study of Latin grammar and
Latin literature composed seven-tenths of our
entire educational curriculum. In the High
Schools of Scotland, Latin, under the title of
'the Humanities,' was the one recognised item
of mental food; and to this day Greek literature
is in the greater part of them but partially cul-
tivated; and in many schools writing, arithmetic,
and modern languages are considered as subsi-
diary, or as articles of intellectual or æsthetic
luxury, to be paid for separately, and declined
at pleasure. Twenty years ago very few English
grammar schools taught even the beggarly ele-
ments of mathematics; here and there a French-
man would be the butt of ridicule to unmannerly
lads, whose short-sighted contempt for their
teacher's language was due to the stolid pre-
judices of their parents; the language of Goethe
and Schiller was in all these schools a dead
language, or was rather as a language that had
never yet been born.
During this interval great advances have been
32
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
made, chiefly by such proprietary schools as
those of Cheltenham, Marlborough, and Edin-
burgh, which with, commercially speaking, a
discreet spirit of compromise, whilst they grasp
new things by the hand, cling on to the skirts
of things old. In such quarters the study of
modern languages is gaining more and more
of respectful attention; and the remarkable fact
seems to be coming out into clearer and clearer
relief, that we, the modern English people, have
of our own a language unsurpassed in copious-
ness and power, and a literature unequalled in
dignity, wisdom, utility, and beauty.
But how stands the case with our great historic
public schools, to which the children of our
nobility flock, that they may associate with their
social equals, and the children of our wealthier
middle-class, that they may rub shoulders with
their social superiors? You are aware that,
not long ago, at the most aristocratic and the
wealthiest of these schools mutton was the only
animal food, and classics the only mental food,
of her alumni. The system of exclusiveness
could only be improved upon by exacting, that
henceforth mutton should be restricted to cold
mutton, and that, instead of classics badly taught,
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.
33
we should have classics taught badly and foolishly
to a superlative degree. Some such improve-
ment has, in fact, been carried out. A conclave
of schoolmasters was recently held, every mem-
ber of which was a man of undoubted learning;
and a manual of elementary classical instruction
has been issued, which throws into the shade
all ancient productions founded upon the divine
theory of Unintelligibility. In a coming chapter.
it will be our amusement or bewilderment to
bring forward specimens of the newly patented
methods by means of which intellectual twilight
in boyhood may be converted into a mystic and
religious pitch darkness. We shall be brought,
perhaps reluctantly, to acknowledge that-at
least in the matter of education-things can
never be so bad but that human learning and
ingenuity, unimpeded by mother-wit and com-
mon-sense, can contrive to make them a very
great deal worse.
C
#
34
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
II.
SCHOOL MEMORIES.

T was on a sunny morning in a far
away spring-time, that I stood be-
tween my Mother and my brother, by
the coach in front of the old Bull and Mouth
Inn. I was a little over seven years of age, had
just doffed my frock or some equally semi-
feminine garment, and was now encased in an
imitation horse-hair shirt, yellow worsted stock-
ings, fustian knee-breeches, a yellow hearth-rug
petticoat, and a long blue gown; a red leathern
girdle went round my waist; a pair of parson's
bibs hung down from my neck; and my hair was
cut so short that I think I might have been used,
with a little inconvenience to the user and my-
self, as a hair-brush. I cannot say what my poor
dear Mother thought of the grotesque-looking
article before her. She was bewildered in the
midst of her sorrow. I think she looked upon
me as a ridiculously small parody upon John the
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
35
Baptist, bound for years of sojourning in the
wilderness and of feeding there on locusts and
wild honey. I went into the wilderness; but,
for nine of my twelve years there spent, I fed
mentally on locusts only, and the food was very
disagreeable.
There were packed some six of us new be-
dizenments inside the coach; a greater number
clustered on the exterior. To a spectator at a
distance it would have seemed as though the
conveyance had been settled on by a swarm of
unnaturally large bumble-bees. For the space of
about ten minutes we were all too sad to speak ;
we were, in fact, all weeping-going, as it were,
to the funeral of our respective childhoods. By
and by I was seized with a happy thought.
Underneath the seat I had a huge cake, within
a wrapper of brown paper. It was to be given
in charge to my matron, on my arrival at St.
Edward's-in-the-Fields; and the dispensation to
me of a slice per diem would, it was supposed,
extend my memory of home over at least a lunar
month. I had recently purchased a large clasp
knife; with this I anatomized the cake into thin
eccentrical sections, and introduced myself by
handing them round to my fellow-passengers.
36
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
Some one from without must have scented our
proceedings; for a large brown hand was in-
serted at the top of the window, by way of
mute but intelligible petitioning. Slices were
put within the brown hand, until all the out-
siders had been supplied; and there was a pause
for twenty minutes, when the brown hand re-
appeared; but the clasp knife was in my pocket,
and there was nothing left for it to cut.
It was evening when we arrived at St. Ed-
ward's. There was a posse of lads at the gate,
curious to see the new-comers. In reply to the
usual interrogatory I gave my name, which was
misinterpreted into Dobson-a circumstance that
gave me a short-lived popularity. The name of
misconception was that of the chieftain of my
ward or sleeping-room. I was immediately
ushered into the presence, and for a time was
treated with general consideration, as the chief-
tain expressed a conviction of our distant rela-
tionship. Before very long, however, upon closer
questioning, the real spelling of my name to-
gether with the disappearance of the cake was
ascertained, and my borrowed plumage was in-
continently stripped off me. Indeed, for the
first time in my life I knew what it was to have
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
37
my head punched, and, at the time, I had an
indistinct idea that I deserved it.
I may as well state, in passing, that the poor
chieftain died not long after, in the infirmary, of
some epidemic fever; and I felt exceedingly
sorry at the occurrence, for it positively never
struck me that his decease could be viewed in
the light of a judgment. Strange to say, I
caught the fever shortly after, and had to occupy
the bed in which he died. My companions in
the sick-ward informed me of the fact, with the
pardonable indiscretion of boyhood. The infor-
mation was not of a cheering character, and led
me to a forecasting of my destiny which expe-
rience has mercifully shown to be incorrect and
premature.
For a year and a half I remained in the
country division of the great school of St. Ed-
ward's. The great majority of my companions
were, for eleven months in the year, total exiles
from home; dreary dwellers in Siberia; hermeti-
cally sealed from home joys and merriment.
My own matron was a pretty, kind, lady-like
woman; the superintendent was a handsome,
well-bred, and kind-hearted gentleman; but the
discipline of a school containing over four hun-
38
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
:
dred boys was necessarily strict, and Latin and
Greek, especially when administered in the dear
old English fashion, was dry and tasteless food.
I was a great deal more happily circumstanced
than my comrades; for my mother had taken
a tiny cottage at Spitalbrook, by Hoddesdon,
some four miles from school; and I was allowed
once a month to spend Saturday and Sunday at
home. I remember how surprised they would
appear at my rough ways and my usage of
school slang; how young my Mother used to
seem to me; how like a girl my brother; and
oh! the delight, after weeks of bullying in the
play-ground and unintelligible mutterings in the
school-room, to stand for a summer's day by the
shallow narrow waters of the New River, angling
for sticklebacks and minnows!
My purpose here is not to discuss or criticise
educational systems, to describe and exprobrate
any dismally useless course of study. I wish
only to recall the humorous associations of my
boyhood and youth; to stereotype, ere they
vanish, and fix, as by photography, old Will-o'-
the-Wisp whimsicalities; to sketch the social
landscape of the old quaint school, with its occa-
sional lights and its many shadows, before it be
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
39
too late to sketch-before the setting of the
boy-memory within me.
The head-master in the commercial division
of the school made a deep impression on me; in
fact, he made several impressions on me in a
variety of ways. He was a little fat man, like
Napoleon, and had many special qualities for
rule in common with his comparatively more
famous prototype. He was a short, dumpy,
spheroidal man, and walked with a spring in his
gait, as though his feet, like those of dogs and cats,
were fitted with elastic cushions. He seemed
absolutely to spurn the earth; at all events, he
never seemed to think it worth looking at, but
appeared to be evermore on tip-toe, gazing over
an invisible wall at some object a foot or two
beneath a distant horizon. His round, self-satis-
fied, but not uncomely face was like a full moon
when suffused with the redness indicative of com-
ing wind; perspiration gathered easily on his
forehead; and in the exercise of his duties he
mopped himself with a red silk handkerchief and
puffed and puffed continually. This subdued kind
of snorting was very impressive. As he always
held his head a little thrown back, it seemed as
if he were ducking upwards out of too thick a
40
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
medium, and taking in breaths of thinner air,
like a grampus. During our writing hours he
would intone, or, more correctly speaking, toll
vocally certain sentences, which were the axioms
of caligraphy-the thirty-nine articles of our
copy-book creed. One article I remember to
this day, for it seemed in a strikingly graphic
way to describe the personnel of the speaker:
Round at the top and round at the bottom, and
thick from top to bottom.
Every now and then the monotony of our
daily routine would be tragically, but not alto-
gether unpleasingly, diversified by an execution.
Some miserable urchin, whose round-hand would
have run into a small-pox of blots, would be
ordered into the dark lobby, between the inner
and the outer door, at the far corner of the
school. Four comrades, pressed into the hate-
ful service, would accompany him; one would
serve as horse, two of them would have a leg
a-piece to hold secure, and the fourth would
have the more ignoble task assigned him of
holding tight over the wretch's head the ex-
tremity of his garments, so as to leave exposed
the orthodox surface for birch-correction. Mean-
while, over the listening school-room would be
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
41
heard the sound as of a hail storm, and stifled
shrieks that seemed to issue from out a bull of
Phalaris. Then the hail storm would cease, and
the shrieks would die away; and from the den
would emerge on tip-toe our little fat judge and
ruler, with his chin very high in air, and a great
deal of perspiration on his forehead, and puffing
from his lips frequent and audible puffs of magis-
terial wind. By and by would follow the satellites,
with the look of having shared in some serious
and dignifying responsibility; and lastly would
reappear the culprit himself, to be, in the estima-
tion of his school-fellows, a martyr for the day
and a hero for a week.
I humbly but devoutly thank my stars that I
was never so martyrized. It is not the physical
pain that I would so strongly deprecate; for in
my time I was often subjected to punishments
more severe than the ordinary birch-flogging,
and they left, for the most part, no permanent
feeling of shame or anger behind them. The
horror of the old time-honoured punishment
consists in the unspeakably ludicrous position
into which a poor fellow is hoisted between earth
and heaven; a sight to set the gods on high
Olympus roaring over their nectar with inex-
42
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
tinguishable laughter. To this very day, and
on this very day, they are guffawing at the
tragico-comedy, as it is being enacted in the
grammar schools of dear conservative, wilful,
pigheaded old England.
A very singular superstition was prevalent in
this junior school in my time, and I have little
doubt that it has descended by tradition. From
a misinterpretation of a verse in the Athanasian
crèed it was supposed that the muttered repeti-
tion of the word 'Trinity' was a specific against
all peril. Vicarious repetition was included in
the doctrine. I have known a big fellow, when
summoned unexpectedly to the master's desk,
pass the order round for every one to say
'Trinity' for him as fast as possible; and for a
few seconds there would be some fifty of us
chattering the word as quickly as our tongues
could move. Sometimes the charm failed; and
vengeance would be taken by a bully upon the
little wretches whom he logically supposed to
have uttered the mystic word with insufficient
vehemence, rapidity, and faith.
There were also two terrible legends current,
and universally believed. It was said that, many
years ago, two infatuated boys had sinned be-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
43
yond repentance in the following ways: one had
said his prayers backwards; and the other had
written a letter in his own blood to the Power of
Evil, and placed it beneath his pillow before
going to sleep. The morning after, the beds of
both were found empty, and no tidings were
ever heard of either. The cause and manner of
their disappearance was horrible, but obvious.
There were several big boys, whose statements
admitted of no questioning, who had been told
by the night-watchers that the ghosts of these
miserable young sinners were continually seen
after midnight in the infirmary back-yard.
Underneath the writing-school were very ex-
tensive passages and cellars, forming a species of
petty Labyrinth. I ventured once a considerable
way inside; but suddenly was seized with a panic,
and scurried back to the light of day. This was
the favourite haunt of an old man, named Bush,
who was general scavenger and performer of all
nasty work. He was probably the grimiest man
in the world outside of Poland. Had the poet
Eschylus once set eyes on him, he would have
styled him in his own boldly figurative way, 'The
Twin-brother of Dirt.' On all hands he was
suspected, not without cause, of being an ogre.
44
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
Bones in large quantities were known to be
stored up in his secret cave. One very big
boy in my own sleeping-room once informed
us that he had watched his time, when Bush
was otherwise engaged, and had penetrated
within the cave until he had reached a spot
where was a kind of well, and round the well
were great piles of bones. He had dipped his
finger in the well, and, to his horror, had found
that the liquid it contained was blood! The
bones, therefore, were in all probability not beef
or mutton bones! One little Paynim miscreant
made some puerile suggestion about red ink and
dinner-remains; but he was at once summarily
dealt with by the justly-offended narrator, to the
great satisfaction of all us believers, and to the
entire removal of his own pestilent and unnatural
incredulity.
It was not long after the recital of these horrors
that Bush left the service of the school, and he
was frequently seen driving a gig upon the high
road, with his face approximately clean and a
white shirt on. The report current in the outer
town was, that he had inherited a small fortune
from a distant relative; but the people of the
outer town knew nothing about the winding
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
45
cellars, the pool of blood, and the huge heaps of
human bones.
Occasionally, on half-holidays, we were taken
out in charge of a beadle in long file of two and
two for walks into the country. These rambles
were to us hermits sweet beyond the conception
of ordinary loose-tied boys. The great majority
of us were the merest chits; and yet for us sun
after sun went drearily rising and drearily set-
ting, and there was no pleasant talk and gossip
over a breakfast-table, no romping in garden or
orchard, no birds'-nesting in lane or wood, no
cake or fruit by comfortably-lighted table after
dinner, no kiss before going to bed. These
country walks seemed to loosen for a time our
fetters, and carry us, in a strange way, miles and
miles and miles nearer home. Our favourite
walk was one that led towards a slightly undu-
lating hill, on the side of which was a deep pre-
cipitous pit. Were I to pass that pit now-a-days,
I should possibly and foolishly conjecture that it
had been quarried for building purposes. We
had, however, the word of our guide, good and
kindly Mr. Crossman, that this was the identical
pit in which had lived for years the cannibal
Sawney Beany with his traveller-crunching family.
46
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
Some boys, whose eyes were very keen, or whose
imaginations were very lively, could discern frag-
ments of skeletons at the bottom of the den.
Once, lying prostrate on the ground, I peeped
down into the horrible hole, but failed to make
out any decided specimens of human remains.
The depth, however, of the place confirmed me
in my previous and well-grounded ideas respect-
ing the size of men and women, and especially of
cannibals, in past ages.
In addition to our ordinary play-ground, we
had, in summer, a large field for cricket and
similar sports. The field was bounded by an
easily-surmounted wooden paling, and beyond
this wooden wall lay the turnips of one Mullins.
These were apples of the Hesperides, watched
incessantly by the dragons, Allen and Crossman.
At times an adventurer would be gathering the
sweet fruit into his lap for his comrades and him-
self, when Allen would drop as it were down from
the clouds like a thunderbolt from a clear sky,
would kindly assist the weeping trespasser to the
right side of the frail boundary, would march
him off with a numerous and sympathizing but
mysteriously-delighted escort to the office of the
superintendent, and the offender would be exe-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
47
cuted on the spot, untried, unshriven. For my
own part, I never once crossed over into Mullins';
perhaps I was too discreet; perhaps I was too
much of a coward. Since the days of boyhood,
however, I have too often had the foolish hardi-
hood to climb over into Mullins', and gather
turnips, fancying they were golden apples; but
an unseen Allen has invariably detected me, and
led me off to an unseen Superintendent, who has
invariably administered the rod.
As a brain left to feed upon itself and denied
the invigorating and cheering influence of society
and books turns morbid and hypochondriac, so
our coterie, cut off from the outer world, was a
prey, from time to time, to the most fantastic
panics and illusory alarms. One panic in parti-
cular I remember. In extent and groundlessness
it had an antitype in the panic at Athens con-
sequent upon the mutilation of the Hermæ.
Chartism at the time was the bugbear of
England, as is Fenianism of modern Ireland.
Information of a specific kind had been brought
in a mysterious way to some boy or boys un-
known, that the school was destined for pillage,
and that a Chartist spy was secreted in the lower
chamber beneath some bed in number seven
48
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
ward. Not a soul would enter that chamber. A
general council was held, and it was decreed that
lots should be cast among the members of the
unhappy ward for the appointment of an enfant
perdu―a solitary forlorn hope. At this moment,
a volunteer stepped forward. His name was
Jones; a name never to be forgotten. I think
it never will be forgotten. A second David, he
simply armed himself with the leaden plug of the
lavatory, entered alone the suspected chamber,
and crept in the dark under the two long rows
of beds. Meanwhile, we were listening below
for the crash of weapons or the sound of fire-
arms. We heard nothing; and after a while.
Jones reappearing dispelled our alarms. The
Chartists must have been made aware of our
state of preparation and the resolution of our
leader; for their original intentions of pillage
and murder were never carried out.
When sisters and cousins of a marriageable
age live together, how they must flutter with
curiosity and trepidation and hope, when a lik-
able young fellow comes for the first time
among
them! Meanwhile, he poises like a hawk, swoops
down, and, unless he miss his aim, clutches one
of the sweet flutterers, and away with her he flies.
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
49
How bewildered
to his own cold bachelor nest.
must be the brain of a chicken, in among a brood
of brother and sister chickens, when he sees the
cook from time to time seize upon a companion
or two, and carry them away to a bourne from
whence chickens never return! Must he not
wonder occasionally when his own turn will come
to be hurried away, to have his neck twisted, and
be roasted or boiled or made into a delicious
curry? Something of the kind were my feelings
when I heard at distant intervals a list of names
read out of the boys that, either from superan-
nuation or progress in study, were destined to fill
up vacancies in the great school in the metropolis.
What marvellous legends were afloat among
us regarding that great Ninevite school! It had
(in fact as well as in report) a thousand boys;
and some of the boys in the nautical school were
of immense strength and superhuman stature-
Brobdignag boys; any one of whom could demo-
lish with a blow a butcher or a bargeman; and
at the head of the school, far removed from the
thick lower atmosphere, sphered in a clear serene
empyrean, were the seven Hellenists-the seven
Latin and Greek sages-seven lamps of learning
-a sacred brotherhood-a particular people. It
D
50
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was said that every Saturday they had for a revisal
lesson the last long sentence that covers nearly
half a page in the Latin Delectus; that they had
each a guinea a week pocket-money allowed them
by the Government; and that they were continu-
ally being asked to dine with the Lord Mayor.
At last the list was read in public wherein my
name appeared. I had been hitherto a boy, and
had thought as a boy; but now I was to put
away boyish things. The great school was in
the heart of Nineveh, and Nineveh was the great
pulsing heart of the big world. If a lad worked
hard in that great central school, would he not
receive the bâton of Hellenisty? And would
not a Hellenist dine habitually with the Lord
Mayor, and knock his forehead against uncom-
fortably low-ceilinged skies? And yet it was a
pity to leave St. Edward's-in-the-Fields; for the
pretty matron had been kind and motherly;
the clerical Draco who had flogged me with his
riding-whip had been replaced by a somewhat
stern but just and earnest and high-principled
gentleman; Ramsay, the gigantic but gentle
usher, was a man not to be easily forgotten;
the writing-master, with all his pomp and glory
and superfluity of inner wind, was a kindly man
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
5 I
and an able teacher, and severe only to the
profligate and abandoned that defaced their
conscience and their copy-book with unneces-
sary and wilful blots. Not an enemy was
left, but very many friends. Moreover, Spital-
brook was near at hand, and would be passed
by the coach as it went its London journey.
Good-bye to the sticklebacks and the minnows!
The invisible Policeman says: 'Move on; my
little man, you must move on!'
Since then, I have heard, on two or three other
occasions, the same mysterious voice. When
I left St. Edward's for Camelot; when I left
Camelot for Dunedin; when I had bidden good-
bye to some forty little fellows in Dunedin,
and closed the door upon them, to leave for the
Citie of the Tribes. What a strange and awful
feeling must be his whom this policeman, Des-
tiny, grips vice-like by the arm for the last time,
pressing a bâton underneath his ribs, and say-
ing in a cold but very impressive tone: 'Come,
sir, the thoroughfare is blocked up; you really
must move on!'
Naked we came into this world, and naked
we go out of it. I brought nothing with me to
St. Edward's-in-the-Fields, and I took nothing
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
away save a little writing and arithmetic, and a
very small amount of harmless rubbish in the
way of Greek and Latin rules, that had been
administered in an unintelligible phraseology.
Nay, nay; I took away something-a few plea-
sant and affectionate memories. Consequently,
I may say that I left St. Edward's-in-the-Fields
with my heart charged, but not crammed, with
boy-affections, and the carpet-bag of my intelli-
gence filled, partly with luggage, and partly, by
way of remplissage, with cinders, gravel, sawdust,
and marine-stores.
Imagine, reader, what your sensations would
be, supposing that, without your waking, you
were lifted out of bed, placed softly in a wheel-
barrow, and hurled off and turned over into the
middle of Rag-Fair. Something of the kind.
were my sensations on first arriving at the great
Ninevite school. It was a kind of noisy, multi-
tudinous, ill-regulated city. My individuality
seemed merged in a great sea of life; instead
of spreading out from a little boy into a big
boy, I collapsed from a little boy into a dwarf,
a pygmy, a hop-o'-my-thumb, a gnat, a nonen-
tity. Like a digit, under an arithmetical process
of evanescence, I went out. Years, entire years
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
53
passed over, leaving me still in bewilderment.
Life was void, chaotic, and shrouded in a mist
wherein I was mechanically groping. The morn-
ing of a day would be spent in the grammar-
school over some three or four lines of Phædrus.
And what a curious language that Latin was!
Why, an ordinary uninspired lad could no more
scent out a hide-and-seek verb than a cow could
set at a partridge. You would have lupus a nomi-
native here, and inquit its verb lines away, out •
of sight, anywhere. Sometimes, upon a Monday,
an orphan lamb in the accusative case would
be bleating after a mother-verb that had been
butchered and parsed on Saturday. Who was
Phædrus? Was he a schoolmaster in the days
when men talked Latin? But when they did talk
it, used they to parse all the words as they went
along, and decline the word for 'soup' if they
asked for soup at dinner, and run the chance of
dative cases sticking in their throats like fish-
bones? But what on earth had we little fellows
done to the governors that we should be forced
to learn Latin? Would it not be far better to
catch the measles, and go to the Infirmary, and
lie in bed for weeks, and have oranges to suck
when we were convalescent?
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
But really, after all, what had we done to the
governors that they should go out of their way
to employ such a lot of clergymen to feed us
day after day with this curious and nasty-tast-
ing and utterly indigestible Latin-and-Greek
food? How would they like it themselves?
Some of them, I afterwards found out, had either
never swallowed the same kind of intellectual
sawdust, or had thrown it up long before they
reached manhood. Perhaps, they really believed
this food to be wholesome; perhaps, they had
no other mental food to give. They certainly
could not be feeding us on intellectual garbage
out of pure malice, for the whole institution
was a colossal monument of benevolence; the
greatest monument of the kind in the known
world. We numbered in all some fifteen hun-
dred pupils. From the moment a lad entered to
the day he left school, all he was called on to
provide for himself were his handkerchiefs and
his gloves. Education, board, clothing, lodging,
all were gratuitously given. An invalid was
treated with greater care than any private means
could afford, and with as much kindness as the
kindest home could bestow. Indeed, apart from
the generous medical arrangements, the pleasant
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
55
face, cheery voice, and genial ways of our resi-
dent physician were enough to make a child re-
conciled to any illness but one involving acute
pain. With benevolence underlying and per-
meating our institution, when every article of
our physical food was of the best quality, why
was the greater part of our mental food so taste-
less, so unwholesome, so gritty? Nature, they
say, is a riddle past finding out. I take it she is
but a poor riddle in comparison with the crot-
chets of humanity.
In the afternoon we would have our three
hours in the writing-school-and that was gene-
rally great fun. After an hour and a half of
reading and ciphering the remainder of the
time was devoted to writing. A skilful hand
could get through this work in half an hour,
and so save an hour for amusement. Idlers by
the dozen would be walking in amongst the
desks, pretending to make pens, serve out ink,
or borrow knives, but in reality proclaiming
lotteries, catering for prick-books, selling, at out-
rageous profits, almonds, raisins, toffy, sausages,
saveloys, and slices of roley-poley pudding.
Sometimes, at briefest notice, the senior master
would make a visit of general inspection, and a
56
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
•
sudden destruction would come unawares upon
the idlers in Pen-and-ink Fair-a temporary
deluge would overwhelm them; but on the
morrow the interspaces of the desks would be
thronged again, and Commerce would be hold-
ing on her irrepressible way.
In this singular school-market I was always a
purchaser; that is, when I had the wherewithal
to purchase. Almonds were sold at twenty the
penny; raisins, not Muscatel, at thirty; cakes
of toffy and other articles were so divided into
pennyworths as to give a regular profit of cent per
cent. I have known a skilful salesman make his
five shillings by the week's end out of an invest-
ment of sixpence on the Monday morning. One
holiday, as I returned schoolwards with a six-
pence in my pocket, I was seized with the spirit
of covetousness, and purchased, with intent to
sell, a little round of toffy. That evening in
bed I divided it into twelve pennyworths,
wrapped these same neatly in paper, placed them
beneath my pillow, and made my calculations.
By next evening I should have a shilling, which
would be two shillings by the evening after, and
then four, and then eight, and so on. It reminded
me of the old sum about the nails of the horse-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
57
shoe. For the time I had forgotten the story of
the dreamer in the Arabian Nights. In a year
I should have more money than I should know
what to do withal; I should be richer than both
my uncles put together. But soft; what after
all was the use of money? Was not enjoyment
the end of man? If I just ate six of my penny-
worths, I could sell the other six, and buy another
cake; redivide it, eat six pieces, and sell the
other six; buy a third cake, a fourth cake, and
so on for ever and ever. I had discovered a
simple but sure method for living eternally at
no cost on toffy. So I ate the first six penny-
worths. And then I thought with what anxieties
and troubles the pursuit of commerce was accom-
panied! Had I not already eaten my six penny-
worths? Consequently, I could not anyways be
a loser. If I ate the other six, should I not,
without an effort, in one evening have made a
clear profit on myself of sixpence? The specious
reasoning was conclusive to a willing judgment.
And so I ate the remaining six pennyworths.
And this was the first and last attempt I ever
made in the way of retail traffic.
Fagging and bullying prevailed at this old
school, as, indeed, at all old schools. Fagging
A
迂
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may, perhaps, with due restrictions, produce
healthy moral effects; it may be employed to
make dull physical force deferential to intel-
lectual superiority. Bullying is, of course, an
unmitigated evil. I doubt whether at any school
of any epoch this hateful system was more fully
carried out than in the earlier years of my Nine-
vite school-days. I was, in all, nearly eleven
years at this one school; of these years during
the first five I was a Gibeonite, and hewed wood,
and carried water; for the next two years I had
my fag, and was to some extent an oppressor,
and employed and bullied many Gibeonites;
and during the last three years, having been, as
it were, translated, I ignored all connection with
my younger fellow-schoolboys, and lived in the
serene contemplation of my own unapproachable
greatness and wisdom. And here I would
parenthetically remark that the most conceited
peacock living might serve as a model of hu-
mility, if contrasted with an average member of
a senior class in an English public school. To
illustrate the miseries endured by the class of
Gibeonites, I give a few of the many anecdotes
that crowd upon my reluctant memory.
Poor honest Prior, gentle as a sheep, huge as
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
59
(
a buffalo, slept next to a wolf of a bully, Smith.
An evil conscience kept the former awake one
night to an unusually late hour; when at length
he roused up Smith, to tell him that the day had
been his birthday, and that a plum-cake was
in his settle, and that a slice was at his dis-
posal. Had you told me of this before,' was
the reply he heard; 'had you told me of this
before, I should have given you a bit.' As it
was, the poor owner of the cake had to make it
over in toto to the wolf, and had furthermore to
pass a considerable part of the night on the floor
beneath his bed, for venturing to keep over so
many unnecessary hours a secret of so important
a nature.
A wretch of the name of Turquand came sud-
denly upon a little friend of mine, knowing the
latter to be in possession of half-a-crown. 'Come,'
said he, 'I'll give you two-and-six for your half-
a-crown.' My friend gave up his money, and
received in turn two shillings and six shots. He
burst into tears; but dried them perforce, as he
was given to understand that any whining on his
part would lead to a substitution for the two
shillings of two bullets. With a humour pre-
figurative of legal after-life the bully observed
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
that even then he would be fulfilling his offer to
the letter.
This same scoundrel gave another instance of
his sense of fun in dealing with this same little
friend. He gave him an empty common stone
ink-bottle-which, when full, would have cost
one penny-to keep in charge, urging upon him
the greatest possible caution. Timeo Danaos et
dona ferentes would have passed through the
little fellow's brain, had he known enough of
Latin at the time. At all events, the meaning
of the words did pass through his mind, and for
days the clumsy bottle was carried about in his
pocket, and placed at night beneath his pillow.
By and by he grew secure, and tired, and care-
less, and deposited the charge in his settle.
Scarcely an hour elapsed before restitution was
demanded. The culprit ran to his settle, but
the deposit was gone. Trembling, he disclosed
the fact to Turquand, who burst into well-simu-
lated weeping, seized the defaulter by the hair, and
shrieked You little thief, that bottle was given
me by my grandfather on his deathbed; you shall
give me five shillings for it, or you'll break my
heart!' He would have broken the little fellow's
head, if the promise of payment had not been
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
6I
instantly given. The money was paid in full, by
instalments out of the child's pocket-money.
In course of time the system became intensi-
fied in cruelty. The bullies, or brassers, as they
were termed, were as terrible and as daring as
Cilician pirates. On a general holiday, they
would be stationed near the gate, when the little
fellows came home at evening from their visits,
laden with cake and fruit, and rich with small
silver coins. The majority of them would reach
their beds with pockets as empty as they had
left withal that morning. Some cautious urchins
would devour all their treasures on the road,
and would pay dearly-not too dearly-for their
caution or temerity. The evil at length became
so flagrant that the cry of the oppressed went
up to the ears of the head-master; a special
commission of inquiry was instituted; disclo-
sures of the most appalling kind were made; con-
dign vengeance was taken in public upon dozens
of the pirates; and the land had rest for years,
and has rest, I trust, to this day.
When I look back upon the condition of the
school in these years, I seem to have before me
a picture in little of old medieval and older.
heroic days. In the Hellenists I see the
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studious and exclusive searchers after a Latin-
and-Greek philosopher's-stone; in the Brassers
I recognise the barons of the middle ages,
who had all the halfpence going in their days;
and in the little ones I see the burghers who
paid the piper, the retainers who did the dirtier
work, and the general rabble who came in for
the kicks and cuffings. How I should like a
return of the old feudal times, if I were only sure
of being a baron! How I should like to fight
round windy Troy, if I were only the son of a
goddess, and could scurry the poor Trojan fellows
like locusts into the river, without one of them
having a chance of grazing my royal and semi-
celestial shins! How splendid it must have been
for a great chieftain, gifted specially of Heaven
with superhuman shoulders, indefatigable hips,
and an impenetrable hide, mounted on a light
car drawn by divine steeds, his sword upon his
thigh, his shining shield in front, and a great
tree of a lance in his terrible hand, to rush
careering in among a crowd of leather-clad
trembling louts, and prog and pierce and skewer
and stab and slash until at length he ceased
from very exhaustion, and doffed his helm, and
with the fringe of what may be called his frock-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
63
coat wiped the sweat from off his steaming fore-
head in the middle of a great slaughter-house of
groans and glory!
Our games were singularly rough, and strictly
heroic and feudal in their administration of half-
pence to the leaders and kicks to the plebs.
Two of the favourite games of the nobility were
'Gates' and 'Cheating Running-over.' In all
essentials they were at one. For the latter, a
small body took possession of the centre of some
specified alley in the play-ground, and numerous
antagonists crossed through and passed them
from side to side. All whom they captured and
carried back to the side of starting were pressed
into their service. When only a very few chief-
tains were left uncaught, then the work waxed
hot. The middle rank of captors would divide, to
let all pass but one, and would close upon him.
Meanwhile the other chiefs would hasten to touch
their goal; for the game then admitted of their
returning, without possibility of capture, to the
rescue of their brother. Strange to say, the
central ranks were compelled to act only defen-
sively in their captures, while the outsiders were
allowed to strike anywhere but on the face.
In the game of 'Gates' a single pair would
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
stand out face to face at arm's distance in the
centre of some division, and the outsiders would
run through them from goal to goal, backwards
and forwards. You were considered a prisoner,
if one of the 'gates' could hold you, while he or
his comrades counted some special number; and
thereupon you swelled the lines of the captors.
At length some thirty lads would be standing on
each side of the 'gates,' and three nobles only
would be left untaken. But here each one
must pass through the portals alone; as we all,
one day or other, have to pass through a gate
more terrible. Then would there be a tighten-
ing and a girding up of the coat about the loins;
girdles would be strapped round, and the runner
would be made as slippery as an eel. Finally, but
one chieftain holds his own; his comrades are all
captured, and transformed into traitorous cap-
turing elephants. He seldom has more than one
triumphant rush; in the second, he will career
along, with fury in his eye, with hand uplifted
to slay; but his force will be by this time abated
with continual hammering of the common sol-
diery, and a brother chief will spring forward, and
hold him like a vice, until we count the mystic
number; and then the battle is over, and the
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
65
little ones have rest until the rising of another
sun.
This game of Gates was a kind of antithesis
to the glorious fight at Thermopyla; for with us
the interest of the game was keenest when the
occupants of the pass were multitudinous as the
Persians, and the assailants were few and wearied,
like the gallant and the deathless men that fell
asleep upon a long ago summer's eve, obedient
to the laws of their own Lacedæmon.
At Christmas-tide one evening was set aside
for feasting; but the feast was preceded, instead
of being logically and Lapithaically followed,
by a pitched battle. Each ward of fifty would
be divided into two bands, either sailors and
soldiers, or pirates and sailors; the former side
in each division being the favourite one of the
select few. We had all to practise for weeks
previously; our coats would be tucked up tight
to the waist, displaying our knee-breeches and.
our laughable yellow legs; the breast of our
coat or gown would be thrown open to display
a paper-painted mimic shirt, with blue or red
stripes; the soldier would wear a gorgeous paste-
board helmet; the sailor and pirate would have
respectively his blue and red worsted night-
E
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
cap; every man would have his wooden sword
and shield; but the soldier's device might be a
griffin or a red-cross, while that of the pirates,
who were always the favourites, was invariably a
skull and a pair of crossed-bones.
Sometimes, upon a dark wintry evening, when
the separate bands were marching and counter-
marching in the grounds and through the
cloisters, singing hymns, military, naval, and
piratically-diabolic; when the beadles were on
the alert in every quadrangle to prevent a mêlée ;
-the pirates of one ward would unite with those
of another, and another, and another; gradually,
the soldiers and sailors of all countries would be
marching side by side, and the school of a thou-
sand lads would be divided into a Spartan cluster
of pirates and a Median host of horse-marines.
Again and again would they pass each other by,
singing loudly their varied Pæans; until at length,
what with the measured tramp of many feet, the
measured cadence of their hymns, the favouring
darkness, and the fun of outwitting the beadles
and the upper authorities, the blood of the boys
would be up, and a rush would be made from
the two ends of the great play-ground, and in the
centre, for the space of fifteen minutes, there
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
67
would be charging, and slashing, and hammering
on head and shoulder and shield and coward
back, as in the olden days before and round
windy Ilium. And we left our wounded on the
field; for alas! I have seen again and again.
the beadles carry off unfortunates senseless to
the Infirmary. On more than one occasion I
managed, by some accident, to pierce right
through the enemy's lines to the very outer
verge of the battle-field. Whenever this good
luck befell me, thinking it would be sinful to
tempt Providence I invariably ran away.
The child is father of the man. In the times
of the Crimean war, when every man was at
heart a soldier, I dreamt on three several nights
that I was engaged with the Russians. I regret
to state that my provoking dreams led me in
every one instance to turn tail. My mortification
was always very great on awaking; for I had to
regret the lost opportunity of cheaply purchasing
a good amount of future self-esteem. I think a
good many of those gentlemen who came home
upon family business must have been troubled
with similar dreams. Some of them, I believe,
were seen dreaming on the very battle-field by
wide-awake and steady-nerved comrades.
:
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
To render my school-days complete, a great
rebellion broke out on the occasion of a half-
holiday being refused to us on some saint's day
after we had attended morning service in church.
At grace before dinner, the choristers 'tuned up,'
but no response was given. Nobody would sing,
pray, or say Amen. During meal-time derisive
laughter flew re-echoing from table to table, the
monitors were non-plussed, and the superinten-
dent seemed at his wits' end. After dinner we
paraded the grounds with banners inscribed with
scurrilous puns on the names of the leading
authorities; we stormed the gates one after the
other; but, when at length we had succeeded in
bursting one open, not a boy was found bold
enough to issue forth. I must say that there
was a mob outside too thick for us to penetrate ;
and in the mob were policemen ready to arrest
any runaways. Until formally called on to stop
the mutiny, our head-master, not to interfere in
matters secular, ignored the whole matter. The
moment, however, his aid was demanded, he
rushed out of doors into the middle of the
mutineers, and cried in shrill tones that rang far
and near: 'Boys, if you don't go this instant into
school, I'll flog a dozen of you!' The cry of
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
69
Achilles on the field after the death of Patroclus
was not more instantaneous in effect than the
sound of a certain monosyllable towards the
close of this sentence. A panic ran through
the whole host, and we made in tumult for the
several school-doors. When we were all seated
in our places, the head-master with all the
beadles in attendance went round from room
to room and form to form. One very knowing
beadle had mingled with the noisy crowd, pre-
tending great enjoyment of the fun; but unob-
servedly he had put a little chalk-mark on the
coats of the most obstreperous; and the owner
of every coat so chalked was now singled out
for execution. Our head-master had threatened
to flog a dozen of us if we did not go to school.
We went to school, and he flogged soundly—
and deservedly-three dozen of us. Not long
afterwards the father of a victim called at the
grammar-school door, and, not knowing what he
did, sent in his card to the redoubtable head-
master. The latter came out, and was informed
by the visitor that his boy-who was beside him.
-had written home a very distressing letter,
complaining bitterly of harsh discipline, scanty
holidays, press of work, and a score of other
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
grievances. 'Poor boy,' said the doctor, 'let
me have a private talk with him; I think my
reasonings will have a soothing effect upon his
mind.' The credulous father sent the boy in
with his tranquillizer, and about ten minutes
afterwards the son was pushed out at the gram-
mar-school door, sobbing convulsively, and en-
tirely convinced of his errors by the doctor's
unanswerable logic. The measures taken were
doubtless stern; but a mutiny of a thousand
lads is anything but a joke, and our doctor
thought that, as with the bees of Virgil, so with
the bee-clad children of St. Edward's,
Hi motus animorum atque hæc certamina tantùm
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent;
which couplet interpreted declares that a re-
bellion can only be put down by the dusting of
a few jackets.
Since leaving school I have never-in church,
kirk, or chapel-heard readers to compare with
our Hellenists. Our dining-hall was, with the
exception of Westminster-hall, the largest room
in Great Britain unsupported by pillars. All
our meals were preceded by a regular service,
and that before the supper on a Sunday was a
church service in itself. It was on an evening in
:
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
71
the early autumn, when only the two lights in the
pulpit were lit, that it fell to the lot of a pale-
faced organ-voiced youth-now a man of fame,
high place, and affluence—to read the fifteenth
chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Several verses had been read without any
unusual effect being produced. There was as
yet the usual accompaniment of shuffling feet,
coughs, blowing of noses, and the various and
indescribable movements that cause vibration in
the air and militate against distinct hearing.
Gradually the noises died away into silence, and
the silence deepened until it became intense, like
a something of itself to be heard; the reader
warmed and warmed with every verse; upon his
pale and intellectually beautiful face, clearly
visible between the two far-away lamps, the eyes
of nearly a thousand listeners were fixed, and a
sublime shudder passed over the whole assembly
as, in tones rich, clear, and resonant, the solemn
words were read: 'O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?' I have since
heard the chapter read on infinitely more mo-
mentous occasions; but the solemn words have
then sounded to me as idle words, and I have
heeded them not; because at these latter times
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
of hearing their full and comforting significance
has been very hard to understand.
I was about nine years of age when I entered
with luggage as aforesaid the metropolitan
school. For five or six years I was on the
Under Form; but in this long interval the con-
tents of my carpet-bag underwent little variation.
Some arithmetic and penmanship I certainly did
pick up and stow away; but the result was a
beggarly one for the time expended. I have an
indistinct remembrance of months and seasons
and years of Phædrus, Cornelius Nepos, Ovid,
and Xenophon. I never knew any boy expiscate
the meaning so far from a Latin fable as to
point its moral; none of us cared a straw about
the subjects of Cornelius' biographies, or glanced
beyond the unintelligible four lines of the lesson
for the day; Ovid was regarded only as an
inexhaustible mine for the composition of non-
sense verses; and the only sentences that were
hailed in Xenophon were those, rendered easy
by constant repetition, wherein the army is
said thence to march this or that number of
parasangs; but whither it marched, and whence,
or why, not a soul of us cared to know. Xeno-
phon was the special bugbear of the higher
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73
classes in the Under Form. It was the usual
lesson for Monday morning or afternoon. Our
masters were unusually severe in dealing with the
works of this accursed and diabolical author.
The anticipations of their severity lent a super-
fluous gloom to the observance of our dull and
wearisome Sabbaths. On one occasion there
had occurred a word, dromô, in an early part of
the Greek lesson, which had been interpreted
higgledy-piggledy by the master. The closing
part of the lesson was so miserably botched, that
the class were, what was technically called, turned
down. As they hurried to the door to escape
the boot of a clerical pursuer, one little urchin
said, loud enough to be overheard: 'Here we go,
dromô, dromô. In a moment the little wretch
was seized by the neck, hauled back into the
den, and made bitterly to repent his untimely
appreciation of fun and humour.
In each great sleeping-ward there was an
average of fifty beds. When the midsummer
vacation, or sleeping-out, as it was termed, was
just fifty days off, we commenced after a singular
fashion to imprint the passing dates upon the
memories of the many and the antipodes of the
few. Each evening the boy in every ward the
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
number of whose bed gave the date of distance
was bumped by his companions. Two at a time
would take hold of each arm, two of each leg,
and all eight would raise him with a will and
bump him down to the chanted words: So
many days, so many days, so many days to
Sleeping-out!' The energy of the bumpers be-
came terrible in intensity as the dates decreased,
and it was anything but a joke to sleep in one'
of the first nine digits.
I have already alluded to the gloom and
dreariness of our Sundays. Even now I shudder
at the recollection of them. Not that I have
any fault to find. Quite the contrary. I think
that, when children are year after year crammed
together in unwholesome multitudes where any
imitation of domesticity is impossible, in the
heart of a great city where a cheerful walk
is denied, the only feasible process with them.
on all occasions is that of tread-milling. How
otherwise are they to be kept out of mischief?
The practice is understood and carried out at
the great majority of boarding-schools through-
out the country. If requisite at these latter, à
fortiori was it requisite at the great metropolitan
school of St. Edward's. There is a meaning in
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75
everything.
Our week-day treadmill was a
Latin-and-Greek machine, that ground nothing
in particular; but, if you missed your footing,
you ran the chance of having your leg broken.
Our Sunday implement was ingeniously com-
plex. In plain words, we rose on Sundays at
seven, an hour later than usual: O the delicious-
ness of that hour! We breakfasted at eight,
and had our service of psalms and hymns and
prayer; at a quarter to eleven we went to church,
and were there engaged for a good two hours.
Our Bibles were very large, and we had to kneel
during a considerable part of the service on hard
boards, with no rest for our arms or heads.
misery of the Litany was beyond all words. It
was a very Sahara of tribulation. At the end of
it we little sinners were miserable enough. On
leaving church, we went at once to the dining-
hall, and dinner was preluded with a lengthened
service of reading, psalmody, and prayer; im-
mediately after dinner we repaired to our wards,
and spent an hour in the repetition of catechism
and psalms and in the reading of portions of
Scripture. At the ringing of a bell we de-
scended to the cloisters, formed into ranks, and
marched again to church. On leaving church,
The
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
after a short time allowed for walking in the
play-ground, we were rung up into the dining-
hall, and a portentously long service heralded
in a cold and scanty meal; after grace we
waited until the head-master appeared, who
would favour our dull and inattentive ears with
their third sermon for the day. Immediately
upon the close of his sermon we left for the
sleeping-wards; but on reaching them we had
still another service to go through. One of our
monitors would read us a chapter from the Bible
and a regular set of evening prayers; and we
appropriately closed the Sunday with a singing
of the Burial Anthem! Heaven only knows who
was the wag that ordained this opportune finale.
The oddity was that, while our psalmody was in
general carefully attended to by an organist of
the highest ability, the air of the Burial Anthem
had been handed down by merely oral tradition.
Each ward had consequently a variation of its
own. That of my own ward was more desultory,
fitful, and melancholy than the howling of an
out-of-door's dog upon a moonlit night. It seemed
always to chime in with my own Sunday-evening
feelings of blank, cold, hungry, church-wearied,
sermon-stunned, Xenophon-dreading, for-ever-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
77
and-for-everish despair. I have heard a great
deal said in my time of the religious education
of children and boys. I, at all events, have no
reason to complain. I had as much of religious
instruction squandered on myself as, if judiciously
distributed, would have turned a whole regiment
of dragoons into missionaries.
Above, in treating of our Great Rebellion, I
referred to our religious services on saints' days.
Our school had been founded on the ruins of an
old monastery, and in our costume and in many
of our habits there was much to remind one of a
monastic origin. However, what had been taken
from ecclesiastics at the outset had been with
unquestionable wisdom placed under the patron-
age of the municipal corporation of Nineveh.
Accordingly, on sacred days, viewed as profane
by the crowd, the civic dignitaries arrayed in
scarlet robes would attend public worship in our
church. On some of these occasions a bishop
preached. These were days of intense excite-
ment.
The beadles and church-wardens seemed
profoundly impressed with the solemnity of their
offices; irradiated with reflected light. The in-
cumbent alone seemed to shrink into insignifi-
cance, and dwindle down from a sun into a
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
moon, and from a round moon into a thin pale
crescent. His very voice seemed to have died
away within him, and he read like the ghost of
his ordinary self. As the scarlet-robed Alder-
men entered the central aisle, the organ struck
up a triumphant march, a thousand lads rose
respectfully to their feet, and the procession
parted off in mid-aisle into two square pews of
honour. One felt an almost irresistible British
impulse to hurrah. But the spectacle of the
Aldermen in the pews calmed down our enthu-
siasm into a serious repose. These grave digni-
taries were not satisfied with a hurried smell
into their hats like private men, but, with their
piety expanded by their public functions and
uniforms, they knelt down, buried their faces,
like clergymen, in their ruffles, and for a long
while seemed immersed in prayer. During the
service, they would rest large books upon the
backs of the pews, and repeat the answers in
loud voices that sounded all the louder from the
absence of the ordinary congregation. They
seemed to be praying at us boys; making, for
example's sake, a magnificent display of first-
class Ninevite piety. I used to think it was no
wonder they were so religious, with silk knee-
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
79
breeches on, white-silk stockings, silver-buckled
shoes, scarlet robes, and massive prayer-books.
in hand, every letter in which was as big as a
blue-bottle,—not to speak of the luncheon they
had already taken and the dinner that was
awaiting them in the school committee-room.
us.
Whilst I am in church I would fain record the
impressions made on me by a few memorable
discourses. Upon the death of the incumbent
the curate preached a funeral sermon. His text
was: 'We'-meaning the incumbent and him-
self-went up into the house of God together.'
This statement amazed me exceedingly; for
the incumbent had been a non-resident, and
had never set eyes on the oldest boy amongst
I inferred, however, that incumbent and
curate had been in the habit of going through
the services on week-days snugly and comfort-
ably by themselves. At the close of his dis-
course the preacher was so overcome with his
own eloquence and the recollection of these re-
ligious tête-à-têtes that he was unable to lift his
head off the cushion, and two church-wardens
had to lead him by the arms down the pulpit
stairs. It was touching beyond words to tell.
But the occasion was nothing for pathos to that
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SCHOOL MEMORIES.
on which our friend, having failed in his candi-
dature for the incumbency, preached as it were
his own funeral sermon; dug his pulpit-grave
before our very eyes, got into it, and covered
himself all over with a mould of words. Every-
body wept from great church-wardens and
beadles down to common laymen and chits like
myself. Not more universal was the world's
sorrow at the death of Baldur, or the sobbing of
the feathered creation at the murder of Cock
Robin.
For many years our afternoon preacher was a
stranger, who was an ecclesiastical Paganini, and
played or preached upon one string. His hearers
consisted chiefly of servant-maids and school-
boys. He appeared to be dreadfully-I some-
times thought, needlessly-alarmed at the
prospect of our being all converted to Roman
Catholicism. How he belaboured the Pope, to
be sure! He seemed to stick him up like a
straw-stuffed Guy Fawkes right in front of him-
self in the organ-loft, and to bowl at him furi-
ously for the hour together. I never heard any
one secular man say of another secular man
such hard things as this clergyman said of his
great ecclesiastical enemy. Some of the words
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
81
he used would have been indelicate out of the
pulpit; would have savoured monosyllabically
of Billingsgate. How thankful I used to feel I
had been born in a true Protestant land, where
priestcraft had no power, where bigotry was a
thing unknown, and where we all were at liberty
to believe implicitly every single thing our
clergymen told us! O the blessings of enlight-
enment to my countrymen !
'O fortunati nimium, sua si bona nôrint, Agricolæ !'
It was not for nothing that our Paganini
bowled at the organ-loft; for he was in course
of time raised to a post of considerable dignity
and emolument through the influence with an
evangelical Prime-Minister of a then omnipotent
noble Dean-and-Bishop-maker, who in all his
selections for places of honour rightly preferred
elocutionary powers and Protestant zeal to the
respectable but earthy recommendations of in-
dustry, patience, learning, common-sense, self-
control, and practical well-doing.
In course of time I emerged into the Upper
Form. For a while I still pursued my way in
darkness, until at length I reached the mathe-
matical school, and an Euclid and an algebra
were put into my hands; and I had a sensation
F
82
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
45
as though I had been walking through long dark
alleys in a subterranean coal-cellar, and that I
now through an opening saw the light of day;
and I seemed to myself to climb up through
the opening and stare at the blue sky above;
but ever and anon I would be called upon to
re-descend, and rest contented for a while with
partial light. And then came my apotheosis
in the three years of my Hellenisty; happy,
industrious, and, to a very great extent, useful
years. Indeed, of these three years I should.
consider that, at the most, only one would be
wasted in the pursuit of useless and unedifying
and impracticable knowledge; whereas, of my
first six years, as spent in the metropolitan
school, the concluding six months might, with
good teachers and sensible methods, have pro-
duced as good or as bad a result. And at
length the time came for my doffing the graceful
gown of the Hellenist, and going out into the
world an ordinary trousered, waistcoated, be-
hatted mortal. The invisible Policeman came
nudging me with his inexorable bâton.
Naked came I into St. Edward's—literally
naked; for I was stripped to the skin, and reclad
in my blue regimentals. Naked came I in; and
SCHOOL MEMORIES.
83
what am I carrying out in my carpet-bag? Let
us examine: one very great friendship and
some few lesser ones; affectionate and grateful
recollections of three masters and friends; some
mathematics and French stowed away neatly
and compactly, and a great lot of classics rather
confusedly huddled together; and bless me! in
amongst the classics has tumbled a deal of alcaic
sawdust, hexametrical cinders, iambic chaff, and
other intellectual marine-stores. Well, never
mind; if these latter are of no earthly use in the
outer world, they are highly valued at the univer-
sity of Camelot to which I am proceeding; so
we may just as well take care of them for three
more years, and then we may with safety throw
them all away into the eternal dustbin.
84
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
熬
​III.
COLLEGE MEMORIES.

FTER twelve years of bareheadedness
and blue and yellow bedizenment,
I found myself, behatted and be-
trousered, with carpet-bag crammed as aforesaid,
at the gate of the great College of St. Henry,
in the old, quaint, picturesque, academic city of
Camelot. And now observe, reader, it is not
with an obtrusively personal view of publishing
an autobiography that in the present chapter or
elsewhere I make frequent and direct use of the
first personal pronoun. I am of opinion, firstly,
that there is a semi-concealed indirectness of
speech that is infinitely more egotistic than
egotism; and secondly, that a man may be
allowed to speak frankly concerning himself, if
his words tend in the most indirect way to clear
away misapprehension, to expose error, or to
illustrate a curious past. So far, kind reader,
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
85
from wishing to obtrude upon you any adven-
tures of my own merely as my own, I would
rather forget them my own self. Indeed, I am
deeply grateful to my Maker for having blessed
me with an indifferent memory; so that nine-
tenths of my past life is to me a total blank;
and sometimes the greater part of the remain-
ing tenth seems hardly worth the remembering.
How pleasant it is to take up a book of Homer,
a chapter in Don Quixote, or a play of Shak-
speare, and read it, nominally for the twentieth
time, but virtually for the first! It is the
only kind of food you can eat again and again
with an ever fresh relish. A Roman emperor
adopted the most bestial expedients to pur-
chase the enjoyment of multiplied daily ban-
·quets. How he must have envied a cow her
capacity of luxurious rumination! But a man
with a bad memory is an intellectual rumi-
nator. Imagine the case of a married man
totally forgetting all about his wife once in every
twenty-four hours, and falling desperately in
love with her every morning over the breakfast
table. What a delicious series of recurring little
honeymoons! However, such a condition might
have its drawbacks; it would make of life a
7
1
86
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
succession of jerks, would ruin the nervous sys-
tem, and bring on heart disease or a sentimental
delirium tremens.
This digression upon memory has left me for
a while standing at the gate of that noblest of
all noble colleges, piously dedicated to St.
Henry, the many-wived Defender of his own
Faiths-five times these as numerous as his
wives. I knocked timidly, and a little wicket
was opened by a middle-aged gentleman in
black clerical costume. There was an expres-
sion of calm intellectuality in his countenance,
and a tallowy complexion seemed to tell of
mental labour and physical repose.
To my
astonishment this gentleman stepped forward,
shouldered my portmanteau, and led the way
to rooms temporarily assigned to me,-nay,
more, on leaving me, he condescended to accept
a trifling gratuity. And yet this dignitary was
better off in point of total income than I was then,
or have been since, or am ever likely to be. He
was only a junior porter, and yet his predecessor
had recently retired before old age with savings
from salary and houseletting that amounted to a
settled income of three hundred pounds a year.
I afterwards ascertained that the regular salary
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
87
of the head porter was five hundred pounds
per annum; in other words, one-third in excess
above the salary of any of the Government
merely intellectual professors in Ireland. The
cook and butler also I discovered to be men of
great possessions. One quadrangle of the college
had been built with the aid of some large sum
lent by one of these gentlemen for the purpose.
One of the two, also, was maintaining his sons
in aristocratic state at a leading college else-
where, where, beyond the smell of the paternal
meat or malt, they associated exclusively with
the lucky sons of dukes and earls and baronets
and landed gentlemen and mercantile princes
and college cooks and college butlers. These
lucky lads wear silver tassels in their caps and
silver braiding on their gowns, and dine at high
table in Hall with Doctors and Fellows, like
parlour boarders at girls' boarding-schools; and
are expected at their departure to bequeath
handsome presents of plate, as little boys are re-
quired to bring with them knives and forks and
spoons to provincial academies; which knives and
forks and spoons are seen of the boys' kindred
no more.
At no place in the world could a young man
88
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
..
of independent means have spent a year or two
of early manhood more pleasantly than at St.
Henry's. There would have been just enough
of academic restraint imposed to give a zest
to his liberty. But for the lectures and chapel
services he would have been entirely his own
master; and even these duties were light enough,
and would seem to have been invented for the
purpose of dispelling rather than causing ennui.
He would have seen daily passing before him
a miniature England, with its lords and com-
moners and commonest. I myself was one of
these commonest; in other words, I had entered
as a sizar. Among my fellow-sizars were many
youths that have by this time risen to eminence
in various departments of learning and science.
We, the commonest, had special seats set apart
for us in chapel, for fear we should rub elbows
with the spangled son of any lucky college butler.
We had occasionally to wait at the Hall-door
until our wealthier brethren had done feeding. In
former days our serfdom would have been even
more galling. Within the memory of living men,
sizars, or poor scholars, brought the soup-tureens
into Hall for the Fellows' table-nay, the tureen
had been so brought in by a then living presi-
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
89.
dent of a Camelot college, who, on one occasion,
upon being severely reprimanded by a Fellow for
spilling the soup, had replied, somewhat saucily,
that he would stop the practice when president
of the college. He had kept his promise.
I remember my surprise when, for the first
time, I saw an undergraduate walking about
in a Master-of-Arts' gown, with an ordinary
unacademic chimney-hat. I naturally supposed
that the young man was either muddled with
liquor or contumaciously engaged in winning a
wager. My surprise was multiplied on learning
that this anticipatory and heterogeneous cos-
tume was vouchsafed to the youngsters whom
Alma Mater-dear, conservative old lady—
especially delighted to honour. The youth was
a nobleman, son of a minister of state. He
was allowed to take a Master's degree almost at
the outset of his estate of pupilhood. The pious
fiction was admitted, that a young noble with
little or no work could grasp attainments whose
acquisition required years and years of toil from
middle-class or plebeian students. There were,
in fact, certain crotchets of Alma Mater that
would have set Heraclitus a-laughing or moved
Democritus to tears.
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
As a true Englishman, I am deeply thankful
for the existence of our House of Lords. I look
upon it as the source of half of England's happi-
ness. I should like to be a duke, were it only
for the amount of pleasure I should be con-
tinually giving. I should feel in my heart that
every time I listened to a middle-class country-
man I was gratifying him; that when I talked
with him I was delighting him; that when I
grasped him by the hand I was thrilling him
with a kind of holy fervour; that virtue was
going out of me. I should consider myself
as walking about with an irrigating faculty,
scattering pleasure and gratification out of my
coat-tails like a watering-cart. When by the
marriage ceremony I should have transformed
some happy woman into a duchess, the bliss
hereby generated would not be confined to her,
but emanating from her would traverse, in ever-
widening concentric circles, the surface of an
entire county, and for moons and moons Com-
mittees of Rejoicings would unwearyingly dis-
charge squibs and crackers in a delirious ecstasy
of plebeian joy. And even when I died I should
for a little while be a distributor of gratification.
Clad in the uniform wherein I had glittered at
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
91
innumerable reviews, with my still breast spark-
ling with decorations achieved by the number of
my acres, the length of my pedigree, and the
extent of my parliamentary influence, I should
lie in a solemn and supercilious state, an object
of marvel to intelligent spectators, who to a dis-
play of fire-works or acrobat skill, almost to the
excitement of a prize-fight or a hanging, would
prefer the spectacle of a real dead and quasi-
pickled duke. I never read without very pecu-
liar emotions that ennobling and truly English
couplet, written itself by a nobleman,-
'Let learning, arts, let wealth and commerce die,
But give, O give us still our old nobility!'
The institutions of our great universities are
not likely to allow in our youth forgetfulness of,
or indifference to, the advantages of rank and
money. I have known an able-bodied youth,
son of a wealthy and titled father, to be plucked
at the Horse-Guards for the most ludicrous
blunders in spelling; but this illiterate able-
bodied youth wore the usual silver tassel in his
cap and the usual silver braiding on his academic
gown. I have known an earl to be plucked for
a matriculation ordeal through which an aged
•
92
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
cabman might be made to pass with one year
of private instruction; and yet this illiterate lad
took precedence in the university church of all
the heads of houses, with the exception only of
the Vice-Chancellor of the year. I remember
once seeing this precedence taken by the youth
in question of the burly, autocratic, colossally-
intellectual, and Tudor-like President of our
Tudor-foundation. I must confess that I sinned
against my lord-loving English instincts by
giving way to a feeling of morbid indignation,
on thus observing youth and luck and stupidity
in the heart of an university and in the house of
God take the place of honour before mature
years, indomitable industry, encyclopædic attain-
ments, and the doctorial hood of a presumed.
theologian.
Now, reader, if you had your way, you would
probably ordain that, in institutions devoted to
scholarship and science, genius and ability and
industry should wear whatever tassels were
agoing, and that vulgar ignorance and plebeian
spelling, though found in an earl or the son of
a wealthy grazier, should be stigmatized with
garret habitation, mean place at board, serge
gown, and untasseled cap. Such regulations,
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
93
reader, might work well in America, France, the
Pacific Islands, or the moon; but their simplicity
would ill prepare young Englishmen for the
artificial complexity of the civilisation in which
their manhood would have to be passed. You
must bear in mind that in our multiplex society
literature, art, and science have no recognised
position. It is but logical, then, that in our old
historic universities the aspirants to scholastic
or scientific distinction should occupy the lower
platform which, with all their distinctions.
achieved, they will inevitably occupy in their
post-academic career.
But the advantages of St. Henry's were not con-
fined to the wealthy, nor was talent and industry
confined to her sizars. Many choice specimens
of England's studious youth, rich and poor, were
there. Little of direct assistance in their studies
was lent them by the collegiate authorities; all
really effective tuition was private and expen-
sive; but there was throughout the atmosphere
of the place a something that kindled emulation.
and smelt of hard work and ambition and
honour. Whatever distinction was achieved at
St. Henry's was achieved against odds, and was
valued in the outer world. With all her anoma-
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
lous customs and the serious deficiency of sound
academic instruction, you could not have stayed
a year at St. Henry's without much of mental
and of social gain. I envy the youths that now
are reaping the fruit of the manifold generous
improvements that have been introduced into
her intellectual curriculum since the day I left
in sorrow her honoured and loved walls.
It was Res-angusta-domi that whispered to me.
the fatal advice of repairing to St. Ignavia, for
the purpose of securing a few of her smaller—
valuable, but easily-won-rewards. For three
years I rotted at St. Ignavia's. I may be said to
have there intellectually anticipated decomposi-
tion. Nowhere in the world, save, perhaps, in
the heart of China, would you light upon so de-
lightful, peaceful, drowsy, comfortable, venerable,
useless a caravansera of idlesse. Such institu-
tions in our midst are relics of a dead-and-gone
civilisation. They moulder away in a beautiful
and ivy-clad decay, and putrefy with a not un-
pleasing odour, like the odour of church-incense.
But, still, they are decaying, putrefying.
I had been for twelve years at school, and at
least two-thirds of this period had been spent in
learning the ins and outs of two dead languages.
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
95
They were still dead languages to me, although
I had gone over a considerable field of their
literature. They were similar in my appre-
hension to that mysterious latter of two lan-
guages concerning which Homer occasionally
speaks, when he says: 'Mortal men call so-
and-so Tweedle-dum, but the Immortals call it
Tweedle-dee.' My chances of success at Camelot
depended greatly upon my increase of skill in
the manipulation of these two dead tongues;
and to a very little extent upon a broad and
catholic study of the treasures-historic, philo-
sophic, and æsthetic-that are embalmed in
them. But St. Ignavia was a sucking mother
with wooden breasts. I had two hours there of
daily tuition-one in classics, one in mathematics.
They were both over before the majority of my
companions took their breakfast. So far as I
was concerned, they might both have been
superintended by the under-porter; who, by-
the-by, was a droll and memorable character,
and apparently under a vow of drinking some
impossible quantity of beer before his call to
another and a beerless world. I felt as though
the dial of my days had run back ten years,
when in my first classical lecture I heard a
1
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
bearded man called upon to parse ‘tuleram,' and
heard the wretch go without a smile through
the old mystic, but nearly forgotten, formula of-
'Fero, tuli, latum, ferre.' I left the lecture-room
with fear and trembling; for it seemed as though
I were on a retrograde road; that in a year I
should be put to pot-hooks and hangers, the
year after to the perusal of Red Ridinghood,
and take my Bachelor's degree in a frock, with
my bib slobbered over.
However, it was of no use despairing until I
had fully sounded the teaching capacities of St.
Ignavia. I had still the mathematical lecture-
room to fall back upon. I had but to strike the
rock in faith, and streams of science would well
out. Very hungry, and a little unbelieving, I
went to a garret in the further quadrangle. The
ceiling sloped very uncomfortably down to the
ground, some panes in the window were broken,
and a dismal fire gave out a little smoky warmth
reluctantly. On a dirty deal table were scattered
old examination papers, with writing upon one
side. Upon the clean sides we were to inscribe
the subject-matter of our teaching. After a con-
siderable interval our lecturer appeared, like a
man roused suddenly from a night's sleep upon
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
97
1
his sofa. He had obviously forgotten to shave
himself for many days, or was meditating a
beard. He muttered in an indistinct voice some
puerilities regarding mathematical trifles that
had been familiar to me for years. My heart
died away within me. For comfort, I examined
the backs of the examination papers before me.
I found comfort. The papers contained answers
to questions in theology. Some youth (who
must now have been a parson for at least twelve
years,) had been called on to give a life of Eli,
and had closed it with these words: 'The aged
prophet was seated in his chair when news was
brought him of the capture of the ark; thunder-
struck with grief on hearing the dismal intelli-
gence, he fell backwards on his own sword, and
perished miserably.' The perusal of this docu-
ment-funny enough in itself—was not very re-
assuring to me in my condition of mental alarm;
for I inferred, not rashly, that the University
of Camelot provided for her theological alumni
teaching not superior to what in the way of
classics and mathematics was given to her chil-
dren by St. Ignavia.
Our comfortable little caravansera-college con-
tained in all some twenty-seven students and a
G
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
staff of some sixteen or eighteen Fellows. A
great many of the latter were non-resident, and
all were in receipt from the college funds of
over three hundred pounds per annum. The
residents, some ten in number, were for the most
part of the ordinary cobra kind. They had
swallowed their intellectual goat in early life, and
were passing through the years of inactivity
requisite for digestion. The busy and famous
minority were in no way indebted to St. Ignavia
for their attainments or their reputation.
might have gone from St. Ignavia's to the Aca-
demia Regia by the mills, to the Caravansera
Regia on the main parade, or to Thule Aca-
demica-the resort of married elders; and here,
there, and everywhere you would have come
upon little comfortable coils of cobras, digesting
all at leisure their mathematical and Latin-and-
Greek goats.
You
Among the twenty-seven students I searched
in vain to find a youth of such attainments and
ambition combined as the lucrative rewards in
the gift of the college would have seemed likely
to attract. A few were youths of pleasant
gentlemanly ways; some able, but unambitious;
others—the majority-of moderate abilities and
:
GENERAL LIBRARY

COLLEGE MEMORIES.
99
slender attainments; the greater portion were
in the possession of independent means, seeking
the easiest possible road to genteel dilettante
ecclesiasticism; a small minority were illite-
rate beyond all redemption, but, at the same
time, were hearty, likable, hospitable fellows.
We were a motley regiment to march through
Coventry withal; and such commanders as we
had!
After lectures we would breakfast; some few
of us would do an hour or two's reading; at noon
there would be a meeting for luncheon, and we
would enjoy a tankard of good ale and a few
comfortable pipes; we would then take a long
constitutional, or play at cricket, or row upon
the narrow winding river; we would dine at
four; retire to a singular mélange of pipes, fruit,
and premature port wine; the chapel bell would
summon us at six; after chapel we would retire
to billiards, and return to a pleasant whist party
at ten, where sandwiches and illimitable stores
of ale and pipes on pipes would keep us in good
humour until very early hours. This delicious
and improving life went on season after season.
Thus did we work out our academical salvation.
We were in a comfortable little inn, with many
Uorm
100
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
:
waiters, who, for the respectability of the thing,
were thinly but not dishonestly disguised as
clergymen.
One of my companions was upon an occasion
sent for by the lecturer, to be reprimanded for
non-attendance in lecture-room that morning.
'I was there,' was the reply of my friend to the
question why he was not there;-'I was there,
sir, and waited for a quarter of an hour, and
nobody came; so I went away, sir; and I may as
well observe, sir, that your bedroom blinds were
down at the time.' Well, well; our lecturer was
a good fellow, and merely mistook his calling.
He was, after all, but one of those numerous
cobra-capellas, mathematical and classical, that
may be seen in high places, at board and in
senate-house, in the academic city of Camelot,
with their goats undigested in their stomachs.
Another curious incident I must relate, in
reference to the religious discipline of our little
caravansera. One of our waiters, disguised, of
course, as a clergyman, was entitled dean, and
his peculiar business was to sweep us into
college chapel. On one occasion I was sent for,
to be reprimanded for non-attendance at sacra-
ment. I pleaded that the rite was a very
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
ΙΟΙ
i
solemn one, and that the amusements of the
week previous, and indeed of college life in
general, were but a poor preparation for attend-
ance at so esoteric an ordinance. I was merely
informed that attendance once every term was
enforced by college regulations, and that I must
either make my appearance at regular intervals,
or stand the very serious consequences. God
forgive me! I attended ever after at the regu-
lar intervals. And yet I was convinced in my
heart that the sacrament was not originally an
academic institution, but a holy rite of divine
origin from which or into which no collegiate
regulation had any right to debar or to enforce.
And further, I would remark that the com-
pulsory daily attendance at college chapel may,
perhaps, be desirable upon grounds of moral
discipline under certain conditions,-to wit, if
the college be permeated by a wholesome at-
mosphere of mental activity, and if the religious
services are such as can be attended by the de-
cided majority of actual and would-be entrants;
-but that such compulsory attendance can be
regarded merely as a solemn daily homage to
Grondê, the great goddess of convention, in
any institution where the seniors are for the
102
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
most part to their juniors but living examples of
duties neglected and talents misapplied.
There were, however, in our mixed commu-
nities certain sections of which every single
individual seemed more resolute, energetic, and
industrious than his neighbour. From two to
four P.M. the aspirants to mathematical honours
might be seen, with low shoes and scrimp trousers,
in search of dinner-appetites, tearing along the
Trumpington road. You would have imagined
there had been something explosive in the nature
of their morning's work, and that they were let-
ting off mental steam by ultra-physical activity.
These men, as a rule, were the dullest of com-
panions, hard as nails, dry as prose. For this
they were indebted to their devotion to one un-
mixed branch of study, that of theoretic analytical
mathematics. Their fancies were deadened, their
sympathies confined, and even their wits seemed
sharpened only for the solution of their own
special impracticable problems. Exclusive at-
tention to any one department is, of course,
greatly to be deprecated; but some departments
are in their nature more comprehensive than
others. No dull dry method of imparting classi-
cal knowledge can bind the fancy while poetry
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
103
is being read; historians will force some infor-
mation upon a student; and the pages of philo-
sophy and the daily grammatical analyses will
help to open and strengthen the reasoning powers.
But the exclusive study of metaphysics tends to
vaporize the brain, and mathematics, used exclu-
sively as an educational implement, are apt to
act upon the faculties like a grindstone on a
carving-knife, when under indiscreet manage-
ment it communicates a sharp edge at the cost
of half the steel.
The river meanwhile would be another scene
of uttermost exertion. The eight-oars would
be in training, and, if you were in good wind,
you might run for a while abreast of one of
them, and examine well the faces, the build,
and the action of the rowers. You would, I
am sure, acknowledge that a man might travel
far and wide before he met with finer speci-
mens of physical humanity. In a few cases,
brilliant from their paucity, a rower was a read-
ing man; as a general rule, the aspirations of
a boating-man were limited to the victory of his
club; his talk would be of long strokes and short
strokes, first winds and second winds. Were you
seated between two stalwart fresh-water mariners
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
at a supper-table, you might try your hardest in
vain to put a knife in between the intervals of
their professional remarks, the nature of which
would perhaps lead you to infer that the heads and
oars of the speakers had been framed out of one.
and the same material. These afternoon hours
were also devoted by certain others to cricket.
As the cricket-ground was comparatively small
for the number of its occupants, it required a
player to be for ever on the look-out to prevent
accidents. At times you would catch on the
calf of your leg a ball whizzing as from a catapult,
and simultaneously, in the crisis of your agony,
you would hear a cry of 'Ball, sir; thank you,
sir,' from the cheery voice of some big youth who
would be profoundly indifferent if you were set
limping for a week. There was something in
the open-air influences of these two great amuse-
ments that rendered almost all their votaries
thoroughly likable and respectable fellows. Low
dissipation was incompatible with due attention
to training. They betted very little, if at all,
upon
the issues of their matches. It was usually
an outsider that made or lost money upon them.
The worst specimens of undergraduate life were
to be sought for in the public billiard-rooms,
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
105
where at the gambling game of pool would regu-
larly meet, evening after evening, the sons of
titled and wealthy fathers-youths for the most
part as vulgar and illiterate as billiard-markers
and stable-boys. In not a few of these rooms
would be found a specimen of what may be
designated as the pediculus aleator or cue-louse,
an odious parasite that by dexterity of hand,
cunning in the make-up of a betting-book, and
toadyism on all occasions, would contrive to eke
a comfortable living out of dupes his inferiors in
sagacity, his equals in vulgarity and ignorance.
The vice of gambling was much rarer at the card-
table; but in and about my own time I knew of
instances of men of very limited means but of
consummate skill that made three hundred a
year and upwards at whist.
Our convivial entertainments were more re-
markable for hospitality and merriment than for
taste or elegance. The waiters on these occasions
were allowed the most audacious thievery. In-
experienced youths might be pardoned a little
prodigality, but college officials should be strictly
watched by college authorities. I remember dis-
tinctly a friend of my own being charged seven
shillings and sixpence for the simple cooking of
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
a hare, with which he had himself provided the
cook. It is but fair to add that the outrageous
fact when brought before the Fellows led to a
thorough reform in our culinary tariff. Our
supper entertainments closed with punch and
music. The punch was as good as the music
was execrable. The vocalists would be in a
minority; and each vocalist would be furnished.
with at most half-a-dozen songs of the commonest
kind; and these would be welcomed with a never-
failing cordiality. A metropolitan actor of third-
rate celebrity once paid us a visit, made our
punch, drank a great deal of it with obvious
gusto, and returned to Nineveh with the idea
that the study of Latin and Greek was adverse
to the worship of the Muses. On another occa-
sion, a highly cultivated Frenchman paid a few
of us a flying visit. He left us with the idea
that we were socially the pleasantest fellows, and
æsthetically the greatest boors in Europe. I can-
not help thinking that English youths would lose
none of their frankness, geniality, likability, good-
fellowship, love of fun, disgust for cant, if they
could be brought to cultivate refining and at the
same time amusing accomplishments. Surely
it would not be too much to expect in an univer-
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
107
sity of a rich and aristocracy-worshipping king-
dom that, when students met together for social
purposes, their voices and their fingers might
produce more of harmony than could be educed
from the frequenters of a Ninevite tavern. I met
by chance one student in Camelot who could
play the piano, and one that could sing, like an
artist; a few that could strum a polka; but in
any mixed company it would have been hopeless
to make up a singing quartette or trio. In fact,
our general music was of the old, merry, pleasant,
barbarous school of Signor Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra-
loo. For all that, our musical evenings were
to me--I say it not without regret-most en-
joyable. I cannot say as much for the morn-
ings that followed. However, great changes are
being introduced, I hear. Perhaps, when our
children are undergraduates, they will have the
harp, sackbut, and psaltery at their more sober
and frugal banquets. I trust they will be as
jovial and hearty as their fathers, and just a little
more refined; that they will sing more and
better; that they will drink less and smoke less ;
and that they will discontinue the fashion now
universal in Camelot of spitting on the carpet.
It cannot be a wrong thing to wish with grand
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COLLEGE MEMORIES.
old chivalric Hector that of our children it should
be said: "They are far better men than their
fathers,'
I have given the details extraneous to instruc-
tion of sixteen years of school and college life.
The greater portion of the latter ten of these
was, in regard to study, devoted chiefly to per-
fecting myself, to the best of my faculties, in
Latin and Greek composition, prose and verse.
I do not think that Methuselah could with
prudence have expended as much time out of
his abundance upon so elegant, but yet so
superfluous, an accomplishment. And strange
to say, although I had devoted the greater
portion of my sixteen years to the acquisition,
for reading and writing purposes, of two dead
languages, I had never once from the lips of
teacher heard a hint concerning the science of
language or the secrets of history which philo-
logy has aided to unfold. At the age of twenty-
three, after an academic career of moderate
success, I stood a trembling novice upon the
confines of a strange world. I had a thousand
causes for feeling grateful for kindness upon
kindness shown to me by my elders in the old
school times and the recent college years. But
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
109
I felt in a singular way chagrined, mortified, dis-
heartened. I was possessor of a certain amount
of old-fashioned learning, which I found it diffi-
cult to exchange into useful and current coin.
I was ignorant of the elements of law, experi-
mental physics, natural history, physiology,
psychology, political and social science. I was
utterly ignorant of the ways of the world.
From what I had seen in a place ostensibly
devoted to the acquisition of sound learning
I naturally inferred that in the world into which
I was now about to plunge I should find rank
and wealth, however idle and stupid, tasselled in
public places, and poor merit, talent, or industry
insulted at the social board, or degraded to
special and lower benches in the house of God.
I had left school, crammed with scraps of
quaint old curiosity-shop knowledge, and inordi-
nately conceited of my broken-china attainments.
The conceit within me had been toned down by
the wholesome social influences of college life.
But in my capacity of student I had worked on
and on in the old groove, and I now stood help-
less and unpractical in the face of a busy prac-
tical generation. I was equipped, as it were,
with battle-axe and breastplate to cope with
IIO
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
rifles and cannon. I had been educated after
a particular fashion, not upon the ground that
the fashion in question was suited to this place or
to this epoch, but simply because youth had been
so educated from the days of Augustus Cæsar.
And here I must pause for a moment to dilate
upon the miraculous conservatism of mankind.
We use a ring in the marriage ceremony, and
eat a morsel of indigestible cake, and throw old
shoes after a departing pair, because such prac-
tices have been in vogue beyond the memory of
man; and there is little harm in all this. A
godfather gives his godchild a silver mug and a
silver knife and fork, because he, in former days,
received such gifts from his godfather. The gifts
have little of the Christian character to recom-
mend them; but, as they are suggestively typical
of traits in our national character, we may as well
continue to abide by them. We carry a deceased
brother to the grave with ceremonies of the
most foolish and ludicrous kind; and there is
no very great harm in all this-none at all,
probably, to the deceased one. But that, in
defiance of the revolution of nearly two thousand
years, in assumed ignorance of all the know-
ledge accumulated during the last three cen-
COLLEGE MEMORIES.
III
turies and accumulating hourly before our eyes;
forgetting, or assuming to forget, that we were
a new people, with new language, literature,
institutions, and religion,—that, under all this
complexity of change, we should, until as it
were but yesterday, have held on to the mono-
tonous curriculum of instruction followed by a
dead-and-gone civilisation, it would seem to
me that there was much of evil-let us say,
rather, of inexplicable stupidity-in all this. Is
it not as though for us, mutton and beef and
potatoes and green peas and anchovy-sauce had
been foolishly-nay, wickedly—ignored, and we
had been fed daily, through boyhood and youth,
on the acorns of a venerable antiquity?
112 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
IV.
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.

U
NDER the delusive idea that I might
one day be called to a fairly-earned
college Fellowship, I presented my-
self as candidate for a Classical Mastership in a
great school in Dunedin, and was successful in
my candidateship. The position was to a pren-
tice-hand so remunerative an one, its duties were
so much to my taste, the Fellowship seemed com-
posed of such cloudlike and dissolving material,
and the calls upon my means were so numerous
and pressing, that I was led by slow degrees to
drop all ideas of a mixed literary and legal life,
and to turn my attention more and more earnestly
and undividedly to the calling into which I had
been fortuitously drawn.
For a long time I was more modest and diffi-
dent in my demeanour to my boys than they
were to me. Not that they were rude or under-
bred. They were almost unexceptionally plea-
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 113
S
I
sant well-mannered little fellows. But for a
while I felt, as I imagine many a young clergy-
man must feel under analogous circumstances,
that I was working at a business of very great im-
portance with a conscious doubt as to my special
calling thereto. Slowly and slowly the serious-
ness of my vocation made itself apparent.
began to examine closely the nature of my work.
I was hereby led to discard certain time-honoured
manuals, as being, to my thinking, worse than
useless; as being impediments no less to the
teacher than to the taught. I worked voluntary
work with my more enthusiastic pupils, and in
leisure hours went through with what were.
unwisely termed my 'boobies' a great deal of
work which to them was, probably, involuntary
and Egyptian taskwork. Colleagues of un-
doubted friendship, kindness, and sagacity,
warned me in vain. 'Pas trop de sèle!' was
whispered continually in my ear. I was told
-and the warning was justified by the sequel
-that I had better do too little than attempt
too much; that I should in a short time bring
about me a hornet's nest of private tutors, dis-
satisfied because relatively unprogressive-
pupils, and, what would be most formidable,
—
H
114 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
dissatisfied parents of relatively unprogressive
pupils. Confident in the disinterestedness of
my motives, and vainly trusting to my supposed
mental and my real physical powers, I went
on and on from innovation to innovation, from
enthusiasm to enthusiasm.
After a while I found corporeal chastisement
to be less and less necessary for the preservation
of discipline. The excitement of the class-room
began to be an enjoyment. I mingled with my
boys, as did other colleagues with theirs, in the
school-yard games; would go with some of
them on long Saturday rambles over the neigh-
bouring mountains. The incidents of school-
life followed me into my home privacy. My
retrospective wistful looks grew fewer and fewer
as I followed my scholastic plough, until at
length I looked forward only. I became heart
and soul a schoolmaster.
One morning I was seated at a quarter before
eleven with a senior class before me, when a
messenger entered the room, gave a whisper in
my ear, and I rose in haste and bewilderment,
and on reaching my home found that the rela-
tive on whom half my earthly hopes were fixed,
who was the last link that bound me to the past,
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 115
!
and who, in apparent health, had given me my
breakfast an hour or two before, was dead.
A very short time after this loss, before my
health or spirits had had time for full recovery,
I received a letter from the Secretary of our
Schola Nova, stating that, for certain reasons
not therein mentioned, my resignation would be
a thing desirable to the Directors. In utter
amazement and consternation, I spent a day in
calling upon each one of these latter; was in-
formed by many that they knew nothing definite
of the matter; by a select few that I had been
all along considered as entertaining views or
possessing accomplishments too high-pitched for
my position; that, in point of fact, the public of
Dunedin would prefer a more conservative, go-
in-strings, imitative, plastic schoolmaster.
By the aid of influential friends this movement,
as cruelly unjust to myself, as-to my honest, if
immodest, thinking-unwise to the prospects of
Dunedin local education, was abandoned, and I
was confirmed in my position. Looking upon
the movement against me as a sign of timid re-
spect for uncultivated public opinion wholly un-
deserving of regard, I continued unswervingly my
petty plans of reform. One by one dull manuals
116 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
went on dropping, dropping. One by one my
pupils were withdrawn. I began to dread the
fate of the horse that endeavoured to live with-
out hay. The Rector of my school, my Col-
leagues, and the Directors had perfect confidence.
in my motives for good, my scholarship, my
powers of maintaining without effort strictest
discipline and of awakening enthusiasm among
my pupils. My lads on arriving at the Upper
School were pronounced as inferior in practical
training to none others. I might say more with
truth, if I quoted from authoritative words ex-
pressed and printed. My heart began to dilate
within me. My fellow-townsmen, I thought,
were beginning to appreciate my disinterested
audacity. I was a great goose.
Meanwhile, upon an early May morning,
when I had prepared to leave for my ordinary
routine of duty, I was warned by a medical man
of impending alien danger; and after some eight
days, when the danger was alas! over, I found
myself in my class-room with some forty or fifty
little faces staring at me as if wondering I
could appear amongst them so soon and with so
little alteration in my looks after so great and
terrible a storm had passed over me.
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 117
By this time I had been, for a short week or
two, a father. Henceforward I entered into my
work with a single-heartedness that, I am sure,
has never been surpassed. I claim no credit
for it, God knows. The cause for all was above
and outside me. In my home, compassed round
about with love and sorrow, was lying in his tiny
cradle a motherless boy, from whom had issued
some mysterious influence, transfiguring child-
hood to my eyes, and hallowing my vocation.
The once rarely used instrument of punishment
was lying somewhere unnoticed, forgotten. But,
so far from waxing indulgent, I became more
than ever exacting. The progress of each single
pupil became to me a matter of painful interest.
During my five or six hours of work I sat like
a father among a large family of sons; I knew
honestly in my heart that I was liked by all the
lads around me and beloved by a few; and in
my heart I felt that the interests of all were
dear to me. But, strange to say, when the bell
rang to give us liberty to quit, I first dis-
charged my hours of private tuition, and then
found my way to the sea-side, and, with the aid
of Don Quixote or a play of Shakespeare, for-
got all about my daily duties; and, if a lad of
118 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
familiar visage passed me on the road during
the afternoon or evening, I lacked either the
courage or the inclination to recognise him.
The nervous tension of this life became at last
too much for me, and I had to seek health and
strength in a tour for some months. On my
return to my old duties, I was again assailed
unjustly, cruelly, and unwisely by the old notice.
to quit. I was informed that a subordinate's
duty was not fitted for me; that, if higher
duties had been open, they would possibly have
been offered, but that I was apparently alto-
gether unfitted to go in other people's harness.
'I wish to goodness,' said one of the Directors,
complimenting me in terms far above my merits,
'that you were a little less in advance of your
times.' 'I am of opinion,' said another, who
had had two sons for many years under my
charge, that a boy who should pass through
a complete curriculum under your care would
obtain the best education that Scotland has to
bestow. But I still urge your resignation on
the grounds that your method of teaching is
not in harmony with the habits-or, if you
please, the prejudices-of the place.' Surely
they who see clearly should guide the blinking
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 119
and the blind. In the very nick of time a Pro-
fessorship in Ireland opened out to receive me,
and the enthusiasm for reform that was con-
sidered damnatory of the schoolmaster was held
as a token of promise for a professorial chair.
So much was my zeal for innovation resented
or misappreciated that, after my appointment
was all but ratified, a gentleman (?), of name yet
unknown to me, but of considerable standing in
Dunedin, wrote a private and confidential letter
in regard to a public appointment to the Irish
Executive, warning them against employing an
unsuccessful schoolmaster, and that too although
the writer must have known that my lack of
success with his own fellow-townsmen had been
due entirely to the fact that they had con-
sidered professorial and magisterial teaching as
essentially diverse, and that I had considered
them as modifications one of the other; that
they had held to the doctrine that the lessons of
children should be fragmentary, discontinuous,
jerky, and I to the theory that they should be
rounded, flowing, continuous, and comfortable;
that they had adhered doggedly to the doctrine
of letting well alone, and that I as stubbornly
had preached the necessity of change.
120 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
:
·
These passing words concerning my own.
scholastic life are merely penned by way of
illustrating how unreasoning, jealous, and vin-
dictive is the conservatism in matters educa-
tional of the most liberal and most generally
cultivated of my countrymen. They may act
as an useful warning to young, enthusiastic,
would-be educational reformers. In Dunedin, a
city whose chief article of commerce may be said
to be instruction, whose local wealth and im-
portance is bound up intimately with the value
of this its article of export, with numerous
warmly attached personal friends amongst pupils,
colleagues, directors, and the public, I found it a
continual struggle to maintain myself in my posi-
tion, and eventually found it a very difficult task
to get out of it, and that only and avowedly
because I taught upon a new fashion of 'from
easy to hard,' 'from beginning to end.'
Directors were specially sent from time to
time to inspect me through a lesson. They
would report that my method was very pleasant
to follow; that they would willingly be listeners
for an hour or two; but that it was chatting, or
lecturing, or a something between the two; but
that, whatever it might be, it was not teaching.
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 121
And they were quite correct. I never intended
to teach in the ordinary acceptation of the term.
I went to school day after day to learn; for
school I had been always brought up to consider
as a place for learning. I divined as correctly
as I could the condition of the average boy-
intellect around me, and went with it through
every phase of puzzlement, curiosity, intuition,
reflection. I learned every lesson set my pupils ;
read it, marked it, and inwardly digested it.
Non tam magister eram puerorum quàm disci-
pulorum condiscipulus. Whatever kind of work
appeared to me on reflection or experiment as
unhealthy, I passed over rapidly or omitted alto-
gether. When reading a Latin poem, I could
repeat hundreds of lines without a book, al-
though none had been consciously committed
to memory; and my pupils with books closed
would take me up at a pause. I could do the
same—not from the strength of my memory,
for it is weak; but from the strength of my
enthusiasm, and that was great indeed-with
Greek epic, tragedy, or speech. When we
changed one author for another, I forgot with
an inexplicable rapidity the long lessons thus
unconsciously learned.
122 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
I made use of a Latin or Greek grammar
solely to assist my boys in learning by rote the
declensions and conjugations. For about two
years I parsed English sentences daily with be-
ginners, using very simple phraseology, and un-
folding very gradually all the little I knew of
the history, the construction, the peculiarities,
and affinities of our complex beautiful language;
and, when the method of dissecting a paragraph
and a sentence had become familiar and trite, I
transferred it with modifications and additions
to the manipulation of Latin or Greek.
By the rule of the institution my classes were
open to public visitors one day in every week.
On these days I was greatly tempted to amuse
the new-comers and grasp at local fame by`bor-
ing myself and my pupils; in other words, to
make a great show of energy on my own part
and of knowledge on the part of the lads by
asking with volubility and loud voice strings of
questions upon matter familiar as their surnames
to the interrogated; in point of fact, to make a
great noise and smoke at these scholastic reviews
by shooting off blank cartridges. Great as was
the temptation, I can honestly say I never once
gave in to it, but put my questions at random,
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 123
as they rose naturally out of my head and my
work; and sometimes these questions were so
vexatiously puzzling to my class and to myself
that many minutes of silence would ensue ; and
my visitors would leave the room under the idea
that we were all going to sleep like sloths upon a
narcotic tree of knowledge, and would go search-
ing about the grounds to find entrance into some
more noisy and interesting monkey-menagerie
under the control of a more vivacious keeper.
I must own that on these visiting days I
always felt, I could hardly say why, in danger.
The visitors—who were chiefly women-folk—
would sometimes ask questions apparently pre-
pared with the subtly diabolical intention of
working my ruin. I remember one lady asking
me why her boy stood so low as thirty-fifth on
my class. I took a considerable while to reflect
upon this insidious conundrum, and at length
informed her that the most probable reason, to
my mind, was, that in the class there were thirty-
four boys who, in my department, were better
than her own boy. Within a few days the child
was removed, for some unknown reason, from
my care. I remember when, on another occa-
sion, a mother came sailing into my room before
124 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
a gale of indignation, towing a miscreant whom
she had found battering her darling; and I was
entreated, almost ordered, to take vengeance on
the spot.
I held a court of inquiry, and the
singular and unexpected verdict was: Serve
him right.' If I was frank, the mother was
sensible; for the lad was left under my charge.
(
I may as well state that, by imperceptible
degrees, the government of my class passed from
despotism to constitutional monarchy, and ended
in what was, perhaps, for the country in which I
lived, too near an approach to a pure and un-
defiled republicanism.
It is with children as with grown-up men; a
punishment, to be effective of good, should in-
variably carry with it the consent of the vast
majority. All ordinary punishments should be
codified; and remission should never, except for
considerations of health, be allowed. It should
also be distinctly understood that it is not the
Master but the public opinion and the interests
of the class by which and to the furtherance of
which all punishments are inflicted. On all ex-
traordinary occasions the system of Austrian
court-martial should be imitated, by which an
offender is tried by one representative of every
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 125
grade in a regiment. Thus, for an offence of any
serious nature involving the cause of morality
or the character of a school, the court of justice
should consist of a Head-master, a Master, and
the boy-captain of every class.
The ordinary punishment in an English school
for petty insubordination is corporeal chastise-
ment. The pain is usually borne with fortitude,
is usually inflicted without personal ill-motive,
and a grudge is seldom felt for long. Indeed, I
would venture to say that the punishment is, as
a rule, condoned by the sufferer before it is for-
gotten by the operator. I do not object to the
system on the grounds of mercy to the boy so
much as on the grounds of sympathy with the
Master. I am disposed to think that rough play
and hard knocks, given without premeditated.
malice, are good things when got in moderation.
I should not be in a great hurry to interrupt
what I knew to be a fair fight; it is possible I
should walk at a rapid pace to the scene of com-
bat, but by a roundabout way, and should not
feel distressed if, on my arrival, the fight were
determined in favour of the better man. One
great objection to physical chastisement is, that
its infliction burdens a respectable and honour-
126 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
able profession with ludicrous associations, and
tends in an indirect but most powerful way to
lower it in social estimation and recognised
rank. Another objection is, that the punish-
ment follows too quickly on the heels of the
supposed offence; and in many cases a willing
but dull pupil is filliped for the simple reason
that his teacher lacks skill or temper, as a dis-
affected subject has many a time been hanged
to atone for the injustice and the blundering of
statesman and ruler. Another objection is, that
such chastisement is not a natural result to any
ordinary breach of discipline. We can see a
congruity between a stone thrown at a hat on
one side and a smart blow inflicted on the other;
but there is no logical relationship between a
tingling hand or ear and a defective memory
or wandering attention.
The great public schools of France are under
central surveillance. A Professor-or Master, as
we should call him—can at any moment use the
Government screw to carry out his will within
certain limits. He can bring to bear upon a
pupil or class a terrific and irresistible pressure.
If he refrain from using the cane,-a ridiculous
and barbarous implement, I allow,--it is because
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 127
he can beat with a weapon like the yard-arm
of a ship. I would gladly see governmental aid,
sympathy, and surveillance operating through
academic agencies on all the educational insti-
tutions of my own country; but I am convinced
of this, that no Master would retain the goodwill
of his pupils, his colleagues, or his countrymen.
at large, who should venture to bring in external
authority to subdue the refractory spirit of his
lads. Indeed, I would go so far as to state that
such a call for aid in our country would be held
as tantamount to a letter of acknowledged in-
capacity and indirect resignation.
The discipline of a great national school should
be in strict analogy with surrounding habits and
prejudices. It should be an embryo nationality.
If absolutism be the form of government, pre-
ceptors should be absolute; if limited monarchy
with graduated ranks of society be acquiesced in,
the school should have a type of the sovereign
in its Principal, of parliament and noblesse in
the subordinate Masters and the upper classes;
if the Government without be a republic, the
Head-master should be the president of his
subordinates and charges, should be the primus
inter pares of free men and free children.
:
128 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
My native country boasts of its principles of
self-government; but its great educational insti-
tutions are all under absolute or oligarchic con-
trol. For my own part, I am inclined to agree
with such as view our constitution as, at present,
to all intents and purposes oligarchical; and,
until it be found that the new reform bill intro-
duces a decided change, I should see with regret
our schools regulated in a manner out of harmony
with our leading political institutions. But, if
the principle of self-government be brought pal-
pably home to our convictions in the political
world, a co-ordinate change will have to be made.
in the administration of scholastic interests; and
no Committee of Management or Directorate
will meet to determine matters pecuniary or
intellectual, unless its component parts repre-
sent all sides. At present, such committees
very rarely admit a Head-master, and never
one of his subordinates; and would laugh at the
notion of admitting one of the boys. Let us
hope that, in the fulness of time, a Head-master
will invariably take the chair at such meetings ;
that a staff of subordinate Masters will be always
represented by at least one delegate; and that
the captains of senior classes will be admitted
A
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 129
on all occasions where their leisure may be
broken in upon, where school habits may be
materially altered, or where practices injurious
to morality may be the subject of discussion,-
such practices, at least, as can only be dealt with
effectually through their cordial co-operation.
The very working of such an administrative
system would be an imperceptible but valuable
training for an after-life to be spent amid a
free self-governing people.
A great many of the absurdities connected
with St. Edward's in my own time were attri-
butable to the deficiencies of its ordinary Direc-
torate. It consisted of men of great wealth and
undoubted benevolence. The great majority of
them were commercial men, admirably adapted
for the regulation of fiscal matters, but entitled
neither by early training nor by subsequent
experience to deal with so complex a problem
as the mental and moral training of fifteen
hundred boys, varying in age from seven to
nineteen. Although there were employed by
this Directorate a great posse of clergymen as
teachers of classical and mathematical science,
neither their moral character as clergymen nor
their scientific character as teachers was consi-
I
130 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
dered in the slightest degree as entitling them to
a voice in the councils of the Institution. Indeed,
on occasions where they came in contact with
the leading Board, they were treated as a cross
between clergymen and beadles; and I must do
them the justice to say, that the servility with
which they licked the hand of unenlightened
authority proved that they were Christians and
Englishmen of the good old spaniel breed.
However, the Directors of St. Edward's had
this excuse for their arbitrary monopoly of
power, that they were extensive benefactors of
their Institution, and disabled by their own un-
selfish laws from reaping benefit therefrom for
their sons or nephews. The Directors of the
Schola Nova in Dunedin were the represen-
tatives of many shareholders, whose trivial ad-
vances had been wiped out again and again by
services rendered their young kinsfolk; and the
only duties by which these gentlemen pushed
on the cause of education were the important
one of selecting good Masters, which they ful-
filled admirably, and the unimportant ones of
flashing annually in a sheet-lightning of harm-
less rhetoric in the school-hall, and of enter-
taining their staff at a subsequent banquet, every
!
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 131
1
dish of which had been purchased with the labour
of their lungs and brains by the honoured, but
bamboozled, guests themselves.
The play-ground, the river, and the cricket-'
field, singly or collectively, absorb a great share
of the time and attention of English boys. A
schoolmaster will do well to interest himself in
healthful sport of all kinds; but he will be in-
discreet if he interfere with play arrangements, if
he obtrude his presence too often in places of
amusement, or if he join in any game of skill in
which he is not himself a proficient. The moral
discipline of the play-ground rests almost entirely
with the senior scholars, on the well-disposed of
whom a Head-master cannot bestow too much
of friendly confidence, and with the ill-disposed
of whom he cannot deal with too great caution
so long as they are only objects of suspicion,
or with too peremptory severity so soon as they
are convicted of misdoing.
Once a priest, always a priest; once a school-
master, always a schoolmaster.
Not so, at
least, nominally, with myself. I have been
kicked upstairs. I have been
been one of the
favoured few allowed to emerge from the
routine duties and unworthy thraldom of scho-
132 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
lastic life to the more congenial duties and.
almost perfect freedom of the life professorial.
I have, furthermore, had the good fortune to be
called to a chair in an university where the
professoriate is in full, vital, vivifying action.
Have my duties been essentially altered? Not
in the very slightest degree. I have been for
the last three years fulfilling the identical duties
performed for twelve previous years with my
senior classes in Dunedin. The only-and
a most important-difference has been, that
under the designation of professor I have been
treated with confidence and respect, and allowed
a fair share of spontaneous action; as a school-
master, I was checked in every effort for good
by the honest but unenlightened prejudices of
an outer public, and the officious intermeddle-
ment of an unqualified, unscholastic, unacademic
Directorate.
When first elected to my present chair, I
had stereotyped in my mind an ideal character
of a professor. I conceived that the lectures
required of me would be something differing
altogether in kind from the spontaneous natural
discussion I had for years carried on with the
lads whom now, in obedience to the whisper of
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 133
}
the invisible Policeman, I was to leave, not un-
reluctantly, for ever. I feared that it would be
requisite for me to give elaborate dissertations.
upon such unfamiliar and not very practical sub-
jects as 'The Architecture of the Parthenon ;'
'The Dikasteries of Athens;' 'The Sophists
of Antiquity;' 'The Exports and Imports of
Corinth ;''The Greek Particles ;' 'The Achæan
League.' I considered that it would be incum-
bent upon me, at least once in three years, to
annotate a Greek Play in Latin, to wrangle
about microscopic trivialities, and to make face-
tiously scurrilous remarks in my foot-notes about
all previous and contemporary annotators.
meditated wearing black clothes with a white
tie until the Amen of my days. I had an
uneasy feeling that I was unconsciously a great
take-in.
I
When a man is married, he is in almost all
cases surprised at the little difference between
his ordinary habits after and before marriage.
Young curates after ordination are apt for a
while to feel disappointed at the provokingly
infinitesimal amount of apostolic power that
seems transfused into their being. When a
banker is translated to the peerage, he will pro-
A
134 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
bably reacknowledge his mortality so soon as the
'my Lord' has lost its piquant novelty. For
myself, I was reassured to find that the chair I
was called upon to fill was just such a chair as
I had filled to my own comfort for twelve long
years. In fact, I was still what I am to this
day,—a schoolmaster. The only difference was
one for the worse as regards my duties; for I
was now only a teacher of Greek language, Greek
literature, and collateral branches; whereas,
formerly, I had been, to my own thinking, a
teacher of ancient classics in the widest inter-
pretation of the words.
In all our universities we have separate chairs
for Latin and Greek. This division would, pro-
bably, be advisable in an imaginary land where
the schools were numerous and efficient; where
the universities were resorted to only by scholars
previously well trained and ambitious to add
knowledge to knowledge. Under the present
deplorable condition of affairs, a man to do
work as a professor must stoop manfully and
contentedly to the duties of an almost primary
teacher. One such professor, with two able
and energetic assistants, would do more work
upon a single system of his own with Latin and
:
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 135
Greek classes together, than two separate pro-
fessors for the two languages, working upon
different systems, and occasionally interfering
with the theories inculcated by each other.
The youths I had now under my care were of
the same age as those attending the two senior
classes of my Dunedin school. The majority of
them had been very poorly prepared. Their
education only devolved partially on myself.
They all attended classes in Mathematics,
English, French, and German; some of the
more advanced, in terms extending over two
years, attended lectures on Logic, Metaphysics,
Natural History, Natural Philosophy, Law,
Political Economy. I had only three hours a
week severally with my new pupils, and only
some seventy hours a year; and yet, strange to
say, I have for the last year been reading with
pupils, who learned their elements with me not
three years ago, entire books—not extracts—--
from the best Greek authors, with a facility
of understanding on their part that I had never
myself experienced, when, between nineteen
and twenty years of age, after twelve years
of almost exclusive classical instruction, with
about six hundred hours of annual instruction
136 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
な
​and supervision in the one great subject, I left
St. Edward's for the university of Camelot.
Was it that my new pupils and I were supe-
rior in mental powers to my old companions
and masters at St. Edward's? Not at all. The
pupils were in mental capacity neither above
nor below the average. I am unaffectedly and
sadly conscious of the limits of my own facul-
ties. But, apart from my own system of instruc-
tion, which I consider to be infinitely superior
to any system under which I as a pupil was
ever worked, my students were now approach-
ing the study of a complex puzzling language
at a comparatively mature age, and the various
studies which took away from their time were
adding daily to the strength, breadth, and
subtlety of their intelligences. A great deal—
a very great deal of their success in my
due to the collateral work going
on in the rooms of my colleagues. Other
men were labouring, and I was entering into
their labours.
room was
I spoke at random, and with a careless pre-
sumption, a little above. I spoke of my
system.' I withdraw the egotistic pronoun-
adjective which may be done with safety in
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 137
1
an Essay so full of the first pronoun-substantive
—and substitute: 'an approximation, to the best
of my abilities, to Nature's system.' In other
words, I worked, and work still, as follows:-
Many of my first-year's students come to me
utterly innocent of Greek. Fortunately, how-
ever, they come to college, not as to a young
man's club, but as to a bonâ fide place of in-
struction. For a few weeks they are engaged in
mastering declensions and conjugations. This
work they must do for themselves. No alien
can chew for them this unpalatable food. From
the first day, however, I insist that every Greek
word should be pronounced in accordance with
the system of accentuation handed down to
us by the Alexandrian grammarian. So soon
as the Accidence is tolerably well mastered, I
begin to read some such easy work in vivâ
voce translation as The Apology of Plato. In-
stead of leading them to believe superstitiously
in every idiom of the new language, I can show
to them that, in the first page or two of the
above-mentioned book, Plato has made nume-
rous and, probably, purposeless violations of the
strict rules of grammar. By and by they will hear
me read a book of Homer, and they will find
138 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
·
that Homer, monarch that he was, considered
times or tenses as made only for slaves. Later
on they will ascertain that the best writers of
the most intellectual people of ancient or modern
times-poets, historians, philosophers, and ora-
tors-wrote all, without exception, with a pro-
found contempt for, or ignorance of, the rules
of strict grammatical science. And the wonder
is, they will think-and this is a pregnant
thought—that they wrote none the worse, but,
probably, much the better for their contempt
or ignorance. What a benefit it must be, they
will perhaps think, to be trained unconsciously
in the scientifically inaccurate, but practical,
forcible, and elastic use of one's own language!
They will gradually come to consider that there
are no such things as Greek Grammar, Latin
Grammar, English Grammar, any more than
such absurdities as English Arithmetic, French
Physics, Dutch Electricity. They will begin
to see that there are certain universal laws of
thought, of which traces may be discerned in the
organization of all languages-at all events, of
such as they are called upon to deal with,-and
will be interested in observing the comparative
deflections made from those laws by the lan-
1
1
1
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 139
guages more or less familiar to them. They will
come to appreciate the wanton luxuriance, the
infinite variety, the careless versatility of Hellenic
speech, wherein expression shifts from tense to
tense and mood to mood like lamplight on flossed
silk or sunbeams on pebbles in clear water; the
grave and dignified simplicity, the logical se-
quence, the measured fugue-like music of Latin;
the trim precision, the sharp-cut exactitude, the
polished prose brilliancy of French; the uncouth
majesty, the rich and deep resonance, the antique
air of quaint, stubborn, self-centred German; the
reckless defiance of system, the love of anomaly,
the borrowing and amalgamating properties, the
wayward graces, the pith and vigour of their
own tongue; and it will, perhaps, strike them
that the leading characteristics of great nations
may, to some extent, be adumbrated in the lin-
guistic habits they have unconsciously formed.
After a little while I exact, so far as I can exact,
three carefully-written exercises weekly. These
I examine in the leisure-time of my students,
each exercise separately; and upon these exer-
cises I build almost the entire superstructure of
my grammatical teaching. During the hour of
lecture in which I read portions of an author I
4
140 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
seldom break the sequence of narrative, oration,
play, or dialogue, unless a difficulty of an extra-
ordinary kind presents itself; but my students
are requested to note with pencil any passage
they may find it hard to follow, and to call upon
me for explanation at the end of the lecture,
either in class, or by themselves.
By this system of endeavouring to interest a
pupil from almost the very outset of a difficult
study, I have been enabled to achieve what
many will think impossible results. I have
been enabled to read unbroken books of
Homer to youths who, less than two years pre-
viously, were ignorant of the Greek characters;
and to my second and third year students I
have read in English from dialogue of Plato,
tragic play, and Demosthenic oration as fast as
I could coherently word the renderings; and
I have been attentively, intelligently followed.
And my fluency on all occasions has been at
least as much due to the interest of my pupils
as to my own enthusiasm. On one occasion,
after going through the speech in smaller por-
tions, I read, after three weeks of laborious re-
hearsal, to second and third year students the
Crown Speech of Demosthenes in three readings
.2
-
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 141
of two and a half hours each; and I did so, I
can say in perfect honesty, not to exhibit a feat
of volubility, but to give my lads the best dra-
matic impression I could of that magnificent
and incomparable specimen of ancient oratory.
And this topic suggests to me a radical de-
fect in our classical teaching. While we treat
ancient language with a servile and superstitious
reverence, we treat our own with unmerited con-
tempt. From the moment we begin to translate
ancient authors, we begin to corrupt the purity
of English idiom. It is as though, when we took
to drink French claret, we should purposely-
or purposelessly-deteriorate our own English
ale. Under any circumstances it is a long and
laborious task to achieve simplicity, purity, ease,
and elegance in speaking and writing our own
tongue. But it becomes trebly difficult when
over years when imitativeness is strong we have
habituated ourselves to modes of expression.
only heard in classic grammar-schools, only
written within academic examination-halls. If
the idioms of foreign tongues are so crotchety
as to be mastered only at the expense of
our own language, they had far better be left
alone. In reality they are not so. Common
142 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
sense would teach us the absurdity of sup-
posing that a sentence of good Greek can be
satisfactorily rendered by a sentence of bad
English. Every lesson in a great author of an-
tiquity might be, and ought to be, made a lesson
in the vernacular, at all events, so thought no
less a man than Pitt,—and no single unidiomatic
expression in this latter should ever be passed
by, much less should the use of such expres-
I would not,
sions be rigorously inculcated.
certainly, advocate an unlimited licence of para-
phrase; but I would earnestly deprecate the
fashion almost universal of verbal, literal, hybrid
translation. If any outsider were only to look
over the examination-papers of candidates for
high classical honours at any of our universities,
and were to peruse the rendering of extracts
from Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, Demos-
thenes, and others, he would consider that the
style of writing before him was exceedingly un-
like the modes of speech and writing of his own
countrymen at any known epoch; and would
wonder that any men could really and truly
admire the works of writers that read so gro-
tesquely and ungracefully in an alien tongue.
Any one who has had much of experience in
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 143
matters linguistic will agree with me that it is
not twice as hard to learn two foreign languages
as to learn one; and that still less is it four
times as hard to learn four. In fact, as the num-
ber of languages moves on in a rising arithmetic
series of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 . . ., the difficulty of ac-
quisition varies in a descending geometric series
such as
. . 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. Upon these conside-
rations I think it would be no hardship to exact
of all candidates to classical masterships in first-
class schools a thorough knowledge of Italian,
French, and German. Italian and Latin should
be, as said elsewhere, considered as indivisible;
and French and German, if taught by highly
educated native scholars, would be invested with
a dignity which hitherto has been denied them
in the estimation of young English students. A
German may occasionally master our pronuncia-
tion and appreciate our national peculiarities;
but this is very rarely the case with Frenchmen.
Typical characteristics cling to them as to cats
with a tenacity that defies all modifying influ-
ences. The great proportion, also, of French
masters are half-illiterate men; and would, pro- .
bably, be but genteel hairdressers in their own
land. They have only an outside book-cover
144 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
knowledge of their own literature, and set a pre-
posterous value upon Parisian accentuation, the
glib utterance of conversational commonplace,
and other gimcrack conventional accomplish-
ments. After ten or twenty years of misery, as
supremely ignorant and as complacently dis-
dainful of the people they are quitting as on the
day of their arrival, they carry home with them
their hoarded savings, and spend the autumn of
their days amid the bustle and excitement of a
Frenchman's earthly Paradise.
As there are no limits to the working powers
and courage of our graduates, there can be no
doubt that, if a knowledge of modern languages
were exacted of them and well remunerated, they
would be found able and willing to meet the call.
Indeed, at my own-in matters intellectual, ad-
mirable-Schola Nova at Dunedin, all the clas-
sical masters without exception were qualified in
this desirable way. If such were generally the
case—and alas! it is very rarely the case in the
best schools of England—our own young scholars
would gradually push out of the scholastic
market all foreigners except the highly culti-
vated, who would hold their own to their and our
advantage. This elimination of foreign rubbish
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 145
would be a great gain to our boys and girls, and
a great gain to the profession of teachers, whose
rise in general estimation must depend mainly,
if not exclusively, upon the increased extent of
their useful attainments and the corresponding
value of their practical services; who, before
they can command the respect of all around
them, must use Self-respect as a guide upon the
road to find Self-improvement; and these twain,
when met together, will cross arms to lift them
up to the desired pedestal of Self-assertion.
This last word recalls me to myself. In this
Essay, as in two others, I have made an unusual
sprinkling of 'I's' and 'me's.' Had I been pre-
paring articles for a monthly magazine, an alias
might have been used without difficulty on my
own part to obviate harsh criticism from the
reader. But I am writing, not for æsthetic, but
for useful purposes. It may possibly be found
that I have little that is new to tell ; but whatever
l;
I have to tell must be told to a very great extent
with apparent egotism. Were I a chemist, a geo-
logist, or a political economist, I might bring
before readers or hearers the results of years of
study upon subjects altogether impersonal. They
might listen to my words, or gaze upon my dia-
K
146 A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES.
grams, or watch my experiments, and care little
what manner of man I personally was. But the
subject of education is one that penetrates into
every cranny of every one's life. Not a man
alive but has something to say upon the uni-
versal subject. Indeed, in regard to the right.
methods of training a child, governing a king-
dom, and poking a fire, it may be said that
every one man considers himself as knowing
more than the rest of mankind put together.
There is more of the scientific element, I own,
in right education than we are disposed to be-
lieve; but, after a few broad, simple scientific
principles have once been laid down and acqui-
esced in, the working part must be left to able
and honest hands, and idiosyncrasies must be
allowed a large margin for free action. No man
can appeal to a large audience on the topic now
before us with the presumptuous idea that what
he can state should be regarded as comprehen-
sive or final. I have stated honestly my ex-
periences as boy at school, as youth at college,
as teacher at school and college, and have added
a few theories as the fruit of my experiences. I
have egotised, however, out of sheer modesty ;
from a disinclination to discuss a subject of
A TEACHER'S EXPERIENCES. 147
universal interest in terms of impersonal and
dictatorial preachment. I shall be satisfied if
here and there a suggestion has been made
that will hereafter tend in the least degree to
overthrow scholastic superstitions, to smooth
the course of school life for children, and to
raise to its due level in social rank and to
second in its claims to the right of at least
partial self-government the respectable, but in-
sufficiently respected, profession of which I am
a humble but enthusiastic member.
}
:
148 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
V.
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
CIV

T has been of late years the glory of
bishops to multiply churches, and rain
down curates upon a thirsty metro-
polis. For my own part I should like to dot the
land all over with ample, high-ceilinged, well-
ventilated schoolrooms, spacious play-yards, level
cricket-fields, free libraries, free museums, and to
go out into the highways and the hedges, and lay
hands on all bird's-nesting vagabonds, and com-
pel them to come in. There is nothing like
leather,' says the cobbler.
We are all cobblers.
But still I grant that we might possibly have too
much of a good thing. The world would, per-
haps, be none the wiser, and it certainly would
be a great deal the duller, if of two men in every
dozen one were a parson and the other a school-
master. God's ways are not hurried. We live
only through our own little day in the long year of
human progress. We sow the seed in honesty;
1
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
149
1
but alas! too often, in our foolish curiosity, we
scratch up the mould to see if the seed be grow-
ing. Faith is a duty, because it is a necessity.
In a diversity of ways may seed sown grow up:
rapidly, on favourable ground; more slowly; but
charged, may be, eventually with equal fruit, on
sunless spots.
Many a noble nature has, in a strange way,
owed, or seemed to owe, nearly all its nobility
to ill-usage and bad example in early years; has
emerged unselfish from depths of selfishness;
pure from out a den of impurity; has been, as it
were, shunted on to the right path by the con-
tinual pressure of alien depravity. Many of our
most carefully nurtured intelligences mature and
decay, bearing no fruit, leaving behind no record,
pass over a wilderness of inutility into oblivion.
Many of our greatest and best have done their
work with no thanks due but to their own in-
dustry, courage, sagacity, and integrity.
father of the American Republic is not the only
instance of a great man's having entered upon
active life with a mental training limited by the
old familiar trio of accomplishments-reading,
writing, and arithmetic. This incomparable
man certainly would have been none the less
The
:
:
150 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
great had he passed in boyhood and youth
through a lengthened course of well-regulated
and well-timed literary and scientific studies;
but perhaps his head was, at the outset, all the
clearer from the absence of those cobwebs which
modern scholasticism spins in the nooks and cor-
ners of young brains. An army cannot take the
field provided with too good a commissariat ;
but its efficiency may be neutralized by lumber-
some baggage and superfluous camp-followers.
Our first mother was tempted by the fair-
ness of the fruit that hung upon the tree of know-
ledge. And no wonder; for the fruit is unutter-
ably beautiful. When young lips are watering
to taste it, we seek foolishly to cure them of their
natural longing by presenting them with apples
of which the rinds have been discoloured and
rubbed over with unpalatable medicaments. At
one time, when a patient was ill with fever, we
closed the windows of his chamber and denied
him draughts of refreshing water; but we per-
fumed his room by artificial means, and supplied
him liberally with prepared potions. We are
trained to love the semblances of knowledge;
we value accomplishments because they are diffi-
cult, tedious, costly of attainment, and because
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
151
their attainment commands the admiration of
the ignorant many. Self-love pushes off from us
the obtruding suspicion that we may have wasted
For one case
years in the pursuit of shadows.
of faculties impaired by disease, or obliterated
by death, how many there are of faculties dulled
or extinguished by the honest efforts of the mill-
horse schoolmaster!
Am I an advocate for the abolition of curates
and schoolmasters? would I fill the month with
week-days, and the year with vacation-time ?
God forbid! I only see a vast amount of igno-
rance and vulgarity in our midst; thousands of
schoolmasters I see engaged in hardening or in-
creasing heaps of pestilent prejudice; and too
often I see foolish and exclusive pride employ-
ing the curate's hands, like a pair of tongs, to
deal with what is really or supposedly mean,
unsightly, offensive. What I would advocate is,
that we should all join hands together in im-
proving the schoolmaster and curate, and then
co-operate with them heartily in their noble
work of scattering enlightenment.
Of the three great divisions of the United
Kingdom, it is over Scotland that the light of
civilisation is most generally and equably dif-
;
152
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
}
fused.
}
The Minister and the Schoolmaster have
both had their share in bringing about the
result; but the work of the latter has been
of unmixed benefit, while the unreasonably
exhaustive demands of the former upon the
spiritual and mental faculties have oftentimes
resulted in serious and lamentable physical and
moral reactions. England is the land of para-
doxes. One of the pleasantest, most lovable
and admirable characters in the world is that
of a well-educated, well-conditioned, widely-tra-
velled English gentleman. In such a character
you will see an easy, negligent, spontaneous
refinement, a still and quiet courage, a pride un-
touched of vanity, a quick and delicate sense
of alien rights blending harmoniously with
a deep-seated self-respect. In the neatness,
the cleanliness, the comfort and aptitude
arrangement, the simple but unstinted hospi-
tality of farm-life, there breathes, as it were, the
aroma of a venerable albeit homely civilisa-
tion; of a prim, respectable, kindly, but prosaic
Arcadia. Other European nations may surpass
us in the production of ingenious scoundrels;
but no nation can produce a creature to vie
with our Cockney in vulgarity; as has been re-
of
OUR HOME CIVILISATION. 153
I
!
;
cently shown, with our saw-grinder in brutality;
in bovinity with our clodhopper. But, if Eng-
land is a land of paradoxes, Ireland is a land
of paradoxes gone mad. Her children give
the lie indirectly to the old ingenuas didicisse
couplet of Ovid, by being the best-mannered and
worst-educated people in the world. The most
respectable section of her population is un-
doubtedly her peasantry, the members of which
are, as a rule, and under moderately favouring
circumstances, moral, industrious, affectionate
towards kindred, kindly towards neighbours,
and saving to the point of parsimony.
Her
higher and lower noblesse are too often imitators
-in some cases very contemptible ones-of
English prototypes; her professional and com-
mercial men, down to a low grade, are given to
ape the fashions, manners, and amusements of
the noble and proprietor. This unwholesome
ambitious imitativeness is due to a variety of
causes that a diffusion of sound political, ethical,
and social teaching might, in course of time, neu-
tralize, modify, or annihilate. At present, the
land is under a government that has borrowed
all the outer trappings of royalty, unaccompanied
by its dignity, respectability, or permanence.
1
154
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
Poor Ireland sees only the sunlight of royalty
at most distant intervals, and then only for
briefest periods; as a general rule, she is dimly
illumined, without being in the slightest degree
warmed, by the reflected radiance of a vice-
regal moon. In accordance with astronomic
usages this moon shows only one face; and that
face is a Protestant one. No people are more
naturally intelligent than the Irish; and yet
learning and mental power are little esteemed
among them, except when displayed in some
striking manner at the bar, on the bench, or in
the House of Commons.
Scotland has owed much to the fact that the
vigour and common-sense of her working classes.
were found strong enough to neutralize and
over-ride the selfishness of what, with a very few
splendid exceptions, was an unworthy unnational
nobility. Ireland will be equally prosperous
when her children shall have thrown off their
servile admiration for rank and place, and their
passion for the useless, expensive, and, in some
cases, demoralizing sports of wealthy idleness;
shall spend more upon the children in the
schoolroom than on the horses in the stable;
and shall come to respect, cultivate, and reward
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
155
1
industry, ability, and honesty. It would be
none the worse for her if the members of her
three great religious sections would be content
to journey severally on their own ways to
heaven without throwing stones at their bre-
thren as seen walking upon parallel, but seem-
ingly divergent, pathways. In plain words, it
would be a blessing to Ireland, if her children
would seek to save their souls in a more com-
mon-sense way; would cultivate less the sterile
plant of religious acrimony, and unite to cul-
tivate ever more and more the sustaining plants
of self-reliance, energy, industry, and national
brotherhood. However, so long as absentee
proprietors draw cruelly and exhaustively upon
her resources, so long as the great majority of
her journalists and parliamentary representatives
advocate the claims of sectarianism in preference
to those of nationality, so long as a favoured
alien church irritates the holiest feelings of seven
in ten of the population, so long, in all probability,
will the emissaries of Chaos impede the pioneers
of steady, gradual, constitutional progress, and
so long will social and religious disunion prevail
among her children, together with a general in-
difference to things noble, useful, and elevating,
!
ر
156 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
1
and an universal worship of things fortuitous,
useless, ephemeral.
Are we, then, the subjects of her Britannic
Majesty, a refined and civilised people? Let us
answer the question indirectly.
There are agricultural districts in Scotland
where the illegitimate births are to legitimate
ones in the ratio of one to ten. In other words,
these agricultural districts vie in unchastity with
Vienna, the most licentious capital in Europe.
I have myself known the numerous workmen
in a Glasgow factory visit Edinburgh for a holi-
day, and leave late in the evening to return,
drunk almost to a man, after having spent an
entire summer's noon and afternoon and even-
ing within some three favourite taverns, in little
wooden boxes impervious to the light of day,
drinking whisky by dim gaslight. And yet all
these men would be efficient workmen in receipt.
of good wages. The majority of them would
return home to wives and children. Happy
wives! blessed children! These wives and chil-
dren would be indebted for the periodic bouts
of intemperance on the part of husbands and
fathers to the dearth of open-air amusements, the
lack of cultivated tastes, and the unnatural and
1
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
157
demoralizing regulations of a cherished Sabba-
tarian asceticism.
The love of sport is natural to all Englishmen ;
but cricket is, perhaps, our only pastime the
intrinsic interest of which calls in neither the
incentive of betting nor the stimulant of drink.
What spectacle can be more inspiriting than that
of the rowers in a boat-race, or of the runners on
a race-course; more dispiriting, more nationally
humiliating, than that of the shrieking, vulgar,
betting-men on the steamer or the grand-stand?
When a posse of our middle-class respecta-
bilities start upon a pleasure expedition, on
arriving at a convenient spot they fall immedi-
ately to eating and drinking. From the majority
of such picnics our women return home in low
spirits, and our men under the influence of drink.
If they dance after their repast, the men are
never graceful in their movements; occasionally
they are indecorous and rude. If they sing on
their way home, the words and tunes will usually
be borrowed from those never-to-be-sufficiently
execrated nigger minstrels, who appear to have
been sent into the world to make, if it be pos-
sible, our English taste in music more unutter-
ably vulgar than it was before. There are few
1
1
•
158 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
nations in the world that know how to make
money better than ourselves; there is not a
single people in the world that understands less
the philosophy of enjoyment.
In Ireland, in its most prosperous and thriving
corner, we shall find that men of ancient birth,
extensive means, claiming, rightly or wrongly,
the respect due to high, mental, and religious
culture, celebrate year by year, or countenance
others in celebrating, the anniversary of what to
the whole civilised world appear, if known at all,
to have been but petty and insignificant actions, in
which one set of Irishmen were victorious some
two centuries ago over another set amongst their
own countrymen. It is sufficiently barbarous to
erect conspicuous pillars in our capitals, to build
metal-bridges over rivers, to station huge cannon
in our market-places or at the extremities of har-
bour-piers, by way of commemorating victories
over a gallant foreigner; but it is unspeakably
ungenerous and barbarous, not to say stupidly
suicidal, for any one class within a country to
be for evermore stirring up the smouldering em-
bers of an old and now meaningless domestic
animosity.
Two of the chief pioneers sent out, or gone out
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
159
of their own accord, to improve the barbarism
amongst us are the ecclesiastic and the school-
master. A great amount of useful work is done
by both; but more work could be done by them;
and, at the same time, of the work already done
much might with profit be altered, and much left
undone altogether.
The chief lesson impressed upon the children
of English peasants is respect for wealth and
rank,—for what are called, in every detestable
variety of phrase, 'their betters,' 'the upper
classes,' 'their superiors.' The poor child is
brought up to grovelment; to crawl, as it were,
with his belly on the ground. His fingers at
length clutch spasmodically at his foremost tag
of hair. Never a word does he hear of the
beauty, the nobility, the grandeur of self-respect.
After years of gross physical feeding, a moral
feeding more gross and debasing, and no mental
feeding whatsoever, the creature solidifies into
the bovine lout that grins through a horse-collar,
that swills small beer by the gallon, or that dis-
graces his manhood by accepting in public places
nursery prizes for good conduct at the hands of
a white-waistcoated, contemptuous, unapproach-
able fellow-countryman. Through some such
1
160 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
training must those two children, officially re-
ported as 'of average intelligence, and of eleven
years of age,' have been passing, who, in reply
to the questions of an Assistant-Commissioner,
-'What is thy duty towards God?' 'What is
thy duty towards thy neighbour ?'-answered,
severally, on their slates as follows:
'My duty toads God is to bleed in him, to
fering and to loaf withold your arts, withold my
mine, withold my sold, and with my sernth, to
whichp and to give thanks, to put my old trast
in him, to call upon him, to onner his old name
and his world, and to save him truly all the
days of my life's end.'
'My duty tords my nabers, to love him as thy-
self, and to do to all men as I wed thou shall do
and to me, to love, onner, and suke my farther
and mother, to onner and to bay the Queen, and
all that are pet in a forty under her, to smit
myself to all my gooness, teaches, sportial pas-
tures and marsters, to oughten myself lordly
and every to all my betters, to hut nobody by
would nor deed, to be trew in jest in all my
deelins, to beer no malis nor ated in your arts,
to kep my hands from pecken and steel, my
turn from evil speaking, lawing, and slanders,

OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
161
;
not to civit nor desar othermans good, but to
laber trewly to git my own leaving, and to my
dooty in that state if life, and to each it is please
God to call men.'
Within the last twenty years, so many new
openings have been made to industry and ability,
that the Church has suffered some fifty per cent.
in the quality of her average entrants. While
the age is growing daily more and more inquisi-
tive and critical-at least as regards the edu-
cated classes, the general teaching of the pulpit
is growing, week by week, more and more stale,
flat, unprofitable, and wearisome. How often,
with a host of fellow-victims, have I fallen into
temporary inanition before a clerical Samson
as he wielded the old, simple, but formidable
weapon! How many times I have heard a
sciolist priestling cope a vapid sermon with a
prayer that God would imprint the recently
uttered bagwash upon the hearts of all his
hearers! How I have shuddered to think the
prayer might by any possibility rise higher than
the ceiling!
Whilst our young ecclesiastics are being
drawn from lower grades of intellectuality, what
is being done by and with our schoolmasters?
L
:
*
162 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
i
We have seen what crab-like movements may
be made by the Heads of our great public
schools; how they can shut their eyes to com-
mon-sense, and dance a backward dance to the
marvel of the world, the indignation of the en-
lightened, and the cost of their disciples and sub-
ordinates. The following is a summary of the
evidence presented by the Commissioners of
Education in regard to our teaching in private
schools-borrowed from the abstract of Mr.
Herbert Skeats:-
Mr. Frazer, after saying that 'the great ma-
jority of the private schools in his district are
kept by most respectable people, some of them
by very admirable men and women,' adds, that
'the teachers have often no special fitness, or,
at least, no fitness that is the fruit of prepara-
tion or training for their work, but have taken
up the occupation in default of, or after the
failure of, other trades.
Most of them
have picked up their knowledge promiscuously;
several combine the trade (!) of school-keeping
with another.'
•
'The general testimony,' says Mr. Hare,
speaking of Hull, Yarmouth, and Ipswich,
'goes to show that most private schoolmàsters
/
!
}
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
163
are men who have failed in other pursuits, and
that many of them eke out a subsistence by
doing whatever odd jobs chance may throw
in their way. One witness specifies quondam
barbers, sailors, soldiers, and millers, as turned
to school-keeping, and represents schoolmasters
as being also interested in ship-owning or en-
gaged in rate-collecting.
I became ac-
quainted with one whose general intelligence
enabled him not only to keep a day and even-
ing school, but also to cater for a country news-
paper, to conduct correspondence for persons
who are no scholars, and to make the wills of
testators who are penny-wise and pound-foolish.'
Mr. Cumin's experience in Bristol and Ply-
mouth was similar. Of the private school-
masters in Devonport, one had been a black-
smith and afterwards an exciseman, another was
a journeyman tailor, a third a clerk in a solici-
tor's office, a fourth (who was very successful in
preparing lads for the competitive examinations
in the dockyard) keeps an evening school and
works as a dockyard labourer, a fifth was a sea-
man, and others had been engaged in other
callings. Of some of these Mr. Cumin's infor-
mant spoke in favourable terms.
4
164
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
In none of the districts, however, were these
features so strongly marked as in London. Dr.
Hodgson found evidence to justify the assertion
that none are too old, too poor, too ignorant,
too feeble, too sickly, too unqualified in any way
or every way, to regard themselves, or to be
regarded by others, as unfit for school-keep-
ing. Nay, there are few, if any, occupations re-
garded as incompatible with school-keeping, if
not simultaneous, at least as preparatory em-
ployments. Domestic servants out of place, dis-
charged barmaids, vendors of toys or lollipops,
keepers of small eating-houses, of mangles, or
of small lodging-houses, needlewomen who take
in plain or slop work, milliners, consumptive
patients in an advanced stage, cripples almost
bedridden; men and women of seventy and
even eighty years of age; persons who spell
badly (mostly women, I grieve to say), who can
scarcely write, and who cannot cipher at all.'
Mr. Wilkinson's account of the matter is very
similar.
He says that the profession (!!), as
such, hardly exists, and that it is a mere refuge
for the destitute,' and enumerates 'grocers,
tobacconists, linendrapers, tailors, attorneys,
painters, German, Polish, and Italian refugees,
1
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
165
1
bakers, widows or daughters of clergymen,
barristers, surgeons, housekeepers, ladies'-maids,
and dressmakers, as being amongst the teachers
of private schools.'
Mr. Winder says that hardly any one is
brought up to the business unless he suffers
from some bodily infirmity. He called, without
design, on five masters successively, all of whom
were more or less deformed; one, who taught in a
cellar, being paralytic and horribly distorted.
In Ireland the Catholic collegiate schools are
the only ones that can lay claim to impersonal
ownership and an approach to national aspira-
tion. There are a few private Protestant board-
ing-schools of high character, and here and there
a foundation school may be indebted for its
good working order to the energy and ability of
its passing head-master. Even in Ulster, where
education is chiefly valued, the middle schools are
in a wretchedly unsatisfactory condition. And
yet there are funds scattered wastefully through-
out the land—not to speak of twelve hundred un-
employed Protestant clergymen-that, if wisely
administered, would amply meet all educational
requirements. A very intimate friend of mine
was speaking to a schoolmaster who had house,
i
1
166 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
glebe, and a good income upon what is called
'Erasmus Smith's Foundation.' 'Well,' said my
friend, and how is your school getting on?'
Admirably,' replied the schoolmaster; 'I
haven't a single pupil.' 'What!' said my
friend, taken suddenly aback, as though he had
been struck in the stomach; 'not a pupil? and
are you glad of that?' 'Come, come,' said the
other, 'you're a man of the world, and you'd
be glad enough too. I've an independent in-
come; and, if there are no boys to teach, all the
better for me.' The schoolmaster in question
is not a man of the world; he is a clergyman-
a man of God; and happily for himself has a
great deal of spare time on hand to spend in
meditation upon the things of eternity.
Whilst, however, the middle schools of Ireland
are in a deplorably and disgracefully low con-
dition—thanks to religious bickerings !—Ireland
is better furnished than, perhaps, any country
in Europe with the means for carrying out
elementary and academic instruction. If her
Model Schools, National Schools, and Queen's
Colleges were freed from the deadening influence
of direct governmental control, were interlinked
harmoniously with one another and with older
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
167
institutions scholastic and academic, and were
supplemented by a system of intermediate se-
cular grammar-schools open to efficient, trust-
worthy, academic inspection—and the means for
providing all aré already in existence,—Ireland
would be the best educated country in Europe.
But a man may have excellent clothes in his
wardrobe, and decline to put them on.
I re-
peat that Ireland might, if she pleased, be ex-
ceptionally well provided with all the requisite
machinery for universal instruction. Will she
make use of it? I fear not; at least, for a long,
long time.
Priest and clergyman and minister
and layman will be found to warn childhood,
boyhood, and youth from the perilous soul-
contaminating influences of mixed-secular pot-
hooks, heretical arithmetic, unapostolic trigono-
metry. And there will be thousands ready to
give attentive ears to this honest, well-meant,
ridiculous, anile, and most mischievous drivel.
Alas! alas! for the disastrous effects of inter-
necine religious discord.
No educated European would quarrel with a
Lascar sailor concerning the properties of a right-
angled triangle. The consciousness of his own
knowledge and of the other's ignorance would.
168 OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
render a demonstration of ill-temper superfluous
and ridiculous. To throw acerbity into a dis-
cussion, it requires a parity of knowledge or a
parity of ignorance. The acerbity reaches its
maximum when the questions at issue are such
as, for their solution, demand the combined
aid of experience and time, or of experience and
eternity. Thus we find that physicians quarrel
over the mysteries of our carcases with a rabidity
only surpassed by that with which ecclesiastics
quarrel over our souls. Oh for the immeasurable
mischief done and a-doing by well-intentioned.
ill-regulated zeal! By which of these three
agencies, reader, do you think most harm has
been inflicted on our kind,-tobacco, alcohol, or
dogmatism?
These melancholy reflections would force
themselves upon you, were you to saunter
through the streets of Dublin. Not one bonâ
fide publisher would you find in the metropolis
of a land containing six millions of inhabitants.
The windows of the fashionable book-shops
would display to you little else than recent re-
ligious publications, in whose pages you might
wade through twaddling sentiment, Elizabethan
controversy, and mischievous fanaticism; but
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
169
t
you might turn over a bale of recent literary
issues without lighting on one recent native
work of masculine thought, solid scholarship, or
broadly national aspiration. The native medical
and mathematical works would, however, honour-
ably remind you that you were the while within
bow-shot of an ancient and richly-endowed
university. Is it that there is a lack of ability in
the land? In all Europe there is not a people
of quicker readier intelligence; but alas! in all
Europe there is not a land upon whose bowels.
feeds so mercilessly the devil of religious dis-
cord. One great stumbling-block in the way of
fair and vigorous action against all ecclesiastical
interference in secular education, in the way of
the intellectual regeneration of the land, is the
existence of a Protestant establishment in a
Catholic country. The truth is, England, after
using the Reformation as a crutch to prop up
her own political independence, made use of it
as a staff to knock a sister on the head.
An Irish proprietor of great wealth and in-
fluence observed recently to another friend of
my own, that the new Reform Bill would be the
ruin of the country, as, in the choice of a re-
presentative, electors would look henceforward
170
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
..
more to ability than to property. I can scarcely
hope that electors will, at least for a century or
two, display such hitherto unprecedented com-
mon-sense; but I am convinced that the results
of such conduct would belie the prognostications
of the desponding squire. If, during the next
twenty years, a tithe of the jealous care that for
centuries has guarded the rights, the privileges,
the amusements of property, were expended
upon the physical, moral, and mental culture of
childhood, boyhood, and youth, we might then
be enabled to give a direct and affirmative
answer to the question:- Are we, the subjects
of her Britannic Majesty, an educated, refined,
and civilised people?'
There are four countries in Europe through
which education is more or less widely diffused,
—Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, and Prussia.
Perhaps it would have been as well for the neigh-
bours of the latter had she been less enlightened,
as enlightenment in her case has paved the way
for her ambition. However, such is the condition
of ignorance or dishonesty in which Europe is
found after eighteen centuries of Christianity,
that she requires some thirty millions expended
annually on naval defences, and nearly four
OUR HOME CIVILISATION. 171
J
millions of non-citizen, non-self-supporting, mili-
tary policemen kept permanently on foot, to
keep the peace amongst her children. Nay,
so universally spread throughout Europe is the
pestilent war-spirit, that for years past very few
improvements in mechanism have been recorded,
saving in the construction of quasi-miraculous
engines for the rapid destruction of human life;
and titles and ribbons have been bestowed by
civilised monarchs who might have taken a
wholesome lesson from the treatment of Perillus
by the Syracusan Phalaris.
This is the natural, at all events the actual,
result of that universal policy that puts promi-
nently forward things secondary or indifferent,
and treats as by-work questions of incalculable
importance. I have no hesitation in asserting,
that a more important question even than such
obviously important ones as concern the ad-
ministration of justice, the regulation of the
rights of property, the raising of the revenue,
the maintenance of order, the protection of our
colonies, the defence of our own shores; more
important a hundred times than the considera-
tion of means whereby lands, wealth, and titles.
may be transmitted to a remotely distant pos-
172
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
1
terity; a thousand times more important than
the discovery of effectual means whereby hares,
partridge, grouse, woodcock, hand-fed pheasants,
and other fowl may be preserved to recreate our
weary legislators; tenfold more important than
all put together is the question: How shall
we, physically, morally, and mentally, train our
children, our boys and girls, our youths and
maidens?' For, if this one comprehensive pro-
blem be thoroughly and satisfactorily settled,
other questions of domestic state-policy will
have lost all the greater share, some the entirety,
of their difficulty.
In Scotland, a rambling unemployed lad
may be forced into an industrial school, where
he will be supplied with wholesome practical
instruction. In England or in Ireland the
poverty-stricken chits in the streets are as free
and ignorant as the sparrows. But it is not
economy thus to foster ignorance and idleness.
Shortsighted people will tell us that the poor
are spoiled by education. If education be con-
sidered as the exclusive work of a drawling
preacher and an unqualified master, the remark
holds good. But there is an universal responsi-
bility that rests upon the shoulders of every
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
HOME
173
1
single cultivated man and woman, to shed abroad
intelligence, to go out in person to confront
ignorance, to take dirty human clay in the hand
and mould it into forms of comeliness and grace.
The moment we learn a thing worth knowing
we are bound to make it known to others. So
far from losing by the transmission, we gain in-
finitely by every gift. The idleness, the igno-
rance, the sottishness, the superstition of our
neighbours is our own great disgrace, our own
great loss. It is a loss so serious and terrible
that we should endeavour by our own efforts to
make it good. We should tremble to confide
the replacement to other hands.
1
In every village should be well-appointed in-
fant schools to clear the high-road of imperilled
children, and train them in habits of cleanliness,
neatness, and order; in every town should be
large and lofty rooms, superintended by well-
bred, highly-cultivated women, supplied with
every means that could amuse and improve our
little brothers and sisters. Our preparatory
schools should be superintended by gentlemen
holding equal rank with the national clergy; the
rate of fees should be fixed so low as to admit
of the schools being attended by all classes in
1
174 OUR HOME CIVILISATION,
:
i
common; the incomes of teachers, where the
totality of fees were low, should be supplemented
from the general or local purse, out of which also
the poorest pupils should, for a while at least, be
supplied with the means of procuring for school
attendance the requisite school manuals, and be-
fitting, simple raiment. But, until these latter
were old enough to work for their own partial
support, they should be forced to come in. Our
teaching of boys should be national, catholic.
The instruction provided by the body public
should be so generous and interesting as to
defy the competition of unenlightened grammar-
hucksterers. So far from seeking to stereo-
type our present system of petty ignoble ex-
clusiveness, we should throw ourselves with
enthusiasm into a holy war for the purpose of
breaking down barriers, of throwing light into
dark dwellings, of shedding refinement over
meanness and vulgarity.
Gentle reader of independent means, quiet
life, inoffensive ways, you never pass in the
streets a dirty, sickly, untaught lad; an idle,
good-for-nothing, dissipated man;
womanly, unselfrespecting woman; but some
little of the blame of what you see rests with
an un-
OUR HOME CIVILISATION. 175
yourself. Pause in your walk, and regard at-
tentively these saddening objects. There is
good in that lad; there is a chance for that
man; there is hope for that woman.
You are
removed from them all by but a few insignifi-
cant grades of social rank; if their experiences,
chances, and temptations were weighed against
your own in an unerring balance, the result
might not be flattering to your vanity; at all
events they are kith and kin to you; they are
bound to you by cords of responsibility that are
clearly visible to the eye of reason, and to be
broken only to the cost and detriment of the
breaker.
Do not, I beseech you, reader, think that you
fulfil your duty in endeavouring to impress
upon their untutored minds abstract and diffi-
cult doctrines which you have been comfortably
brought up to believe, and which neither you
nor any man now living will ever even dimly
comprehend. Take this practical world in a
practical way. Become poor with the poor;
ignorant with the ignorant. Begin at the be-
ginning. Do not despise those honest, useful,
unpretending handmaidens-Reading, Writing,
Arithmetic. It would, I grant you, be in keep-
176
OUR HOME CIVILISATION.
ing with sentiment and flattering to complacent
self-love, to expound a chapter and read an
exhilaratingly miserable sermon upon universal
depravity. Use, for a while at least, means
more prosaic, but likely to be more effectual.
Do not be ashamed to admit the poorly-clad
into the schoolrooms of your children, into
your parks, your fashionable walks. Talk with
men and women of a so-called lower degree
without reserve, without a forcing of conde-
scension, in a free, open-air, self-forgetful, and
wholesome way. You will be a friend to good
manners by discountenancing bobbing courtesys
in womenfolk, and jerky clutchings at male fore-
locks. Give every aid in your power to throw
innocent pleasure in the way of the poor, without
obtruding on their privacy, or tampering with
their sense of self-respect. If there be people
dependent on you for support, aid cordially such
as are ambitious of independence, and stimulate
the inactive to a like wholesome ambition; and
be not disappointed if the successful should oc-
casionally be ungrateful: there may be more of
selfishness in the grateful sycophant who clings
to you, than in the man whom success has unduly,
but not altogether unreasonably, elated. Above
1
2
OUR MODERN CIVILISATION. 177
all, look upon the children of the poorest as the
brothers and sisters of your own boys and girls,
of your little brothers and your little sisters. Do
not, for Heaven's sake, speak of them as be-
longing to 'the lower orders,' as your 'inferiors,'
as of the humble classes ;' but consider them as
of one nationality, one brotherhood, one flesh
and blood with yourself and with your own, and
train them up mentally as though their little
brains were made upon the same mould as that
of the being you love most in the world.
Believe me, gentle reader, it will be a comfort
to you every evening, before you sink asleep,
to think that you have done some little work to
straighten depravity, to enlighten ignorance, to
tame brutality, to strengthen weakness. Doubt-
less the task of uplifting the lazy, of stimulating
the unenergetic, of awakening the unconscious,
of convincing the incredulous, is hard, very hard.
The world seems to stand still at times; at
times it seems to retrograde. Eppure si muove,
si muove. But, supposing even that it were at
a stand-still, you would push it on a little, if, in
dealing with ignorance, you would employ, to
your life's end, the trio of lowly handmaidens
above-mentioned, under the guidance of the
M
V

178 OUR MODERN CIVILISATION.
}
{
higher trio of Patience, Discretion, and Energy,
and in the spirit of a trio higher and nobler
still-Faith, Hope, and Charity. It will be an
unspeakable comfort to you and me, when the
summons comes to us that comes to all, if,
with our friends afore-mentioned of the Ragged
Schools, we can rest assured that in the heyday
of health and prosperity we have done our very
utmost-albeit that utmost may have been a
very little-in a plain, sober, practical, work-
a-day, unpretending, undogmatizing way, to
make the crooked straight and the rough places
plain.
}

WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 179
VI.
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?

Salle
R
EADER, if you were to enter a thronged
schoolyard, and see three hundred.
little fellows busily and merrily en-
gaged at a variety of exhilarating games, and
were informed that the urchins were embryo-
sailors or embryo-soldiers, a gleam of romantic
sentiment would lighten up your imagination;
you would throw yourself into a distant futurity,
-into one, perhaps, on the yonder side of your
own grave,—and you would picture to yourself
frozen seas explored, winds and waves subdued,
or gaily-dressed battalions moving measuredly
´to fife and drum music, and you would hear in
imagination the cries of triumph on some smoky
field of battle.
Had you been told that every one of the
romping children before you was destined to
@
180 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
be an undertaker, your sense of the ridiculous
would first have been aroused, and then you
would half seriously have wondered if some
half dozen of these youngsters might not live
to wear funny hat-bands and drink copiously of
porter at and after your own funeral.
But, had you been assured that the institution
was a hatching nest of future schoolmasters,
your sentimentality would have been hit between
wind and water; you would have been thrown
into a dull and opaque mood of melancholy
reflection.
Of the thirty years that have elapsed since I
left my mother's roof, fifteen have been spent at
school and college in the capacity of learner,
and fifteen at school and college in the capacity
of teacher. My kindest friends in early life,
and my most cherished companions in man-
hood, have belonged to my own present pro-
fession. Were I a painter, and could portray
that representation of an ideal-teacher which
experience has stereotyped upon my brain, I
should draw a black-gowned figure seated at a
desk, his chin resting on one hand, and in his
countenance a mingled look of kindness, weari-
ness, resignation, and conscious irrelevancy.
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 181
1
The instances are rare and exceptional where
youths apprenticed to the sea take to soldier-
ing in manhood; where medical students turn
to the law; where young lawyers diverge to
commercial pursuits; where engineers blossom
into popular preachers. The majority of exist-
ing schoolmasters in the leading schools of
England and Scotland had no definite fore-
casting of their future calling at their first entry
into academic life. Until their degrees were
taken, the Bar and the Church would flit alter-
nately before their eyes; but at length a day
would come when they were brought suddenly
face to face with a world of stern realities;
a world peopled with butchers and bakers
´and grocers; a world giving nothing for
nothing. A little capital and a little influence
might carry them over the interval of slack-
tide between student-life and professional self-
supporting days; but the capital and influence,
and oftentimes the courage, the patience, the
self-denial, and self-reliance are lacking. The
novices look wistfully into the face of Circum-
stance; feel in their pockets for bits of coin to
pay their way withal; and draw out reluctantly
their testimonial-medallions of classical and
182 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
mathematical attainment. And thus it is that
many a would-be parson and would-be pleader
drifts into the weary, half-resigned, half-repining
schoolmaster.
What is the reason, then, that our profession
is one so seldom sought out at all; so very
seldom sought out with eagerness; so often
one into which, as into a pit, Poverty or Dis-
appointment is pushed by an adverse Fortune,
or stumbles out of fear and irresolution? How
is it that, in the so-called middle-class of life, we
should congratulate a youth on being admitted
into a thriving mercantile firm; on passing his
preliminary examination for à naval cadetship
or an army commission; on being called to the
Bar; on his appointment to a dispensary, or to
an ecclesiastical cure? The answer is a plain
and simple one: it is because, in any of these
few cases, we should feel that the object of our
congratulations was now at the outset of a career
in the course of which, with health and strength
vouchsafed, he would, humanly speaking, be
sure of achieving a competency by the possession
of moderate abilities, and the moderate display
of perseverance, integrity, and discretion; and
of attaining to wealth and social distinction, if
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 183
:
1
upon moderate abilities he could bring to bear,
in addition to homely virtues and qualities, the
motive power of a vigorous and energetic nature.
If, again, we were bidding farewell to a youthful
relative, as he quitted a country home to seek
his fortune in some capital or academic city in
the walks of pure science or pure literature, we
should, indeed, view the adventure as a hopeless
one, if our youth were gifted only with moderate
abilities; but, if his call to science or to letters
were to our minds a genuine and indubitable
one, we should cheerily wish him God-speed upon
his journey, upon the grounds that, although
the blanks in his chosen career were numerous,
there would assuredly be in it much of enjoy-
ment; that the prizes, if they turned up at all,
would be striking and valuable; and that the
field for work and utility would be inexhaustive
and illimitable. But alas! if the object of our
solicitude, after a prolonged and successful course
at school and college, had just succeeded, after an
arduous competition, in procuring a nomination
as under-master in an ordinary grammar-school,
the generality of us would feel it difficult to
throw much of warmth or enthusiasm into our
congratulations. We should feel that a young
184 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
fellow of good abilities and tried industry were
entering the scholastic den, at the opening of
which most of the footprints were seen to point
one inward way; that he was upon the outset
of a career which was not a career; that he
was walking, half unconsciously, into a profes-
sional cul-de-sac.
Our forebodings would be very materially.
lessened if he were re-entering, as teacher, some
old and wealthy institution in which he had
been educated in his youth: he would be now,
in fact, constituted a member of a powerful and
quasi-commercial corporation; and nothing but
persistent misconduct could divert him from the
path to comfort or to affluence. Our feelings
would be those of absolute hopefulness if, on
entering the scholastic profession, our friend or
relative should, in defiance of logic, legally
qualify himself for a higher but altogether in-
dependent calling, to be followed hereafter, if it
should at any casual date offer higher emolu-
ments or a rise in social position.
If, then, our statements be correct, that of
some nine careers open to educated youth there
is one that holds out fewer inducements by far
than any of the rest, it would be most unreason-
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 185
i
able in us to conclude, without diligent investi-
gation into all the circumstances of the case,
that the low estimate of this one profession were
altogether undeserved.
A sentimental person will speak feelingly of
the drudgery of a schoolmaster's life, and touch-
ingly of the trials of governesses, of the priva-
tions of poor and prolific curates. It is thus
that self-complacency, by the discharge of empty
words, imagines to relieve itself of a weighty
responsibility. An English Protestant mother
will assert that it is a matter of vital importance
under whose pulpit ministrations her children
should be called once a week to sit; and yet we
are all well aware, that of the entrants into holy
orders the vast majority are utterly ignorant of
Hebrew, the primitive language of the older
Scriptures, and the majority very poorly quali-
fied in the two classical languages in which the
earliest Christian records and doctrinal works.
are written. Such a mother will be naturally
anxious about the instruction of her girls; and
yet, in selecting a governess, she will be pro-
bably swayed by the partially or totally irrele-
vant considerations that this or that candidate.
has a clear touch on the piano; that her hands
186 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
i
are small and white; or that her father was a
clergyman, and died recently, leaving a family
wholly unprovided for. An ordinary English
father will assure you, with a great command
of feature, that the education of his sons is to
him a matter of extreme anxiety; that day after
day the importance of sound instruction is being
brought more and more home to his apprecia-
tion; that he has in his later years bitterly re-
pented or regretted the lack of assiduity or of
advantages in his own youth. By and by he
will accompany one of his boys to a neigh-
bouring grammar-school, and will enter his boy
under one of the under-masters, and, on return-
ing home, will comfort his wife and himself by
the intelligence that the lad's new master is a
gentlemanly-looking man, a clergyman, distantly
related to one of their own county families, that
he was a junior optimè at Cambridge—ignotum
pro magnifico to the wife at least, that he was
somewhere in the first-class in classical honours,
and gained a gold medal for a Greek ode in
sapphics upon 'The taking of Seringapatam.'
With all our serious talk, then, of the import-
ance of efficiency in two callings,—and the im-
portance of efficiency in either is of incalculable
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 187
}
value to the community, we all, as a rule, fol-
low blindly in a groove of routine, like sheep
after a bell-wether of fashion. But how is it in
secular and personal matters of avowedly minor
importance-infinitely minor importance? No
sane man would consent to have a back-tooth
extracted by an unqualified tooth-extractor; no
affectionate and sensible parent would entrust a
boy with the measles or a consumptive daughter
to the care of a medical amateur, although the
latter were a close relation of his own, or the in-
heritor of a lordly estate; no man but a divinely
sublime toady would put out to sea in danger-
ously rough weather with the son of a duke at
the helm, if the latter were practically inexperi-
enced in boating and yachting; no man would
entrust a legal case of the very slightest import-
ance to his nephew, if the latter, although long
ago called to the bar, were known to be utterly
unacquainted with the very technicalities of his
profession. Why is it, then, that we are so trust-
ful, so unquestioning, in the case of curates and
schoolmasters? Is it that, in the serious matters
of spiritual and intellectual development, we are,
for the most part, unbelievers and hypocrites?
Do we, notwithstanding all our protestations,
188 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
consider the duties of the ecclesiastic and the
teacher to be easy, trivial, unimportant, per-
functory?
I will confine my remarks entirely to the
schoolmaster. So far as my own experience
goes, I would unhesitatingly assert that the great
majority of parents are little interested in the
mental development of their boys, provided only
that they are kept out of their own—and harm's
—way; that their health is attended to; that
the school-fees for extras are not exorbitant;
that their holidays are not too frequent and too
long; and, above all, that they mix with chil-
dren of at least their own rank in our social
scale. I grant it, that our solicitude increases in
intensity as our boys advance towards youth.
The ill-regulated temper that was amusing in
years past is becoming ungovernable; the igno-
rance, that in petto was an indirect flattery to our
own comparative knowledge, is now a matter of
alarm. Our responsibilities are beginning to
stare us in the face. We are approaching the
autumn of our children's school-days: we sowed
no seed or poor seed in the spring-time; and we
are disappointed now at the miserable promise
of the harvest.
!
·
1
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 189
So long as childhood and boyhood are little
esteemed, so long the schoolmaster must be
content to hold a Pariah rank among profes-
sional men.
That he does hold such a rank is a
lamentable but an incontestable fact. The fault
lies partly with himself, and partly with the
outer society. The remedy does not lie in his
own hands altogether; but it does lie in his own
hands to a very great extent. He must improve
his wares; must expose better articles for sale;
must throw away all wooden nutmegs.
For a
while his old customers will miss these latter
articles; but in a very little while they will
awaken to a sense of the old delusion, and the
commercial rule will work its invariable way:
the vendor of good and necessary produce will
find a lucrative market; the dispenser of good
and indispensable things will be himself held
good and indispensable.
For the sake of convenience we shall confine
our remarks for the present to the case of our
grammar-schools. Any suggestions or remarks
made regarding them may be easily modified to
suit the case of proprietary or private or govern-
mental institutions. We have in these grammar-
schools alone a numerous body of academically
190 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
trained men, out of which all who have foregone
the obvious advantages of holy orders belong to
no definite and recognised calling. No peculiar
line of ultimate training has led up to their pre-
sent position; there is no path to honour marked
out for the eminently able and ambitious. Indeed,
as a general rule, the duties of a subordinate
teacher are so limited and monotonous, that it is
very hard to display eminent ability in their
working. In the great majority of schools a
master has the instruction of one particular class,
which, after a year's attendance, passes to a col-
league's exclusive care; and so on, until a rem-
nant of it closes its school-time under the charge
of the head-master. In other words, the divi-
sion of labour is supposed to be as efficacious for
the mental training of lads as it is for the manu-
facture of pins. The system acts as deadeningly
on the pupil as on the teacher. The latter may
begin his work in early manhood, and for a while
health and strength and courage will sustain him
in his mill-horse avocations. But no human for-
titude could possibly hold out unblenchingly
against ten consecutive years of Phædrus and
Cornelius Nepos; nay, against some few pages
only, reiterated and reiterated, of these uninterest-
1
#
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 191
ing writers. The pupils are only plagued with
these latter for a passing season; but their teacher
will return to the dull fare next year, and the next
year, and the year after that, and yearly, per-
haps, until the end. Often and often has a
veteran, at the close of a weary and unchequered
existence, cursed the far away and irrevocable
days wasted on academic learning, and regretted
the youthful ambition that led him from more
practical, cheerful, and hopeful careers. I think
if a distinguished foreigner were taken into the
study of such a veteran in some of our leading
grammar-schools, and were shown the few Latin
and fewer Greek pages over which his intelli-
gence had been crawling for three-quarters of a
life-time, he would be under the idea that the
elderly gentleman before him was expiating
some great political crime in a new and ingenious
improvement on Siberia.
The benumbing mill-horse system is very
general, is almost universal, in England. At the
leading public schools in Edinburgh-at all
events it was so for the twelve years during
which I had the honour to belong to one of them
a much healthier system is in vogue. In the
junior school a boy enters under one of four

192 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
classical masters, under whose care he remains
for four years; even then, if he should remain for
the three remaining years which complete the
curriculum, his classical instruction will be shared.
with the head-master by his old friend. This
latter, by being thus allowed to see the fruits of
his labour, is encouraged to take a something
like paternal interest in his charges; and, from
the amount of time at his disposal, he is com-
pelled to diverge from time to time from the
beaten track of dry studies to healthful, whole-
some, and refreshing discussion. Such a method
of teaching is, in essentials, professorial; it needs
only the substitution of other studies for classics
in the earlier years, and the dispensing altogether
with classics in particular cases, to render the
system almost perfect.
The two representative nations of the old
hemisphere have been hitherto France and Eng-
land. French civilisation is centripetal; that of
England, centrifugal. Our neighbours demand
systematization in all things; we insist upon in-
dividuality and spontaneity. The irrepressive
tendency of the English character may be wit-
nessed in a diversity of ways. We are, politically,
a nondescript people; we are warmly loyal to the
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 193
sovereign, and proud of our old aristocratic names,
and yet we preach democracy in the columns of
our newspapers; we assert the equality of all
men, and have hitherto submitted, with a little of
harmless grumbling, to be governed by a small
posse of oligarchs; we abhor interference in mat-
ters spiritual, and support without discontent an
aristocratic church; we declare the public welfare
to override all considerations, and our iron high-
roads are given over to selfish and suicidal ad-
venture; we have a veneration for law and
order, and the administration of law, in its in-
ferior department, is the prerogative of property;
we are continually exciting foreign enmity by
our patronage of foreign discontent, and are stern
in our means for repressing discontent within
our own limits; we believe ourselves honestly to
be pure and chaste lovers of the goddess Fair-
play, and our great national journal is a by-word
throughout the world and amongst ourselves as
the symbol of meanness, falsehood, ability, and
un-principle—as a moral weathercock, a political
strumpet. Our very language and literature is
replete with anomalies: we have no rules for
spelling or pronunciation; we are the greatest
borrowers of words, and still our native tongue
N
1
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194 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
asserts its supremacy; we are a people of low
theatrical tastes, and our own great dramatist
holds his own against antiquity and the moderns;
we are said to be unmusical, and the 'Messiah,
the greatest of all musical achievements, was
virtually a native production; we can hardly be
called a mathematical people, and we claim as
our own the two Coryphæi of modern science;
it was one of our anti-æsthetic Puritans that
usurped the third place in the æsthetic hierarchy
of European poets; much of our municipal free-
dom was due to our kings; much of our personal
freedom to our nobles. We have throughout our
history been practical disbelievers in the axiom
that tells us that the shortest distance between
two points is a straight line. But, like trees that
have been planted in unfavourable spots, we
twist and turn and rise into sunlight. It is a
slow and painful process with us; but we turn
and twist and rise. Our civilisation moves like
the glacier, majestically, noiselessly, and very
slowly; but still it moves,-eppure si muove.
This love of singularity, anomaly, and inde-
pendence in our countrymen is oftentimes a
barrier against licence or rash empiricism. It
is as often an unwholesome and unreasonable
•
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 195
check upon improvement. We are too prone to
brand displacement as overthrow, modification
as revolution. Our Anglo-Saxon love for muni-
cipal and local institutions impresses us with an
especial dread—and in nearly all cases a whole-
some dread—of centralization. State control,
directly used, is, we own, calculated to exercise
a deadening influence upon other than primary
educational institutions, but academic co-opera-
tion would dignify a school and utilize an uni-
versity. At present, we see the members of
what should be a definite profession acting as
independent units in little spheres; their utility
thereby lessened, their social position deterio-
rated. We, the would-be reformers, are seeking
to raise order out of confusion; dignity out of
disparagement; corporate cohesive action out of
individually wasted energy. We are met by
apathy from the outer public, and too often by
hostility from our brethren.
There is a society now in process of formation,
the primary object of which is to gain for the
schoolmaster a social position that shall be de-
finite, special, and legally fixed, and intelligibly
recognised; in other words, to gain for the scho-
lastic profession advantages that are enjoyed,
I
1
196 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
7
with as much of advantage to the public as to
themselves, by the apothecary, the surgeon, and
the physician. Were the members of 'The
Scholastic Registration Association' actuated
only by the natural and pardonable desire of
bettering their own social position, their claims,
if fraught with no detriment to alien interests,
would be deserving of sympathy without and
within the borders of their profession. But
upon public grounds their claims demand favour-
able attention, when the first result to be brought
about by their projected limitations and restric-
tions would be an elevated and broadened
standard of acquirements as required in future
candidates for scholastic initiation or preferment.
And observe, this modest but public-spirited so--
ciety asks for no monopoly; calls only upon
academical societies to unite and issue a brand
of didactic qualifications, without any intention
of quarrelling with such as shall choose to pur-
chase the unregistered article. Indeed, the
wonder is not that such modest claims are now
put forward, but that these were not put for-
ward and allowed at the period of the Refor-
mation. Our social condition is, I own, almost
as artificial as that of China; we have separate
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 197
platforms of varying heights for varied grades ;
for inherited rank, for inherited wealth, for the
ecclesiastic, for the soldier, the sailor, the advo-
cate, the physician, the surgeon, the solicitor.
It is not with the view of introducing super-
fluous artificiality into a, perhaps, too complex
organism that we push the claims of the school-
master. It is rather with the view of introduc-
ing simplification, of removing an anomaly, of
putting hundreds of educated men in the place
of respect and honour that is justly due to their
attainments. Were our professional brethren
to make an united effort in the cause, we should
carry our object with ease and rapidity. As it
is, the lay-workers amongst us are but poorly
seconded by the most powerful, wealthy, and
influential among our own order, who, as ecclesi-
astics, enjoy higher social privileges than, per-
haps, the scholastic world could under any
circumstances confer on them.
Hereafter, in speaking of a schoolmaster we
shall be speaking of a non-clerical one; and we
here also remark that, while we are cordial well-
wishers of the society above mentioned, we
would not pledge ourselves to its subsidiary
objects, nor be indisposed to hear suggestions of
198 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
improvement, or, if sound reason were shown, of
even radical change.
It is said-I believe with truth-that there
are no schools patronized by any grade, however
wealthy, in the kingdom, to compare, in regard
to the relative value of instruction given, with
our Government National Schools. The cause
must be, to a very great extent, attributed to the
supervision of enlightened, unprejudiced, utili-
tarian, and—what is very important—indepen-
dent, well-paid inspectors. The condition of our
grammar-schools could not fail to be improved
by a system of similar, not identical-academic,
not governmental-supervision. Direct legisla-
tion in the matter would now be premature. Vo-
luntary co-operation could alone avail; and that
might eventually extend so widely as to render
direct legislative interference unnecessary. It is
needless for a while to expect submission to
external authority, however enlightened, on the
part of our great public schools. Their wealth
and prestige, by rendering them almost inde-
pendent of casualties, render them, to a very
great extent, invulnerable to stricture, deaf tò
counsel, resolute against change. But, if some
six or eight of our lesser grammar-schools would
?
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 199
?
combine, and submit to regular and identical
supervision, and this supervision were, at fre-
quent intervals, exercised by inspectors nomi-
nated by the nearest university from amongst
its most accomplished graduates; if special
preparation for such inspection were precluded
by uncertainty of date, and classes were caught
here and there in, as it were, their ordinary
work-a-day clothes; and if the results of inspec-
tion were at the close of each annual session
made public; our schools would be made aware
of their several deficiencies; the public would
be re-assured as to their actual merits, where
existent, and, under any circumstances, of their
honesty of purpose and willingness to improve;
and every increase of confidence on the part of
the public in the working of our schools would
logically lead to an increased estimate of the
value of her schoolmasters.
It may be urged against my proposal, that we
have already a system at work of periodical
examinations, oral and written. I reply, that in
most cases the examinations are illusory, and
that in many cases, where good work is done, it
is done at a needless expense of time. In no
single instance is the examination of a public
}
UorM
200 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
school, as now conducted, thoroughly satisfac-
tory; as it is never the master, but always the
pupil, that is subjected to scrutiny. In other
words, an examiner is called upon to state
whether this or that class has worked satisfac-
torily in a given subject; but he is never called
on to state whether the pupil has had too much
of one kind and too little of another kind of
mental food. Indeed, in most instances, he is
little disposed to pass opinions thus freely, and.
still less qualified to enforce them with authority;
as he is, in most instances, a private friend of the
head-master who invites him; or a former pupil
at the school he is called on to inspect; or is a
master in some other school carried on upon
identical principles, the merits and defects of
which, from habit and association, he is unable
to weigh with impartiality and accuracy. In-
deed, such commonly recurring specimens of
examinership would appear to me analogous to
cases where a purchaser, in dealing with a wine-
merchant, should choose a cousin of the latter
as a judge of his goods, or should call in to taste
this or that wine a friend whom he knew to
have recently drunk too freely of the wine in
question. The times of examination, also, are
1
I
::
ป
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 201
usually fixed a week or two before vacation-
time, and the specified work has usually been
revised ad nauseam a week or two before the
examination begins. All this time is almost
invariably wasted. The energies have been
strung up to full tension for competition work ;
and ordinary work, as lacking the stimulus of
prize-winning, is stale, flat, and supposedly un-
profitable. If stimulants are perilous in man-
hood, they are doubly so to boys. Splendidly
bound books are used, with a somewhat ques-
tionable expedience, to draw onwards the able and
ambitious; and, with an inexpediency altogether
unquestionable, goads of a more stimulating
kind are employed to push on the idle and the
dull. I am disposed to think that fixed ex-
amination - times, prize - subjects, medals, and
canes all more or less partake of the unhealthy
nature of stimulants, and that they would become
gradually less and less necessary as the subject-
matter of school studies should increase in in-
terest, vitality, and relativity to surrounding
actualities. I am quite aware that to dispense
with prizes and canes would entail a great in-
crease of trouble upon the teacher; but, if their
absence were to stimulate him to double his
202 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
exertions and widen his reading, he, together
with his pupils, would be the gainer in the end.
Furthermore, I would recommend that the
suggested academic inspection should never be
singular, but that every quasi-periodic examina-
tion-for the dates would only vary within
limits should be conducted by two inspectors
acting in concert; and that one of these should
be eminent in scholarship, and the other in
mathematical and natural science. I think,
however, it would be highly advisable that one
report should be agreed to and signed by them
in common. It seems to me better that two
eminent men should confine themselves to
opinions wherein they can agree, than that they
should distract the minds of others by the
elaboration of subtle and varying disquisitions.
Under present circumstances, nothing can be
simpler than the plan of action to be followed by
a young and inexperienced teacher in scholar-
ship or mathematical science. He has the tra-
ditions of his own school-days for guidance.
He equips himself in a magisterial gown; he
lays a cane upon his desk; a little class is sum-
moned; some six or eight lines of (occasionally)
worthless Latin, or a problem in geometry, is
f
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 203
2
the work of the hour. The Latin is anatomized
according to ancestral formulæ ; the geometrical
problem is by the better pupils solved by a
subjective, mental, difficult process; by the in-
ferior pupils committed to memory; by the
enfants perdus is bungled,—and the unfortunates
are treated according to a time-honoured pre-
scription.
Our proposed inspectors would probably cause
a revolution in this world of scholastic routine.
They would wish to see a teacher not seated
behind a desk, but on a chair upon the school-
floor, on a level with and confronted by his
little fellows, whose work should be prepared,
thought out, and wrought out in their presence.
They would expect to see pupil and teacher
wax naturally warm over their mutual work;
they would prefer to see energetic irregularity at
times rather than a stereotyped and monotonous
preciseness; they would be filled with belief in
the powers of a master, when his enthusiasm
kindled enthusiasm in themselves.
In some such way as that here described the
College of Preceptors acts upon a great number
of private schools in England, and the London
University upon many colleges in various parts

204 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
;
of the United Kingdom. The benefit to the
public would be incalculable if the Grammar-
schools of England, the Foundation, Diocesan,
Model, and National Schools of Ireland, and the
High Schools and Academies of Scotland, were
affiliated in groups to the Universities of Oxford,
Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aber-
deen, St. Andrews, Dublin, and the Colleges or
quasi-Universities of Belfast, Cork, and Galway.
But the public welfare is not at present my
object in view, although its advancement would
be ensured by even the partial achievement of
my direct object, which is simply to obtain
fixity and dignity of social position to the school-
master as schoolmaster.
A colonel in a regiment must have passed
through all the grades, from that of ensign or
cornet and upwards, and will be little esteemed
in his profession unless he be thoroughly con--
versant with the duties of private, corporal,
serjeant, and each separate grade of com-
missioned officers; with all the minutiae of
clothing and commissariat for home or field
service. A first-class captain of a man-of-
war has, in his' probation time, put his hand
to every duty of a sailor; from stem to stern,
1
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 205
from keel to pennant, the use of every article
of mechanism is as familiar to him as that of
his watch-key. The judge upon the bench was
briefless once; maybe for years he did gratis
work in an attorney's office; he had his years
of anxious waiting, followed by years of labour
as junior and senior counsel, before he reached
the haven of comparative rest. To all these
favoured professions there are brilliant prizes,
in money and in distinction, attached; and
there are no cases wherein the highest prizes
are assigned to a novice, if we except only
-for the army and navy-the rare and
unimportant ones of royal princes. In the
scholastic world there are only two sets of
prizes,—the head-masterships of schools, and
the professorial chairs at the universities. The
instances have of late years been common where
youths of very brilliant academic distinctions
have been called, in earliest manhood and
wholly inexperienced in practical teaching or
economic arrangements, to the charge of large
and wealthy institutions. For a candidate to
any Chair, it is actually a strong point against
him that he should have been a schoolmaster ;
it is not a point very much in his favour that he
206 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
should have been a successful one. It is said-
and, under present circumstances, it is often said
with truth—that the dull routine of school duties
is no preparation for the more generous and
expansive lectures of the professor. I am quite
aware that it is not; but I am not aware of any
distinction between the nature of boys and that
of youths such as to justify us in withholding
from the former in our teaching hours the
liveliness, the animation, the interchange of
question and answer that we vouchsafe to the
latter; I cannot believe that the youth at college
is to the boy at school as the head to the tail
end of a severed worm; I cannot believe that,
with all the complexity of a boy's organism,
Nature can have ordained that his physical
nutriment should be palatable, but his mental
food indigestible and nauseous. Before the
schoolmaster can expect to rise in social estima-
tion, he must throw away scholastic superstitions;
he need not love Latin and Greek and subjec-
tive mathematics any the less, but he must love
all the more drawing, music, natural history,
natural science; he must acknowledge that
the same Power which has set the sea the
bounds it cannot pass has limited but varied
!
WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER? 207
·
the faculties of childhood and boyhood; he
must solemnly and repentantly abjure his once
nearly undivided fealty to a Latin-and-Greek
Procrustes, and resolve henceforward to regulate
his manipulation of a pupil by four co-ordinate
considerations: the pupil's special age; his spe-
cial aptitudes; his physical strength; and, above
all, by the condition and tendencies of external
cotemporaneous society.
Nor is self-improvement alone necessary; he
must abandon his present condition of isolation,
and for self-protection and self-assertion com-
bine with his brethren; he must let the daylight
into his class-room, that his defects may be 'de-
scried and corrected, and his excellences made
known with authority to the outer world; and,
when he shall have submitted to all this, he may
fairly claim the privileges of an useful and digni-
fied profession; he may fairly consider himself
as directly qualified to stand as candidate for
every scholastic and academic prize and distinc- -
tion; he may fairly and effectually assert his
right to be represented by a colleague in such
councils as direct the institution in which he
serves, the which councils have hitherto been
open only to head-masters in his own calling, to
i
208 WHAT IS A SCHOOLMASTER?
the gentry, to the nobility, or to members of
alien professions.
But, until my brother schoolmaster can thus
far widen his sympathies and modify his work,
he must be content to remain an object of
respect largely mingled with contemptuous pity;
a professional Gibeonite, he must draw water
and hew wood for professions more favoured;
he must stand a stationary anachronism in an
age of progress, like a moss-coloured mile-stone
upon an old, disused, and grass-grown highway.
!
1
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
209
VII.
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.

OU will bear in mind, reader, that the
desultory sketches given of my school
and college days refer to years within
the dates of 1836 and 1854. Within the last
thirteen years more attention has been bestowed
on the subject of education than had been
bestowed for perhaps two previous centuries.
In my own St. Edward's the curriculum of
instruction has been somewhat improved, and
the social discipline somewhat softened; and it
would have been difficult to deteriorate either.
Into some others of our old historic schools
-walled round, albeit, with an adamantine
conservatism, innovating under-masters have
introduced the wedge-point of contemporaneous
thought. The more recently founded schools, such
as those of Edinburgh, Cheltenham, and Marl-

O
210
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
borough, combine many of the social advantages
of the older institutions with not a few of the
advantages the systematic study of natural
science excepted,-called for by the disciples of
innovation. The Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge are year by year expanding from
sectarian into national communities, from a two-
fold congeries of classico-mathematical Board-
ing Schools into broad, generous, and catholic
Universities. With regard to Cambridge alone,
two commissions and an Act of Parliament have
been brought to bear upon the question of im-
provement; the constitution of the University,
and, to some extent, that of the colleges—alas
for the burrows of comfortable St. Ignavia!-have
been remodelled. The curriculum of studies has
been enlarged, especially in the direction of law,
moral philosophy, medicine, surgery, and natu-
ral science. Large museums and lecture-rooms
have been built and fitted up. The terms and
times for degrees have all undergone essential
alterations. The examinations for ordinary de-
grees are altogether different from the ordeals
passed through by a graduate of ten years'
standing. There are several new class-lists for
honours; and in the course of a very few months

YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
2II
the old classical and mathematical examinations
are likely to undergo radical change. The pro-
fessoriate has been extended; the last additions
being the chair of Sanscrit and Comparative
Philology; and, ere long, will probably be added
chairs of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and International
Law. It is as well, however, to add that the
University is honourably moving in advance of
the scholastic world. She is providing profes-
sorial instruction for which no great public
school as yet adequately prepares; and her
chief rewards are still the prizes of successful
study in the two branches of pure abstract ma-
thematical science and of the Latin and Greek
languages and literatures.
It is difficult to ascertain the condition of
the smaller colleges; but their tenure of fellow-
ships has been improved, and relieved of many
of the old restrictions. The great college of
Trinity provides classical lectures so frequent
and so good in quality as to enable her students
to dispense with the ancient burdensome ex-
penses entailed by private tuition; English lite-
rature is recognised in her examination-hall;
her scholarships are thrown generously open to
all and sundry of the sister University of Oxford;
212
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
and the same will probably be done, ere long,
with her fellowships. Finally, there are three
bills before Parliament affecting the universities,
all of which are fraught with important results,
and all of which, in some form or other, will
eventually pass into law. In matters political,
reform is thought to rise like smoke upwards;
in matters educational, we see the rule reversed,
and our academical Houses of Lords are calling
their scholastic Commons to mend their ways
and improve their condition.
Before one step had been taken in the way of
reform for Oxford and Cambridge, the London
University and the Queen's University in Ireland
had been called into existence, and, notwith-
standing the splendid list of improvements above
enumerated, the curricula and constitutions of
the new universities still hold the superiority in
breadth and catholicity. Indeed, there can be
little doubt that their constitutions suggested
many of the recent changes in the old corpora-
tions, and that their successful working has all
along encouraged and assisted Oxonian and Can-
tabrigian reformers in their great and arduous
task. Their influence for good, combined with
the still more powerful influence of the genius
:
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
213
of progress now abroad, is at work in Ireland
as well as in England, and is being felt by the
wealthy conservative College of Dublin, which
within the last fifteen years has been slowly
but steadily advancing, and will ere long, it is
said, move so rapidly in the path of remodelment
as to render superfluous the suggestions of re-
formers and the interference of Parliament. These
circumstances may be comforting to the world
in general; but they are very distressing to poor
honest writers on academic obstruction, who have
now to run hastily and indecorously to catch hold
by the tail of some disappearing abuse; who
have to write while there is yet a little twilight,
for fear the noonday come wherein they, poor
honest moles, must cease to work from the lack
of work to do.
From 'the time of Charlemagne to the epoch
of the Tudors western Europe was politically
subdivided; but in matters of religion, art, scholar-
ship, and philosophy, was one great republic.
The religious movement of the seventeenth cen-
tury shattered this grand and venerable fabric.
Its reconstruction may come with time; but, to
render it possible, the element of metaphysical—
not practical-religion must be eliminated from
214
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
the influences employed. However, before in-
dulging our imaginations with the prospect of
European, and eventually more than European,
academic brotherhood, it would be as well to
inquire into the chances of establishing a mutu-
ally benefiting intercourse between the several
universities of our own nation.
As the Queen's University in Ireland is a con-
glomerate of three separate colleges, which are
severally in all essentials universities, we may
state that the United Kingdom contains the
twelve universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Dur-
ham, London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen,
St. Andrews, Dublin, Belfast, Cork, and Galway.
A religious element only enters into four of the
twelve into Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, and
Durham; and the valuable prizes are in the gift
of the three first among these four. The great
work of nationalizing our universities might be
commenced by throwing open in the three
wealthiest universities all professorships and fel-
lowships for competition to graduates of the
said three. The scheme would be found so
beneficial in its results, that its action would be
gradually extended, until a youth would select
his own college upon the consideration of
{
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
215
neighbourhood, expense, or comparative value
of tuition, and would search his rewards where
rewards were most numerous and valuable. I
would go so far as to assert that, in due time, it
would be found desirable to refuse a degree for
continuous attendance at any one university or at
separate universities in one and the same of the
three portions of the United Kingdom. English,
Irish, and Scottish youths would all alike be
benefited by passing severally at least one aca-
demic year out of England, Ireland, and Scot-
land. The social and political advantages of
such a scheme of international fusion would far
outweigh such as were directly educational; and
these latter alone would be great beyond calcu-
lation. Chairs, that here and there had long
been valuable or valueless sinecures, would be
called by distant importunate visitants into
action; there would no longer be paralysis here
and quasi-putrefaction there; but a healthful
blood would be forced through all the academic
arteries, to return through scholastic veins to the
nation's heart. I will now overstep considera-
tions of nationality, of even European academic
fraternity. I will maintain that the ocean, which
is the highway for the material commerce of two
216
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
hemispheres, should not be held as a non-con-
ductor to the immaterial sympathies of learning
and inquiry. I am sure that a coming generation
will see the colleges of the new and old world
forming members of one consolidated university.
Such an university! God speed its inauguration!
Under such happy circumstances as above
foreshadowed, every academic distinction would
partake of a national, an European, or a cosmo-
politan character. Until recently a fellowship
was known to be achieved with difficulty at such
colleges as Trinity and St. John's, Cambridge;
at Balliol and Oriel, Oxford; at Trinity, Dublin ;
because at these and a few more competition
was open to large numbers, or the value of the
prizes intensified competition; but at the great
majority of the English colleges the attainment
of a fellowship might occasionally be a sign of
talent, but was often a sign of stolid, ignoble, bull-
dog clinging to one department of study, and very
often a sign of sheer luck. In my own times, at
one palatial college in Cambridge, and at more
colleges than one in Oxford, fellowships were
virtually conferred on youths even years before
they left school. I am speaking from actual
knowledge. A certain examination would be
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
217
passed at about the age of fifteen or sixteen; if
a youthful competitor were successful against
some two or three antagonists, he would wait on
at school until a vacancy at college occurred;
he would now require only patience, time, and
vegetable growth to qualify him for fellowship,
tutorship, and college living; he would throw
aside all serious study for life; would read a
few classical poets for amusement; would lay in
a stock of Horatian quotations; would occupy
the greater part of his hours in school, as here-
after his college evenings, with whist, and his
leisure hours out of school with sport. The life-
long rewards at the great Cambridge College
were bestowed on the leading pupils of the
greatest wealthiest school in all the world; and
the chief attainment of these lucky lads was
rapidity and fluency in the composition of Latin
verse. At Cambridge they were not required to
compete in any way for out-college distinctions;
they had before them a world without a limiting
horizon; they had done life's, work; they might
turn to their rest on earth, by way of preparation
for a sounder, deeper, and, if possible, more
unprofitable repose underground. It is true that
some ambitious youths would prevent their ver-
[
218
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
sification from waxing rusty, and would occupy
lazy and unprofitable months in writing hexa-
meters, alcaics, and sapphics for the annual
medals, and would thus be adding periodically to
that Babel-pyramid of rubbish with the building
of which dilettante scholarship has been amusing
herself for nearly two thousand years; at Athens,
under the early Cæsars; at Oxford, under Anne
and William ; at Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin
to this very day.
The great portion of the old academic endow-
ments was bestowed by the intelligence and
piety of Catholics, with the liberal object of pro-
moting the study of contemporary knowledge.
The propriety of diverting bequests of a public
nature, to accord with the motives rather than
the express words of the testator, has been
acknowledged again and again; and the only
limit of diversion would appear to be the con-
siderations of obvious honesty of motive and
obvious public utility. There cannot be a doubt
that it would be better for the nation at large,
as certainly it would be more in keeping with the
virtual wishes of the founders, that academic
prizes, carrying with them social prestige and
almost pecuniary independence, should be open
;
w
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
219
ì
to national competition, and very widely in the
departments of science characteristic of the age,
rather than to the competition of a majority or
minority, and exclusively in the departments of
elegant but antiquated accomplishment, or of
such scientific subtleties as whet the intellect
without direct and practical tendency.
These views will doubtless appear revolutionary
to many excellent and able men. The truth
is, the whole train of our social civilisation is
antipathetic to catholicity; is insular, reserved,
hedged-round, elbows-off, home-keeping. We
are afraid of draughts and cold-taking in every-
thing and every place. To worship God in a
cathedral would seem to many of us as uncom-
fortable as saying our prayers in windy weather
on Salisbury Common. Even the parish church
is too open and exposed. We must coterize
off into innumerable sects; build our special
and peculiar Ebenezers; and entrench ourselves.
warmly, snugly, and invisibly in our own private
pews. If we are wealthy, we wall in long
stretches of landscape, and imagine that the
exclusion of our poorer brethren enhances our
own enjoyment of lawn and stream and forest-
glade; we lay embargoes even upon wide moun-
20
220
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
tain-wastes, for the temporary protection of the
little birds that we shoot at, by ourselves, for a
week or two in autumn. We attend no parks,
promenades, or musical reunions, if they are
frequented by what is called 'common people';
and herein we seem forgetful of the vision seen
by Peter, when the Roman captain was nearing
his wicket-gate. If we are professional men, we
keep trade at a distance; trade, again, has in-
numerable sections, all socially repellent of one
another.
There are grades of rank in our
kitchens; and the cook and table-maid will retire
after dinner to their bedrooms, to imitate the
exclusiveness of their employers, by eating their
pie or pudding out of sight of buttons and the
scullery-maid. The vast expenditure of money
upon the decoration of our houses is all due to
this ungenerous spirit of isolation. We wish to
have our own petty museums of pictures, engrav-
ings, shells, and nick-nacks; our own libraries;
our own upholstery trumpery miracles.
antipathy to expansion clings to us on our death-
beds, whereon, if we would fain dispose of some
of our gains in the great cause of education, we
leave this or that annual amount to the Burrows
of St. Ignavia, open to all competitors, with a
The
}
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
221
special preference to such candidates as may
have been born in the parish of St. Swithin, and
bear the surname of Muggins.
In one of his lesser speeches the great orator
of Athens tells us that in his day it was difficult
or impossible to track out the dwelling-places of
the founders of his country's greatness, though
only a few generations had elapsed between his
own day and theirs. But plain to all beholders
were the public monuments, of their taste and
magnificence and public spirit; the very rem-
nants of which to our own times' are the objects
of admiration, envy, despair. The greatness of
a people can only be built upon individual self-
abnegation. A people may not be divided
against itself, but subdivided within itself; and
such a people need not fall, but it cannot rise
and expand. The coral island rises in the sea,
because the building of each minute insect is in
its totality a particle of foundation for further
superstructure. No one tiny mason antagonizes
with his neighbour. No one molecule wastes.
into an unprofitable decay. No efforts of the
builders are spent in neutralizing actions and
reactions, but all work spontaneously upwards
with an invincible unanimity.
A
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
222
·
Were I a sojourner in a strange land, and
anxious to gauge the extent of its refinement
and civilisation, I should be comparatively in-
different to such indices of its wealth as the
splendour of private equipages, the luxury of
private entertainments, the gorgeousness of house-
furniture, the exotics of walled-in gardens; but
I should visit the theatres, which are—or should
be—the schools of taste and morality to the mul-
titude; the public gardens, the public museums,
the public libraries, the public picture-galleries,
the places of public worship, the grammar-
schools, where the hope of the nation should be
hatching intellectually; the colleges, where her
youth should be essaying their wings for future
flight. I should think lowly of a nation, however
great her commerce, however multitudinous her
population, however old her nobility, if I found
vulgar, commonplace, and mischievous sensa-
tionalism upon her theatre-boards; useless im-
practicable studies foisted on her children; and
similar studies, mingled with a servile deference
to things undeserving of academic respect,
flourishing—or decaying-in her highest seats
of learning. I should consider that, if such a
nation were great and powerful, her greatness
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
223
and power were due to the impetus of a past
time, whose opportune and reasonable institutions
had been conserved with piety, until piety had
degenerated into superstition, and utility had
mouldered into mischief.
It is ill with the stream when the water at the
spring is bitter. A very few years ago the Lon-
don University was almost invariably mentioned
with epithets of a foolish and ungenerous con-
tempt by members of the more ancient founda-
tions. The ancient College of Dublin has, until
a very recent date, exhibited a jealousy, unworthy
of herself, towards the recently-founded Queen's
Colleges. Indeed, on one occasion some six pro-
fessors of the latter were treated with marked
rudeness at her hall table, simply and obviously
on account of the new connection they had
formed; simply and obviously so, as every one
of them had been a highly distinguished alumnus
of the old foolishly jealous Alma Mater. The
tide, in England especially, seems set so power-
fully in towards improvement, that before many
years we would fain hope that all marks of
discussion and jealousy and disparagement will
have been washed away. Supposing honesty,
then, and respectability as granted, the rewards

224
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
1
of institutions pretending to the character of
national academic bodies should be the per-
quisites of ability, irrespectively of all considera-
tions of creed, parentage, means, or place; the
only aristocracies recognised within their walls
should be those of industry, intellectuality, and
morality; the only vulgarities branded with con-
tempt, those of idleness, stupidity, and vice.
(
a
While we advocate catholicity as to creed, rank,
and locality, we would advocate à like generosity
as to the subjects of study. The two favoured
branches in Cambridge, our most generous Alma
Mater, have hitherto been Classics' and 'Mathe-
matics.' Let us preserve the old names, but
generalize their significations. Language and
science are eternal; their childhood is hidden
from us by an impenetrable veil of obscurity;
their maturity, we know, is not yet reached;
their old age is in a futurity beyond our concep-
tion. The patois of a Swiss villager is full of
interest to a philologer; the amusement of a lad
with
any gas may suggest something to the oldest
chemist; the sailing of a child's boat may be a
lesson to a mechanician. The word 'university'
is said by some to mean 'the place for study
of the full curriculum of the world's knowledge.'

YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
225
Let us accept the interpretation, and act upon
its accuracy.
age of Roman literature shed a dim light upon
Europe, new languages and new literatures have
been evoked; the geometric knowledge of the
Alexandrines and the natural science of Aris-
totle have branched off into numerous channels.
Why should any single one channel be left
unexplored?
Since the days when the silver
A plausible objection meets us on the outset
of our proposition. The subjects of human study
are now so numerous that it would be impossible
for any length of days ever attained to prosecute
even desultorily the totality. Every single sub-
ject is now so exhaustively treated, that only
consummate ability, aided by unusual industry,
can be expected to open out new paths. The
objection is only a plausible one. A university
is, after all, but a training-school for youth
and early manhood. Its function is to awaken
curiosity, not to develop faculties to their full
extent. It is with the studies of youth as with
human food; the more varied they are, within
reasonable limits, the more healthful they are
found. To discard altogether the learning and
science of antiquity would be suicidal; it would
Р
I

226
1
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
be like climbing up a ladder and calling to one's
friends to saw off the lower extremities. But to
adhere to them exclusively would be to cling
to the ladder's lower steps for fear of tumbling
higher up.
The question becomes: What is the mean-
ing of the terms 'Classics' and 'Mathematics?'
The former word meant originally: 'Ordinary,'
'Regular,' 'Ranked;' and the latter: 'Subjects of
learning.' Into the former category have crept
the works of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri, Mon-
taigne, Pascal, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Des-
cartes, Buffon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Comte,
Lessing, Richter, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Shakes-
peare, Milton, Gibbon, Cervantes, Lopez di
Vega, Calderon. If these are not classics, who
are more deserving of the title, if the nomen-
clature be a title of honour ?
It would be impossible for me to measure
the extent or utility of what is usually termed
'Mathematics.' But I know this much of it prac-
tically, that students have been known to climb
to high eminences in its abstract departments,
who, in facing a class of young students, or a
lecture-room crammed with a popular audience,
have been unable to explain the mechanism of
܂
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
227
the steam-engine, the action of the tides, the
movements of the planets, the application of
the barometer, the air-pump, the syringe, the
electroscope, the voltaic pile and its modifica-
tions; unable to explain in clearly intelligible
terms the means by which a message is sent like
lightning through a wire, or the laws upon
which a railway bridge of metal is formed.
So long as an exhaustive knowledge of Latin
and Greek literature is required, so long as
students are called upon to drink the lees with
the wine, it would be cruel to task their faculties
with the mastering of extraneous literature, how-
ever beautiful, however valuable. So long as
our present-chiefly analytical-course of mathe-
matics taxes the physical strength of the best
constitution to overtake, it would be equally
cruel to impose an extra feather of burthen.
But it is possible to take off, in order to put on.
To my own mind it seems an incongruous thing
to fix by any arbitrary line the limit of Italian
speech and thought. I hold that what we call
'Italian' is the tongue by which we should ap-
proach what we call Latin;' and that the
student who can read Lucretius, Virgil, Horace,
Ovid, Livy, Tacitus, and Juvenal, is only half-
228
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
1
read in one tongue unless he can read with equal
ease and delight the works of Dante, Ariosto,
Tasso, and Alfieri. But, whilst I am of opinion
that Italian and Latin literature should be con-
sidered as one, I would give a separate niche
to the literatures of Spain, England, France, and
Germany. A classical Tripos should allow com-
petition to students in any or all of these litera-
tures. I would suggest that every competitor
should qualify himself in one of the two most
ancient; but I am sure of this, that a youthful
student must have gone through arduous and
useful toil who can translate freely and accu-
rately a passage from a great writer in Spanish,
French, or German, if he can at the same time
prove his real mastery of the special language
by a long exercise accurately and idiomatically
written in its prose.
I am a pleader for the discarding of useless
antiquities, and of the introduction of every-
thing useful in modern attainment into our
academic curricula. Is it because I undervalue
the debt due to ancient thought? God forbid !
My life has hitherto been spent almost entirely
with the thinkers of a dead world. They are
my companions in every vacation. I have spent
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
229
式
​..
a life as it were in the catacombs. I have read
and read again of alien antique master-works
with a relish that I seldom find in the perusal
of any copatriot author, with the one exception
of our unapproachable dramatist; some thirty
years of constant intercourse have made their
languages familiar to me as was my Mother's
voice-alas! long, long ago.
1
No, reader, it is not that I disparage them
that I wish them to be less freely handled. It
is because I reverence them; because I think
that they are mauled and fingered and squeezed
and kneaded out of shape and taste and perfume
and beauty by universal, irreverent, unintelligent,
and premature usage. I would rather that their
study were not so uselessly and mischievously
anticipated; and, when their study were begun,
I would rather that the attention of our youth
were directed solely to what they contain of
noble, invigorating, and still fresh instruction,
than that their wits should be wasted for years
in wandering over fields devoid of interest, and
perusing or imitating what had better be ignored
or forgotten for ever.
Furthermore, I am anxious to preach, while I
have a pulpit allowed me, a short sermon against
!
230
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
divorce.
I recognise no ancient civilisation, nọ
new. I can detect no epoch in the world's in-
tellectual history when God drew a separating
line between new things and old. I know of no
mental deluge that cast up upon an Ararat any
modern Noah with modern sons. Half of the
knowledge that we all possess is older than
the hills; and the oldest knowledge is new to
each one of us on its first acquisition. At all
events, if our dualistic predilections-so strikingly
manifested in all our religious systems, insist
upon an adjusted balance of antiquity and
hodiernity, we must bring in our moral and
mental sympathies to correct the specious but
incorrect suggestions of our clocks. We must
disregard conventional dates, and remember
that Cicero is as near to us as Wolsey; that
Augustus and Charlemagne are nearer to us
than Frederick and Napoleon; that Coeur-de-
lion was a contemporary of Achilles; that our
corporeally surviving ritualists were intellectu-
ally dead and buried and rotten three hundred
years ago; and that our honest old tough-
hided Tories, our militia-colonels and landlords
in Ireland, are, politically speaking, still welter-
ing in præadamite ooze with a kindred race of
YOUTH AND COLLEGE.
231
unimprovable and impenetrable saurians. We
must preach and act upon the doctrine that the
right measure of knowledge is not that it be
fashionable, trite, or curiously antique, or tem-
porarily and personally useful; but that it be
true and eternal in its essence, and universally
useful and comforting and strengthening and
ennobling and good.
When God made the world, and in the world
the Garden of Eden, He looked down upon His
works; and, behold, they were all very good.
Among His works was the tree of knowledge.
The mission of man is to endeavour, with God's
favour, to transmute the fruit of that tree from
a curse into a blessing of blessings; to bruise its
leaves, and assuage withal the pains and sorrows
incidental to weakness and mortality; to work
out the ultimate purpose of Him who planted
it, and who made it and us and everything for
good.
232
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
1
VIII.
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
AM only partially interested in the
great question of university reform. I
am still in heart, where for twelve years.
I was in reality, alternately in the schoolroom
and the school-yard. The wind that blows among
the pines upon the mountain-tops may leave a
nursery garden on the lowlands in repose; and
mental movements on academic heights may for
a while leave the flats of school life untroubled.
But only for a while. The concussion of the
atmosphere will be eventually felt in every
crevice open to space.
We may consider that for the first seven years
at least of his life a boy should be left to the
almost exclusive care of women. My remarks
here, and indeed my remarks in general, refer
chiefly to those favoured classes in the com-
}

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 233
:
:
munity wherein woman can afford to consider
her mission as an indoors one. Not that I lack
sympathy for the classes less favoured, but that
my actual experience has been partial and cir-
cumscribed.
}
After, then, seven years of wise and kindly
maternal or quasi-maternal superintendence, and
two years of such preparatory schooling as, to
the best of my knowledge, only Edinburgh can
give in an approach to perfection, let our child
be carried by us, in imagination, and left in
one of the nine great schools of England. But,
after leaving him thus, let us retire for a long
solitary walk, and indulge in reflections upon
the capacities and tastes of early boyhood. Let
us become in fancy boys ourselves again, and let
us ask of ourselves to what kind of schooling we
should involuntarily wish to be submitted; and,
with the experience that manhood has given
us, let us endeavour to rid ourselves of crotchets
either of personality or of association, and to
bear in mind the unerring wisdom of our common
mother, Nature.
A boy of ten has, as a general rule, no intro-
spective or reflective powers; and, if he had
them, they would be of little use. It would be
234
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
as though a thing that ate nothing should be
gifted with organs of digestion. But he has
hands quick for work, good or evil; an ear quick
to hear, eyes observant to every movement,
colour, and shape around him. If he were taken
to a review, he would bring back with him a
better notion than a newspaper could give us of
the uniform of every regiment, of such military
movements as he could follow, and would pro-
bably hum some of the airs played by the mili-
tary bands.
If his rambles took him habitually
among shipping, he would learn the rig of every
vessel, the name of every rope, the flags and sig-
nals of many nations. If he went to a menagerie,
he would, unbidden, note the forms and colours of
every living creature; and not a form or colour
so noted down among his invisible memoranda
would be lost sight of or forgotten, until death
or its approach should have dulled for ever his
faculties. We never forget a shape, a colour, a
tune, a taste, or a smell. We may be, at times,
unable to recall them at will; but a chance cir-
cumstance or an uneasy dream may bring them
back to us after thirty years of supposed forget-
fulness. After ten or twenty years of absence
in foreign climes a man may return home, and
4
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
235
be served at dinner with some dish that was a
favourite in his boyhood, and the taste will be as
familiar to him as though he had partaken of it
only yesterday. You may hear at times a tune
casually whistled in the streets that will send
you back to the verge of your nursery, and
cause for a little while in your heart and eyes
a singularly painful but sweet fulness.
Again, if we take a boy from lecture-room to
lecture-room of the Polytechnic Institution, he will
drink in greedily all he hears from the chemist;
will listen, wondering and delighted, to the story
of the stars; will touch tremblingly the rod sur-
charged with electricity; will gaze, bewildered
but curious, at a hundred whizzing, unintelligible,
but as he knows-useful machines; will see a
fairyland in the wonders of dissolving views;
will return home with the religious-the reason-
ably religious-conviction upon his awakened
mind that the world all around him is full of
beauties and marvels; and he will very possibly
have a dim idea that throughout all this manifesta-
tion of beauties and marvels there is in operation
a subtle, mysterious, but never failing Law.
This divine curiosity it is the peculiar privilege
of ordinary schoolmasters to stifle. And yet it
236
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
is this same curiosity that, under varying times,
ages, and circumstances, set Copernicus at work
among the planets; Cuvier mapping out the
animated world; Watt busy with steam and in-
tricacies of mechanism; Parry and Ross voy-
aging from pole to pole. It is this very curiosity
whose healthy working is necessary for the mate-
rial well-being and the intellectual health of the
human species. It is an instinct in itself so
strong that nothing but continued and persistent
efforts could possibly succeed in neutralizing
or deadening its action. But human ingenuity
is allowed occasionally-some would say for
wise reasons to override the regulations of
nature. At all events, it has succeeded in the
melancholy attempt most effectually in the
fashionable rearing of nine-tenths of the children
of well-to-do English parents. Happily the nar-
cotic system in vogue with the sons of nobles,
proprietors, and professional men, is not permitted
to descend in action to the sons of artisans and
labourers.
For the first four years of public-school life
the time of a boy will be devoted chiefly—I
might almost say, with a trifling exaggeration,
exclusively to the mastering of his Latin
!
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
237
!
grammar. In other words, he will set upon an
abstract study of a logical kind, such as only
the minority of mature intellects could ever
thoroughly digest, and such as only the minority
of this minority could ever enjoy. For weary
years he will be traversing dull uninteresting
patches of classic ground; stumbling in a twi-
light of intelligence; groping his way by the
bewildering beams of dim flickering lamp-lights.
In his journey over waste and morass he will be
accompanied by a guide, who will be clad in an
appropriate uniform of mysterious black, the sable
livery of primeval Night. He will ever and anon
ask for a sign, and there will no sign be given
to him, excepting such as the grim humour
of his oracular guide shall vouchsafe to give.
He will be told of nouns that are parisyllabic,
imparisyllabic, collective, heterogeneous, hetero-
clite, and mobile; of pronouns and particles
correlative, which branch into interrogatives, de-
monstratives, relatives, indefinites, and universals,
while these last-mentioned branch off again into
universals relative and indefinite, universals
alternative, universals distributive and inclusive,
and universals exclusive; he will hear of con-
junctions subordinate and co-ordinate; of cases
238
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
!
that are objective-genitive, or subjective-genitive;
of verbs with guttural, dental, labial, liquid, and
anomalous stems-strange forest trees; of verbs
with periphrastic conjugations; of verbs finite,
infinite, substantive, transitive, intransitive, active,`
passive, deponent, quasi-passive, semi-deponent,
defective, inceptive, frequentative, desiderative,
anomalous, factitive or quid-quales, purely tra-
jective or cuis, trajective-transitive or cui-quids;
of verbs with moods indicative, imperative,
potential, conjunctive, conditional, concessive,
optative, dubitative, hortative, historico-infinitive,
and prolate-infinitive; of adverbs consecutive,
final, causal, temporal, conditional, concessive,
comparative; of relations-never heard of in
his own home-epithetic, attributively enthetic,
adverbially enthetic, complemental, annexive,
circumstantive, predicative, prolative, receptive,
proprietive; of gerundive attractions-to him
inattractive; of gerundives with attributive con-
structions-upon which he can put no construc-
tion; of asyndetons, complements, congruents,
copulas, ellipses, enclitics, entheses, direct and
oblique enunciations, syncopes, syneses, apodoses,
and protases; and concerning all these mysteries
he will probably have his information communi-
:
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 239
1
cated—mercifully, if not necessarily—in an un-
known tongue. God help us! We live in a
queer world! At all events, I have been for thirty
years a diligent student and teacher of two-to
boys, and perhaps to me-unknown tongues, and
I feel a difficulty now in putting a definite inter-
pretation upon many of the terms above quoted.
You may be possibly under the idea that I
am going back to the days of my own schooling,
and quoting from manuals nominally in use but
virtually superseded. I am quoting entirely from
a small elementary manual issued only a year
ago, and prepared by an assembly of some ten of
the most learned head-masters in England with
the express view of remedying such deficiencies
in elementary education as had been brought to
light by a recent Government Commission of In-
quiry. With many terms of the above ludicrous
and almost unintelligible jargon I was familiar in
my own earlier days; but a very considerable
number of the terms appear to be of recent
invention. The method of cure adopted was a
singular one for a people laying claim to prac-
ticality, but not a singular one for what is in
absolute fact the most anomalous and eccentric
people in the known world. It was a scholastic
240
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
1
3
canonization of the doctrines of homoeopathy.
The public schools under existing administra-
tion were found to be in a deplorably faulty
condition in regard to their system of general,
but especially of early, mental training, and
the remodelment was left in the hands of the
faulty administrators. A circumstance was
forgotten which, while it may palliate past
blunderings in the principal or authoritative
agents, calls itself for correction; and that
is the singular fact that the head-masters of
our wealthiest schools usually proceed directly
from college fellowships to the enjoyment of
their lucrative and honourable posts; that
very few of them have ever taught a class of
children for a single day. In many cases,
they bring with them academic associations and
prejudices, which are as ill-adapted for school
management as are the duties of head-master-
ship. for the discharge of episcopal functions.
In the present case, the evil to remedy was a
mental epidemic amongst our children. Had
the sufferers, their mothers, or their grand-
mothers, been taken into council, it would have
been ascertained that the disease was one of
chronic cerebral congestion induced by an undue
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
241
.
admixture of indigestible abstracts in their daily
school-food. Complete rest for a while, with
instant change of air and diet, would have been
modestly suggested by these unprofessional un-
inspired simpletons. As it was, the chiefs of the
scholastic faculty held a secret and solemn meet-
ing, and, disdaining the preliminaries of asking
questions, examining tongues, and feeling pulses,
proceeded to diagnose the disease in question
by a careful and elaborate study of the works of
Hippocrates, Aristotle, Celsus, and Galen. The
means employed were gigantically, and indeed
dangerously, out of proportion to the work on
hand. A man may shoot with a howitzer at a
rook on his house-top. He may kill the rook ;
but in doing so he may knock his house to
pieces. However, the Council sat, deliberated,
and prescribed. More logic' was the prescrip-
tion ultimately issued. A Highlander living in
a very remote district, to which, owing to happy
difficulties of position, the presence of a practi-
tioner was denied, was asked what steps were
taken in cases of sudden illness in his neighbour-
hood. 'We give them whisky:' was the reply.
'But supposing they don't mend?'
give them more.'
Q
(
Then we
最
​242
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
It may seem presumption in me to criticise
the work of so many heads, every one of which
is unquestionably crammed with learning. The
grounds upon which I venture to speak my
opinion in strongest and most unqualified terms
are, firstly That-whilst in natural abilities and
acquired learning I may be vastly inferior to
every one of the compilers of the New Latin
Catechism or Manual of Darkness-in industry,
zeal, and enthusiastic love of classical studies I
am on a par with any one of them; and, secondly:
That in the first twelve of my fifteen years of
scholastic life I was engaged for three hours,-
in other words, for half my time of daily work,—
during five days of the week, over ten months
in the year, with an elementary class of boys,
varying in nymber from forty to seventy; and,
thirdly That even during the last three years I
have had in the management of an Alpha-Beta
class one-fourth part of my professorial duties.
My experience has taught me, what common
sense might have taught me at the outset, that
it is inexpedient to make a dead language the
sole instrument in educating and training a boy's
faculties; and that, if the exclusive use of that
instrument be persisted in, from inability to find
:
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
243
either other means or work-people able to em-
ploy other means, it is useless, not to say mis-
chievous and cruel, to use that special instrument
in a way contrary to the analogies of Nature's
own showing. In other words, if Latin be
essential, I contend that it should be deferred, at
the least, until an average pupil shall have turned
the age of twelve; and that, when at length taught,
it should be taught by proceeding very gradually
from unconscious handling towards an introspec-
tive process; from particulars to generals; from
practice to theory; from objective illustration
and separate statement to subjective considera-
tion and comprehensive principle; in plain words,
by beginning at the beginning and ending with
the end.
The same law of nature-of proceeding from
easy to hard, from simplicity to complexity,
from messages sent by the senses to the brain to
messages sent from the brain outwards,-should
be pursued in all studies. It is as unphilosophi-
cal to commence the study of geometry by the
abstract definition of a point, a line, a surface, or
a circle, as to puzzle a child's brain with the
logical and metaphysical jargon of grammar.
The study of pure logic, the logical and scientific¸
244
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
t
覃
​study of grammar, and the strictly logical study
of geometry are closely related to one another;
are beyond the faculties of the great majority of
intelligent boys of fourteen, and should be re-
served for the closing years of school life or
the lecture-rooms of an university. Had I to
teach a little fellow between ten and twelve
years of age the elements of geometry, I should
be content if, on my asking him what a circle
was, he replied mutely by drawing one on a
piece of paper with a pair of compasses. In
short, I should consider that this instrument,
together with a pair of scissors, some sheets of
card-board and a few blocks of deal wood, would
be more useful for a long while than a bushel
of definitions; and, again, I would never puzzle a
young learner's head by making him repeat those
logically worded propositions which prove what
to him and every one else outside of Bedlam are
self-evident facts; and, in his proving the harder
and more interesting ones, I should allow him to
proceed in a rough, rude, practical, and mechani-
cal way. How many a child by such a process
would be helped comfortably over the 'Pons
Asinorum !' And how many an intelligent
urchin would be spared the perplexing facility of
f
J
A
1
1
:
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 245
proving that two extraneously touching circles
cannot have a common centre,-that husband
and wife, walking ever so lovingly arm-in-arm,
cannot be in possession of a common liver!
With regard to the supposed sine-qua-non of
Latin, I would recommend that, whether its.
study were attempted unwisely before, or pru-
dently not before, the age of twelve, it should in
either case be approached through the medium
of modern Italian-taught, of course, upon a
simple and natural plan. And incidentally I
would remark, that I should hesitate to propose
with my friend, Professor Blackie, a like inter-
mediate usage of modern Hellenic; for, whilst
the language of Dante to that of Virgil would
seem to be related as summer flower to spring
blossom, the dialect of modern Athens to that
of Plato would appear to stand in the relation
of stalk to flower. After, then, a thorough
course of some easy and graduated Italian
manual, a pupil might be taken through the
four Gospels. The parables should, after being
studied in the original, be read from off the
English text; and afterwards, with the Lord's
Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and other familiar
formulæ, committed to memory. Some such
246 BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
pleasant play as La Locandiera of Goldoni
might be carefully read and grammatically
-not exhaustively-analysed, before ever a
Latin grammar were put into a boy's hands:
The vowel sounds of the most musical, liquid,
dulcet of modern languages are easily caught
-the only difficulty being the double pro-
nunciation of the vowel o; and the semi-
synthetic and semi-analytic character of the
language has much in common with the syn-
thesis of ancient Latin and the analysis of
our own tongue. Furthermore, if our pupil
be enabled to prosecute his studies to the full
hereafter, he will come to love and reverence
those great Italians, who are the connecting
links between the dead past and the living
present; who helped not a little to inspire our
Chaucer, our Shakspeare, our Milton; who were
in fact the grey Fathers of modern literature.
He will be led unconsciously to regard the course
of human thought as moving in a regular and
continuous curve, and not as taking great zigzag
leaps through interjacent darkness from peak to
peak of centuries.
But, though language and geometry were taught
upon the most simple, philosophic, and natural
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
247
!
"
principles, still they would not be enough to
occupy the mind entirely. Man may not live
by bread alone,' spiritually, physically, or men-
tally. The uniformity of mutton dinners in
ancient Eton was, perhaps, less prejudicial to
the physical growth of her lads than the mono-
tony of Latin verse to the development of their
brains.
On
And this incidental mention of Latin verse
compels me to digress a little. Indeed, the
subject never fails to set my mind upon a train
of composite reflection. A year or two ago,
at a house where I was staying on a visit in
Dublin, I observed a young friend, of eighteen
or nineteen, who seemed pale with overwork, to
carry always a certain book under his arm.
my alluding to the circumstance, I was informed
that he slept with it under his pillow. The book
was a well-known manual for composition in
Latin verse. The youth, who was possessed of
average abilities, but had no special call for ver-
sification, read daily with a private tutor; had
done so for years; and an important part of each
day's work was to compose some half a dozen lines
or more of English prose into metrical Latin
proser. To my great delight my friend brought
248
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
me an exercise one day for correction; and,
knowing me to be a former alumnus of an Eng-
lish university, he spoke regretfully of his want
of progress in the study so generally cultivated.
Having now obtained an opportunity for free
speech, I advised the youth to take the treasured
volume, and descend with it into the kitchen,
and, after raking with the shovel a passage in
the fire, to ram the said book within the open
passage, and wait until it were entirely consumed.
My advice was virtually, if not literally, taken ;
for the book was never opened from that day,
and the youth has been ever since a more ardent
-and to my mind a more intelligent and im-
proving-student of classical literature than he
could have been with the weight of an impossible
accomplishment acting as a clog upon his courage
and his energies.
Whilst, however, I look upon every hour spent
on Latin and Greek verse as in ninety-nine
out of one hundred cases absolutely wasted
time, I think that collegiate honour-students
should be regularly and methodically drilled in
the composition of Latin and Greek prose. In-
deed, I know of no one mental operation more
widely and generally wholesome than the render-
f
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 249
མམ་
ing of a complex Latin paragraph into nervous
idiomatic English, unless it be that of rendering
a passage from a good native author into terse,
pointed, accurate Latin. I have found, however,
from experience that Italian and French only
yield to Latin in utility as educational instru-
ments in the comparative paucity of case-in-
flexions. They thus lose somewhat in regard
to brevity and compactness; but in the subtle
management of mood in interdependent sen-
tences the modern pair are as perfect as their
grand original. Indeed, Latin speech seems, to
me to stand towards Italian and French in the
relation of a reserved and stately mother to-
wards two daughters, of whom one is graceful
in every gesture and voluptuously beautiful, and
the other captivating with vivacity and brilliant
with wit. I am of opinion that we should lead
a pupil to write translations into Greek prose
only so far and so often as to rivet his attention
upon peculiarities in style and manner of the
immediate object of his passing study. Thus,
while a pupil were reading Thucydides, he might
with advantage translate two short passages per
week from an English historian into Thucy-
didean Greek; and a similar cotemporaneous
250
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
plan might be adopted by the student of Hero-
dotus, Plato, and Aristotle. But any one of the
three other languages is a far better instrument
than Greek for inculcating and exemplifying the
rules of general abstract grammar. The luxuri-
ance of Greek verbiage and the graceful care-
lessness in regard to sequence of mood and
time may possibly combine with other and
weightier causes to render the perusal of such
a book as the Phado a mental treat of purest
delight; but to attempt from its ever-shifting
constructions to draw up systematic rules of
correct speech were as impossible as to mirror
one's countenance in a pool of crystal water
as it rippled beneath a passing breeze. The
genius of Alcibiades was. not more perplex-
ingly variable than the turns in cadence and
construction throughout the dialogues of Plato;
and that singleness of purpose by which the
Roman achieved the mastery of the world is as
clearly indicated in the unswerving correctness
of his grammatical usages as in the unswerving
directness of his military roads. But to revert
to the consideration of variety in mental pabu-
lum.
Long before a child can take an interest in
}
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 251
1
political or historic geography, he can, especially
with the aid of pictures and specimens, be brought
to take a hearty interest in accounts of glaciers,
waterfalls, rivers, forests, deserts, prairies, hurri-
canes, ocean-currents; in the habits of birds and
beasts and fishes and creeping things; he will
be amused in learning to distinguish every tree,
plant, grass, flower and fern he may meet withal
on a holiday ramble; and his curiosity will be
healthily awakened if, in a room full of me-
chanical contrivances, he daily witnesses and ex-
perimentalizes upon the extraordinary powers
of levers, wedges, pulleys, toothed-wheels, and
screws, as they act singly or in numbers, alone.
or in combination.
From early childhood, so soon as the hand.
can trace a definite line or figure, the hand and
eye should be brought to co-operate with one
another; in plain words, a child should be led
to amuse himself with drawing to the best of his
abilities every visible object that interests him.
Throughout the school-life of all boys drawing
should be seriously pursued. Singing in parts
and choruses should go side by side with draw-
ing. The two branches would give the æsthetic
element in education, the lack of which accounts
t
252
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
for no small amount of the vulgarity that cha-
racterizes us as a people. It certainly is quite
possible for men to rub on in a comfortable way,
to exhibit industry and energy in the amassing
of large fortunes, without their discriminating be-
tween elegance and uncouthness, shapeliness and
disproportion, harmony and discord. But edu-
cation should prepare us for endeavours much
more complex than such as have in view only
the accumulation of money. It is almost im-
possible to follow for years aims purely personal
without coming at last upon the verge of selfish-
ness or even of dishonesty. But, while a dis-
honest man is the enemy of his species, an honest
man may be but a lukewarm friend. We are
bound by an imperative law to step over honesty
into the path of voluntary well-doing. Nay,
more; we do not entirely fulfil our duty towards
our neighbour by benefiting him, unless we
please him as well. For, in order that man as
a social being should be perfect, his motives
should be pure and unselfish, his actions should
be regulated by sound judgment, and his man-
ners should be controlled by a rapidly and
unconsciously discriminative taste; and the
promotion of good manners will be greatly
}
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
253
furthered by a due attention to æsthetics in
early training.
Again, throughout the early school-life of a
boy lessons in dictation should alternate, day
and day about, with lessons in drawing. These
lessons would, to some extent, mutually help
one another, for correct spelling partakes almost
as much of mechanical visual measurement as
of a purely intellectual process. Furthermore,
long after a boy may be able to spell correctly,
he may learn something from writing daily, or
on alternate days, carefully worded passages in
his own tongue. Such exercises might in fact
neutralize much of the mischief done by his
lessons-as now administered-in Latin.
The studies of history and ordinary geography
should be interlinked. I am averse to the so-
called teaching of history in scraps. Boys might
be left alone to read at home, or in a school
library, an entire reign or epoch; and should be
desired to obtain against a definite day from all
possible sources information illustrative of the
time appointed for investigation. The lesson,
when given, should be made to partake of the
character of a lecture; maps and pictures should
be freely used; and, as copiously illustrated
254
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
2
!
books would be too expensive for ordinary
purses, it would be supplying a public want to
his own profit if some enterprising publisher
would issue a series of historical charts, illustra-
tive of the costumes, habits, house-furniture,
shipping, and architecture of different countries
in different epochs. Some of these historic maps
might contain lists of representative names,
printed in large type, so arranged as to illustrate
a reign, a century, or an epoch; and portraits
might be added wherever attainable. Others
again might be historico-geographic charts re-
presenting severally the empire of Alexander, the
Roman empire under Augustus, the Saracenic
empire, the Western empire under Charlemagne,
Europe as in the days of Charles V., Europe.
as immediately before and after the peace of
Westphalia, Europe as during the empire of
Napoleon, and Europe as it is to-day. Ordi-
nary geographical and physical maps of the two
hemispheres would of course be included in our
mural decorations. In fact, the walls of a school-
room might be made a picture-gallery of infor-
mation in the fields of physical geography,
historic geography, historic incident, and bio-
graphy. Such decorations would materially
/
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
255
>
assist a teacher, as in his lectures he were ear-
nestly endeavouring to withdraw the attention
of his boys from the pomps and vanities of courts
and battle-fields to the real work effected by
wise legislators, large-minded statesmen, philo-
sophic thinkers, enterprising discoverers, scientific
inventors; from the periodic but happily unabid-
ing mischief effected by selfish monarchs and
ram-stam conquerors to the ennobling and en--
during influences exerted by poets, scholars,
painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians;
from the petty considerations of town or county
to the more generous considerations of nation-
ality, and from these latter, in due time, to
the still higher considerations of our common
humanity.
Before we parted company with our boys, we
should be giving them as much of pleasure as of
profit, if we delivered, or caused to be delivered
to them, short courses of elementary lectures,
freely interspersed with oral discussion, upon the
constitutional laws and civil jurisprudence of
their native land, and upon the laws that regulate
the accumulation of wealth. We should also be
dealing cruelly with them, if we turned them out
into a world full of temptations at an age wherein
256
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
*
i
impulse is stronger than judgment, and at the
same time withheld from them all knowledge of
the chief laws that regulate health, physical and
mental.
Again, education should never be specially
grooved to suit this or that profession, to pre-
pare for this or that competitive examination.
A wise father will distrust any system that is
advertised to prepare for this or that university,
for Woolwich, or the Indian Civil Service. Un-
less the opening of situations to competition
can be made consistent with broad, healthy,
lengthened, and authoritatively systematic curri-
cula of instruction, our new system will be pro-
ductive of at least as much mischief as advantage.
Cram-systems and exclusively professional in-
struction can flourish only where learning is
valued solely for the material advantages it may
bring. They are founded in selfishness, and tend
to the unwholesome introduction or maintenance.
of caste-divisions. It is from the lack of a
healthy catholicity in our views in the matter of
instruction that our society is artificially and
geometrically divided, like the body of the earth
with its strata, like a map with its lines of lati-
tude and longitude,
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
257
I am continually hearing of schools for the
'lower' classes, schools for the 'middle' classes,
schools for upper' classes of the wealthy and
the noble. I have at times wondered whether
the sons of gardeners, attorneys, and dukes are
as radically different one from the other as
the young of dogs, weasels, and whales. This
triple classification of English society has re-
minded me of that curious mountain in ancient
Lycia, the head of which was tenanted by lions,
the waist by goats, and the foot by serpents.
For my own part, I plead guilty to a super-
stitious love of simplicity; and I hold, and
shall hold to the end of my life, that a boy
is a boy, and a girl a girl; that, in the purely
mental training of our pupils, we ought not
to regard their sex or station or expectations,
but simply and solely their age and strength
and mental capacities. I do not believe that
human brains, under dissection, could be cate-
gorized into male and female, aristocratic
and plebeian. If Latin need not be taught
to the son of an artisan, it should only be
because he will be called from school to earn
his living at an age before such a study
should by rights be commenced by any lad
R
:
258
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
in any rank of life.
It
But, so long as he is
allowed to remain at school-and the longer
the better he will be as much improved as his
richer young neighbour in learning to write
flowingly, read easily, spell correctly, and draw
accurately if not tastefully. He will need as
much as, but not more than, the other some
simple elementary knowledge of his own physical
constitution, to aid him hereafter in guarding his
own health and the health of others. The ele-
ments of political economy are as requisite to instil
providence and common-sense into the children
of proprietors as into those of poor tenants.
is a blunder founded on meanness, vulgarity, and
a total misconception of man's real dignity, to
suppose that a future tradesman needs only such
a mental training in youth as will enable him in
after life to cast up accounts correctly, read a
newspaper with ease, and write a business letter
without committing gross errors in spelling. It
is doubtless more than probable that a youth,
not destined for one of the learned professions,
may be called away from school to earn his
bread some years before a youth more favoured
may enter an university. But, until the call
come, his mental training should be as generous

BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
259
as that of any of his brethren. There is enough
of dry and dull routine even in the life of a bar-
rister; but his life and that of a speculative
merchant are full of ever fresh mental and ner-
vous activity when compared with those of a
country parson and a retail trader. They who
are likely to have in manhood the longest desert
of monotony to pass over should store up in
boyhood and youth the greatest amount of in-
tellectual provender. How many even of our
higher merchants achieve affluence by a patient
monotonous reiteration of simple duties, a
rapidity in computation, some special aptitude,
and a lucky audacity, and wake up in after age
-too late alas !—to discover that they are such
beggars in non-commercial accomplishment as
to lack relish at home for the riches won
honourably in the counting-house! And, as a
counterpart to this mistaking of a career, how
many a youth is drawn on by the Will-o'-the-
wisp of school and college successes into a bog
of professional inutility, whose practical abilities
fairly worked would have made him prosperous
and useful in a sphere of commercial activity!
}
Again and again would I impress upon others
my conviction that, in whatever of instruction we
:
260
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
impart to a pupil, we should be guided only by
the considerations of the pupil's age, health, and
capacity. God knows, we should make very
few too enlightened for their future stations!
I am thankful to be enabled to state that
amongst my old Scottish pupils I number men
that studied patiently, laboriously, and success-
fully the very refinements of scholarship, knowing
all the while that their future life was to be spent
in commercial or mechanico-scientific pursuits.
And I, an Englishman, consider that Scotland
takes the palm over my own country and the
land of my present habitation chiefly from the
facts that her children below and up to the age of
fourteen are the most industrious and the best
taught children in our triple empire; that in
Scotland the schoolmaster, the chief instru-
ment in the building up of his country's wealth
and reputation, — while usually denied a fair
emolument and invariably denied a fair social
status, is from John O'Groats to Gretna Green
exhaustively, unmercifully, and—to his employer
-profitably worked.
Reader, what I here say of Scotland I say
from experience. I have known a man of
humble origin in that country die at an ad-
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 261
{
vanced age, leaving behind him all his four sons
highly educated and holding honourable posi-
tions in professional life; I have known a pupil
of my own to pass from a country school to a
Scottish college, and proceed thence to Cam-
bridge with five pounds in his pocket, and to
leave Cambridge without a debt, and erelong
attain by moral and intellectual merit alone
to an useful and lucrative appointment; and,
whilst I am writing these lines, I know that
within a few miles of me, on the Dublin hills,
there lives the son of a Scottish gamekeeper, a
noble lad, whose name of Campbell'-a name
second in national virtues to none in Scottish
story-is not disgraced by the tenant of a petty
mountain-farm of some thirty acres of almost
waste ground; which acres by the industry of a
few years have been made profitable beyond
expectation, although during these few years
the young tenant has worked from six to
nine every evening, from early autumn, tó mid-
summer, with a class of some thirty peasants—
children, youths, and men,-furnishing them with
his barn for schoolroom, with books, pencils,
slates, and all et-cæteras; treating them at
the year's close with a plain but hearty feast
262
3
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
1
of farewell; and taking no fee whatever, ex-
cepting a fee invaluable—the love of his peasant-
pupils, the gratitude of their wondering parents,
and the comfort of an approving conscience.
This lad would seem to my eyes a man that it
were an honour for any of my readers to shake
warmly by the hand; a man that an Argyle or
a Breadalbane might proudly claim as his kins-
man. Would to God that his practical goodness
were a contagious disease, and that he would run
about the streets of Dublin touching thousands
by the elbow !
If a nation were in a thoroughly wholesome
condition, and keenly alive to the simple truth
that its real rolling capital is the physical strength,
the moral habits, and the cultivated intelligence
of its constituent individuals, children of all ranks
would meet for a time at school, and would only
part company as the requirements of trade or
profession called them away into active life.
Something of this kind might have been seen in
the olden days of the High School of Edinburgh,
where, on the same benches, would sit for years,
on mutually improving terms, the sons of nobles,
lawyers, merchants, and retail traders. The cur-
riculum of instruction has been widened in other
1
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
263
rival institutions in that great capital of educa-
tion; but the baneful spirit of caste has, to a great
extent, been introduced-unintentionally, per-
haps-by, in this one respect, unnational imita-
tors of English systems. And we should here
remark that the old public schools of England
were, originally, broadly catholic institutions,
not dissimilar in design and action to the High
School as above described; and that even still,
although the national tendency to class divisions
has imperceptibly conduced to render them ex-
clusive, there is a tone in them far more manly
than is to be found in our leading private board-
ing-schools or even in our two richest universities.
At all events the prevalent doctrine of class dis-
tinctions is there tacitly ignored by masters in
the schoolroom, and roughly but wholesomely
contravened by pupils in the play-ground. No
young nobleman would be allowed for an hour
to swagger about a Harrow cricket-ground with
a special braiding on his jacket, and 'the boys'
of our great English schools would scorn the
mawkish designation of 'young gentlemen.' With
all the intellectual deficiencies in these schools,
I would sooner that a son of mine should pass
through one of them than that he should go
264
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL.
५:
through a faultlessly complete curriculum of
purely mental training in any private sea-sicken-
ing institution 'wholly restricted to the sons of
gentlemen.' I would rather he came to man-
hood hearty in spirit and mentally undeveloped
than with his brain ever so well stocked, if his
sympathies had been narrowed by the vile spirit
of caste.
I am aware that this Spirit cannot be exor-
cised from our schools so long as it is allowed
to cramp, vitiate, and demoralize our social re-
gulations, to penetrate our churches and cathe-
drals, to fritter down national aspirations to
within the limits of petty class requirements.
By many most excellent and well-intentioned
people this Spirit is reverently worshipped. For
my own part, I abhor it as the cause of half the
ignorance, superstition, and misery in our world.
It is the debasing worship of this evil Power
that has made the 'middle' classes of England
and Ireland objects of wonder and ridicule to
European continentalists for their more than
spaniel servility towards wealth, place, and rank.
Allowing most willingly all reasonable and dig-
nified respect to the obvious and universal claims
of legally constituted authority, we may, for the
BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL. 265
1
mal.com
sake of convenience, or in deference to harmless
prejudice, or in forced obedience to unreasoning
routine, tolerantly, or good-humouredly, or con-
temptuously admit of nominal and unimportant
semblances of social distinction; but experience,
common-sense, and religion teach us that the
bodies of all alike require the same components
of sustaining food; that the brains of all are
fashioned in one mould; that the souls of all
alike must approach Heaven's gates by the one
narrow way.
:
..
266 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
1
IX...
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.

ENTLE readers, is there one amongst
you a bachelor? and past thirty by
the great sun-clock in the sky?
Observe, I pray you, that I would not include
in the category of celibates one whom filial or
fraternal ties were detaining in the wilderness.
Such an one is potentially and spiritually on the
hither side of Jordan. By the term bachelor I
mean one who, with his eyes open, in the noon-
tide of his intelligence, persists causelessly and
wilfully in sinning against God's prohibition of
duality, and in fighting against the instincts of
the whole animated creation.
Gentle readers, if there be such an one
amongst you, let him take off his shoes before
he cross the threshold of our nursery; for on
the inner side of this door is holy ground. Or,
}
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 267
:
rather, let him keep his shoes on, and make
tracks, and skedaddle; for he is a heathen man,
a publican, and uninitiated into the mysteries of
the real Bona Dea, whose sacred implement is
the coral and bells, and whose name on earth is
Hubbard.
Begone, thou dull lump of un-Promethean
clay; thou sun without a moon; thou joke with-
out a point; thou conundrum without an an-
swer; thou bass without a melody; thou tide ever
on the ebb; thou odd without an even; thou see
without a saw; thou hook without an eye; thou
colourless wine; thou disconnected point in a
plane replete with curves; thou word without a
rhyme; thou song without words; thou ballad
without tune; thou introspective, self-concen-
trated, halt and maimed monstrosity; thou use-
less, unnatural, and ungrammatical scissor, trouser,
snuffer, pincer, glove, stocking, breech, and tong!
When should a man marry?' was the ques-
tion put to an ancient philosopher. 'Young men,
not yet; and old men, never:' was the dry old
stick's reply. The duty of marrying in mature
manhood is here obviously inferred. So far the
heathen cynic was wiser in his generation than
a Christian Malthus. It was a beautiful custom
6
3
268 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
in old polytheistic Athens of rich men that
wished to gratify good impulses or to curry
public favour, to devote large sums of super-
fluous wealth to the launching into matrimony
of poor, portionless, stranded maidens. What a
lesson is this to England, who squanders year by
year more than the total revenue of Minerva's
city in ploughing the sand; in transforming
penniless unbelieving Jews into comfortable un-
believing tobacconists; in equipping a numerous
band of missionaries to wound the feelings of
Irish Catholic brethren, and bind them more
closely, heart and soul, to an indecorously-
vilified creed; in sowing the wind, to reap the
whirlwind!
For my own part, I am only an Asophophilo-
sopher, and consequently my opinion should go
for very little; but if I were asked when members
of the gentler sex should marry, I should reply:
'Young maidens, when they choose; old maidens,
when they can.'
One of the difficult questions of the day is how
to provide fitting occupations for women. The
prominence of such a question bespeaks some
flaw in our social organism. There can be no
tittle of doubt but that woman's real sphere is an
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 269
1
}
indoors and a domestic one. The annual births
of children of either sex are about equal in
number. If, then, in our country there be an un-
usual number of young women without homes
and occupation, there must be a proportionate
number of men saturated with an undue share
of selfishness and cowardice.
It would be a difficult and a melancholy pro-
blem to solve, of how much vice and misery a
man may be unconsciously the cause, who, with
ample means for the maintenance of a house-
hold, lives on to fourscore a life of celibacy. It
would certainly be a popular, and, for many
years, a productive source of revenue, if the
bachelors, after thirty and forty years of age
respectively, were called on to pay twice and
thrice their income-tax. This equitable load put
upon the shoulders of the selfish would allow of
corresponding reductions in the case of those
honest citizens, the viri trium liberorum, that were
staring fortune manfully in the face; working
hard for the comfort and the joy of others; walk-
ing up the hill of life beneath a dear but heavy
burthen of affections; and standing, as all true
men should stand, the heat and sweat of life's
busy working day.
270 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
1
܂
There has been considerable talk recently of
expending public monies upon the recovering of
waste lands. Unmarried men may be looked
upon as an aggravated species of waste ground;
as a set of irrecoverable, hopeless, and incorrigible
bogs. Still, they might be put to some use.
The conscription would never be an unpopular
institution if its action were limited to bachelors
between the ages of thirty and thirty-five. The
wretches would probably make poor soldiers,
having no dearer interests than those of their
own carcasses to fight for. But they might ad-
vantageously be put in the front ranks, to act as
buffers, and receive the first fire. of the enemy.
There would be no objection to the hinder ranks
amusing themselves by progging these miserable
buffers with their bayonets.
But, while I linger thus to express my horror
of male celibacy, let it not be supposed I would
draw only a rose-tinted picture of matrimony.
The realities of married life will never fall beneath
the anticipatory aspirations, if the condition be
approached beneath a due sense of its honour
and dignity. Wheresoever in wedlock is found
the union of esteem and love, therein is found
a happiness very different from the idle dreams
,-,,
+
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 271
2
of loverhood. Maybe there is more of prose, a
great deal more of prose, in it than youth had
preconceived; but there is more of substantiality,
of earnestness, of solemnity. The lover thinks
to pass through a flowery walk into a bower of
woodbine and honeysuckle; to his surprise and
wonder, he is led through a majestic avenue into
the aisle of a great cathedral, and listens, not
without tears, to the rolling music of a deep
organ. Married life is not a rivulet, babbling
away over shining pebbles; it is a deep stream,
now flowing with a still and modest dignity be-
tween green banks, now dashing down a rapid in
foam and trouble, and sometimes lost to view
beneath dark chasms.
Matrimony, again, when approached in a spirit
of levity, or with a view to material profit, is, in
seven cases out of ten, found more fraught with
horror than the Sahara-state of celibacy. Such
unions are, for the most part, anticipations of,
and refinements upon, Purgatory.
There are two considerations, of which either.
might induce a man, in choosing a wife, to choose
a good one; and these considerations are, that
there either is a future state, or that there is not.
Now, in the former case, it would be a terrible
272 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
•
:
i
thing for a husband to run the risk of being
saddled with a wife through all eternity, that he
only married in time for the sake of her money
or her looks; and, in the second case, it would
be just as well for a man to live his once for all
with a companion that deserved and forced his
love and his esteem.
But pardon, gentle reader; I have been stand-
ing all this while with my fingers on the door-
handle of our child's nursery-the imaginary
nursery of an ideal child. Pray, walk in; sit
down where you please; and listen, if you care
to listen, for a quarter of an hour to the soliloquy
of an Asophophilosopher.
I can see it is with you, as with one entering
St. Peter's for the first time; you are as yet
unimpressed with the dimensions and capacities
of the place. To the prosy eye of mature man-
hood is presented only a commonplace room of
ordinary size, with a window looking out into a
dingy back-green, with a faded carpet, some
dozen or two of penny pictures pinned to a
cheaply-papered wall, a few chimney-ornaments
of infinitesimal price, a cat upon the hearth-rug,
a cockatoo in a cage, a pile of toys and toy-boxes
in a corner, and, hanging from pegs here and
X
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 273
!
there, articles of clothing indicative of boy and
woman occupation.
So seems it to our eyes; but the eyes of child-
hood are anointed with a divine clay. And our
own eyes were so anointed long ago; but either
time has rubbed off the precious unguent, or we
have washed it off ourselves with careless hands.
To its little proprietor this petty place is a
concentrated fairyland, a garden of delight, an
Eden without its tree of knowledge, an orchard
of golden apples without its dragon-guard, a
kingdom of cock-horses, and an empire of make-
believe and perennial moonshine.
Do you see that little house with two doors
upon the chimney-piece? That was the fashion-
able way of building houses in olden times, until
an architect, superfluously cunning, discovered
that one door was sufficient for two married
people. The husband, you see, is in his lobby,
and the wife is outside her threshold. From
this circumstance, without looking at the sun-
shine on the floor, you may depend upon it that
it is now fair weather out of doors. If it rain
to-morrow, I'll wager that stupid old man will
come out without his umbrella. Heaven only
knows who tells them all about it!"
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274 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
1
Observe closely those two crockery sheep, for
they are sheep; at all events they are a good
deal more like sheep than cows. These creatures
go frisking about the room, when there is nobody
here to see them; and cry Baa, baa, when there
is no one within hearing. Many a time, before
going to bed, we have put grass before them on
the mantelpiece, and always, on awaking, we
have found that these household gods, like Bel
and his Dragon, had eaten all up in the night-
time.
Our nursery, of course, would be ridiculously
incomplete without yonder Noah's Ark. There
is the crew of eight, Noah and his wife, his sons
and his sons' wives; and there are all the ani-
mals, two and two, paired off matrimonially,
from elephants down to cockroaches. What a
sermon is this procession to all single men! I
fancy that, if the patriarch had had an unmarried
son, he would have gone without a coxswain,
and have left the celibate behind to be drowned
in the back parlour! Let us put the crew and
freight on board. It must be confessed that
the accommodation is very poor inside, and the
ventilation unsatisfactory. One would imagine
the vessel had been chartered for the British
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 275
;
Government at the commencement of a conti-
nental war.
However, in with them into the
hold. Now, look in at the window. There is
poor Shem on his back, with a beetle on his face,
the size of a sheep, and a cameleopard on the
pit of his stomach. God help him for the next
forty days, if he suffer from sea-sickness!
And there is a wooden horse; a more remark-
able one by far than that by which the Grecian
chiefs took windy Troy. One of the hind-legs
is broken, and the tail is gone; but the creature's
speed is undiminished. You may put two chairs
three yards apart, place that deplorable-looking
animal on the front one, seat yourself on the one
behind, with string reins in hand, and for the
hour together you will ride swifter than a rail-
way, an eagle, a hurricane; swifter than a Camilla
over unbending corn; swifter than Camaralzaman
on his airy voyage to his beautiful Badoura.
And here is a small tin yacht, with a pilot
of tin fastened to the rudder. That vessel has
sailed to lands undreamt of by Columbus, un-
visited by Cook; that pilot has gone through
adventures to which those of Ulysses and Sinbad
are a joke. I have known that little tiny boat,
in the space of one short afternoon, sail round
276 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
and round the world, until it came to Happy-
land, where the mice go when they die; where
are neither cats nor traps; where the corn is
always yellow; and where cream- cheese and
toasted-cheese are sold at nothing-pence the
pound. In windy weather, I have known that
pilot sail for a good hour under water with his
head downwards, and come up as fresh and
hearty as ever. Not all the water in the sea
could drown that walrus of a fellow !
Yon cockatoo, now snoozling ridiculously on
one leg, with his beak in his coat-tail pocket, is
no bird of ordinary feather. His birthday, as
was heretofore the fountain of the Nile, is hidden
in the mist of immemorial farawayness. He sat
upon papa's shoulder in that inconceivably re-
mote geological period when the latter was but
a tiny boy, and went to school, and suffered
tribulation in the body and in the spirit like
other boys. That bird is consecrated by paternal
memories of school and college. In the day-
dawn of his life he was, of course, jet-black, like
daws, and rooks, and crows, and ravens; but
innumerable winters have blanched him with a
perpetual hoar-frost; and, typical of wisdom,
age, and death, the bird sits clothed in a vener-
1
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 277
able surplice, a changeless nightgown, an antici-
patory shroud.
That shawl and bonnet you see hanging there
belong not to the nurse. We have, indeed, a
little nursery-maid; but she is seldom in this
room, and her duties are very limited. Those
articles of clothing, so plain and homely, belong
to the boy's dear grandmother. And happy are
the chickens reared underneath such wings!
The existence of this good woman in our new-
fangled world is a blunder in chronology. She
is a real daughter of Abraham, and came to us
straight out of the book of Genesis. She carries
about with her the fragrant odour of a hundred
old-world virtues, one half of which were out of
fashion in the days of our great-grandfathers.
She is a woman of few words; but there is in her
a wisdom that cometh not by observation, or the
reading of books, but by inheritance, or by some
secret way known only to our Maker. From the
look of her you would say she came of an old
line of English yeomen, such as in life owed no
man anything save the love due from one to
other, and that died in the fear of God and at
peace with all mankind. But she is, withal, a
great hypocrite, this dear, good soul, this sweet-
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278 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
heart of a grandmother; for she makes so little
of her own good deeds, and speaks so little, so
nothing harm of others, that you would never
give her credit for having chosen in heart the
one thing needful, but would take her only for
It
an aged Martha, careful of much serving.
is only by a never-failing goodness, a kindness
inexhaustible, a providence in little things, that
sits easily and comfortably upon her, like a long-
worn garment, that she betrays her real charac-
ter, and in the presence of those who know and
. love her stands convicted of pure and genuine
and spiritual Christianity.
Under this wise and gentle guardian our boy is
growing up ignorant of bogeys, fearless of ghosts
and bugbears of the dark, unconscious alto-
gether of the existence of poor dear Old Nick.
There is no more idea of putting washy tracts
into his hands than of putting such food down
his throat as would superinduce an artificial
dysentery. He is as yet innocent, and I trust
will long be innocent, of catechism. He has as
yet no lines of latitude and longitude to separate
the orthodox from the hopeless. We have not
as yet ventured to map out for him the attributes
of Divinity as a phrenologist rectangulates the
F
-
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 279
possibilities of a human brain. We have not as
yet coerced for him the Infinite within the limits
of our Procrustes-bed. Our little one is as yet
all unconscious of the generally believed wicked-
ness of all around him. He would as yet be
shocked if I told him-what I do not believe
that God is partial, and that they whom he,
the little goose, loves best, are, perhaps, uncon-
scious castaways. The little fellow has, in fact,
never heard a sermon. Blissful state of baptized
heathenism! We are in no hurry about his
hearing one. His toys are never put away on
Sundays. I myself have read Cock Robin to
him in church hours. I do not think it will be
put down in black and italics against me in the
great book. But the child has his own prayers
too; very short ones, but very good. The chief
one is the brief but divine encyclopædia of all
prayer; and the adjuncts are simple blessings,
which, unlike the church prayers of many of us
grown-up people, go right up through the ceil-
ing and the roof, past the clouds, in amongst
the angels, are listened to by his own mother
and my mother, and are heard and answered
by our common Father. God be thanked :-I, a
sinner, am always mentioned in them. Far be
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280 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
it from me, who am what is called a Protestant
-although, Heaven knows, I protest against
nothing but selfishness and lying and idleness and
vice to speak slightingly of those innumerable
fellow-Christians that value highly a multitudin-
ous advocacy forbidden to myself. But far above
the advocacy of holiest men and sainted martyrs.
and glorified women do I value the pleading
simpleness, the powerful wrestling of these chil-
dren, concerning whom the Brother of us all
once said: 'Suffer these little ones to come
unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is
the kingdom of heaven.'
No influence can be brought to bear upon a
child more healthful than the company of an
aged, sensible, humorous, and undemonstratively
pious woman. If a near relative be found, as in
our imaginary case, to answer the character, so
much the better; if not, such a character should
be looked for in a nurse. But alas! your nurses
now-a-days, like your poets, are all provokingly
young. Euryclêa, when she nursed Ulysses, and
Caiëta, when she nursed Æneas, were knowing
old souls, well stricken in years; Homer was
blind when he sang his songs divine; and Hesiod
was white-bearded when he gave sage rhythmic
'
1
•
FOLKERAL LIBRARY

CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 281
counsel to his foolish and knavish brother. A
lassie of a nurse may serve well enough for many
purposes, where strength and activity are re-
quired; but there are some good old women
that have a special faculty for managing children,
that are imbued with a peculiar child-lore, such
as can be found in no book, but seems to have
been handed down, like the mystery of us Free-
masons, by secret but oral tradition.
Something of such a character was a humorous
creature, who for years was nurse in a family of
my acquaintance. One of her methods of re-
proof was peculiar to herself, and could only
have entered the brain of one wisely conversant
with child-nature. Her youngest charge was a
little girl, named Barbara, whose cast-off clothes
and broken dolls were given from time to time
to nurse's niece, ragged, plebeian, but bonny Lilly
Pye. Lady Bab would now and then, of course,
be naughty and disobedient. On these occa-
sions nurse would bring down from a cupboard
a ponderous old volume of the History of the
War, would open it solemnly, and, putting on
her spectacles, would gravely turn the pages as
she read the future life and adventures of Lilly
Pye. And Bab would be driven half out of her
Diversity of
ICHIGAN
1
282 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
little wits to hear that Lilly Pye was to grow to
be a great lady, and to ride in a carriage and six
with outriders, and to marry the Marquis of
Sugarpopoli, and to dine at eight o'clock in the
evening, with men-servants in velvet liveries, and
silver candlesticks on the table and the side-
board, and chandeliers of shining glass hanging
from the ceiling, and in them all wax-candles
lighted, exactly like Jerusalem; and that she
was to send all her old clothes, and all she didn't
want to eat, to poor, naughty, disobedient,
nursery-maid Bab! However, in course of time,
the latter learnt to read, and the old tome was
found to contain no Sibylline leaves; and Lilly
Pye continued to lead a kitchen life, which life
she is leading to this day. Heaven knows! the
pumpkin coach may somewhere be in waiting,
and the Cinderella may yet be Marchioness of
Sugarpopoli ; so Barbara, although she is now in
her early teens, had better keep a sharp look-
out, and mind her book, and be good and obe-
dient.
And now for a review of our scanty library;
or rather, let us diverge from a special case to
the general consideration of child-literature and
child-amusement.
1
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 283
•
A man of fifty, of good natural abilities, who
has had his fair share of mental work, and seen
his fair share of the world, is a resultant of the
whole history of mankind. Into his life have
been compressed all the phases of human civili-
sation. He may review the several epochs of
his life, and from them form conjectures of man's
mental history; as one may read in upturned
stone strata the physical history of the earth
from now to the reign of Trilobites. Some of
the most serious blunders in the training of
children and youths arise from the non-obser-
vance of mental epochs. We endeavour to an-
ticipate enlightenment, to hurry on civilisation.
Too often do we gather a little forced fruit in an
unnaturally early autumn from a tree that would
bear a hundredfold, if we were only patient and
believing. They also serve who only stand
and wait.'
It is a very common, and often not an un-
founded complaint on the part of a fond mother,
that her boy is mentally overtasked. She dreads,
reasonably, the combined effects of a brain over-
wrought and a physical frame rapidly develop-
ing. But it seldom strikes a mother that there
is far more of danger, physical and moral, to be

2
284 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY
apprehended from unreasonably stimulating and
developing the sentimental and spiritual portion
of her child's nature. Such as have had great
experience in public school life will agree with
me that, as a class, the sons of clergymen are
peculiarly hard to manage. Boys may have too
much of tracts, hymns, catechisms, collects, and
epistles; may be drenched with good advice, sur-
feited with orthodoxy. They may take their pie
and pudding before dinner, and have no stomach
afterwards for meat and potatoes. They may
be operated on with superlatives, until you have
nothing stronger to fall back upon. They may
have maxims of conduct set before them that
they fail to comprehend, or intuitively disbelieve,
or that experience will prove to be false or in-
opportune; and their ears may be made more
than usually deaf to precept and counsel. It is
as easy to clog the spirit of a child with senti-
ment as to burden his little stomach with Scotch
bun; as easy, but fraught with far more serious
consequences. We may bring on a spiritual
indigestion that will defy all the pills and powders
in the ecclesiastical pharmacopoeia.
The subjects of Death and the mysteries of
Judgment are too often forced prematurely on
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 285
!
the notice of children. The too probable re-
sults of such folly will be fear of the dark, and
nightmare dreams. Without any teaching on
our part, the terrible reality of Death is appre-
ciated at a very early age by children. I have
known a very young child, who was supposed
never to have heard the word, stop at the en-
trance of a museum of stuffed animals, and
request his nurse to keep back a little companion,
for fear the latter should be terrified by the
spectacle of things dead. Some nursery pet
goes the way of all living, and there is a sobbing
over a kitten that the fire cannot warm ; or some
blank more serious is made in the family circle,
and the child is led into a darkened room, and
sees a familiar face clothed in a strange still-
ness and darkness and unutterable majesty; and
ere long, upon a Sunday afternoon, when the
birds are singing and the sun is shining, he is
taken for a walk, and shown a little spot of
sorrow-consecrated green grass; and thus the
lesson is taught by circumstance, and needs
alas! little of verbal enforcement; is taught too
effectually, and too soon.
It is not impossible, nor indeed improbable,
but that the religion of a child may differ greatly
286 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
J
from that of a grown boy, and differ very greatly
indeed from that of a grown man. Children,
however, are too often approached upon the sub-
ject, as though they were capable of the feelings
of an after age. No nursery child can appreciate
the thrilling delight of the lad that has kept his
wickets for an hour against hard bowling on a
sunny afternoon; no schoolboy can realize for a
moment the ecstasy of silly talk between moony
lovers in shady lane or on sandy beach; and
moony lovers cannot fathom the deep and still
happiness of those who, at the close of a busy
and an useful day, beguile the evening hours
with book and needlework, or laughingly discuss
the sayings and the doings-uninteresting to
other ears-of the children who are just gone to
bed. The religion of such happy parents must
partake of love and charity and thankfulness
and a trembling ripple of ineffably sweet fear,
which may be dimly appreciated by the lovers,
but will be wholly inappreciable by the romping
boy and the prattling child. And yet, from their
varied standpoints, child and boy and lover and
parent may be equally religious, and the varied
heart-worship of them all may be equally accept-
able in the eyes of the All-discerning.
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 287
When little children were brought to the
Saviour, He laid his hand upon them, and blessed
them; but He gave them no words of exhorta-
tion or instruction. How well were it if earthly
teachers would imitate occasionally this reticence
divine! Children of all ranks suffer much from
the kindly but mistaken zeal of piously disposed
people; but it is in our intercourse with the
children of the poor that the effects of inoppor-
tune piety are most lamentably visible. Grouped
in their little Sunday-school squadrons, they
are exposed by the hour together to the pla-
toon firing of genteel lavender-gloved curates,
evangelical old maids, and surplice-bound
curate-loving young ladies. The children of
the wealthier classes are supposed to derive
amusement and instruction from toys, puzzles,
pictured and profane books, out-of-door games,
and easy unrestrained lay-converse with their
elders; but, whensoever we come in contact with
the children of poor people, we lay at once
didactic hands upon the poor things, and open
wide their little beaks, and pour down doses of
excellent but incomprehensible and nasty-tasting
advice; or we put on the Sunday stop, and set
them piping away some doggrel travesty of a
288 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
·
beautiful but exclusively Hebrew lyric of King
David.
I remember on one occasion hearing a very
worthy, well-meaning, and sincerely pious man
conduct morning worship for a posse of boys
and children. He began word for word as
follows: We do not presume, O Lord, to ap-
proach Thee from any confidence in our own
merits; we acknowledge that we are miserable
sinners; polluted beings; filthy rags; and that
it is only of Thy restraining mercy that we are
not swept away from off the theatre of Time
with the besom of Destruction.' Fortunately, on
the said occasion, not a single child or boy was
paying any serious heed to this funereal service.
I wonder how a congregation of rats would pray
to a terrier, supposing they had been made by
the terrier, and put into a rat-pit by the same
for merriment? or how a swarm of earwigs would
address an elephant, supposing that elephant
had created them, and put them down upon his
garden-walk, to pestle-and-mortar them with his
unwieldy club-feet? Imagine how distressing
it would be to an earthly father, if his baby-boy
were incessantly entreating him with tears and
groans not to bury him in the coal-hole or boil
.-
1
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 289
him in the kitchen-copper! If a cheerful frank-
ness, an affectionate confidence on the part of a
child is pleasing to a father here, can it be sup-
posed as unpleasing to the All-beneficent Father
of us all ?
It would be impossible fully to realize the
condition of mind in which, between the ages of
three and five, a child listens to or peruses the
stories of Mother Hubbard and her Dog; of
Cock Robin; Mother Trot; Dame Bunch; The
Three Bears; The Three Pigs; Little Red Rid-
ing Hood; Jack and the Bean-stalk; Cinderella
and the Fairy Prince; Fatima and Bluebeard;
and other masterpieces of child-literature. But
we may in fancy approach that mental condition
by a gradual process of elimination. We must
remember what an almost rasa tabula is the
mind of a child. His imagination is unfettered
by restraining knowledge, and travels with
electric speed. A simile is to his rapid appre-
hension as forcible as is a metaphor to us; and
a metaphor to him is a sculptured out-standing
reality. The idle impossibilities of Space and
Time are as nothing to his limitless faith and
catholic credulity. His geography embraces only
the house he lives in and his ordinary walks.
T
+
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290 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
He may have heard of London, and formed the
conception of innumerable toy-shops and never-
ending bazaars; but its whereabouts is as inde-
finite as the position of the moon, and may be
reached, for all he knows or cares, by railway,
balloon, or kite. The morning and the evening
sun are almost his boundaries of chronology.
To-day is his little raft of time, on which he
sails contentedly and fearlessly in the great
ocean of eternity, with an invisible but unerring
compass of faith. He knows nothing of the
infinite past, dreads nothing in the infinite future.
Incidents in his story-books that to grown-up
readers seem comical or extravagant are to him.
commonplace and matter-of-fact. It is not in
the least degree improbable to him that a doggie
should be stone-dead at page five and nursing
the cat over leaf. What is there of absurd in
the idea of an old witch flying on a broom-stick?
Why, witches have done it from time imme-
morial. Is not the circumstance pictured in shop
windows? is it not written in books? It is not
impossible but that this non-wonderment of
children is more philosophical than the blatant
amazement of moralizing philosophers. The
child is not startled at the infinite variety of
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 291
form around him. Perhaps he discerns intui-
tively that finity of shape and circumstance
would be infinitely more marvellous and inex-
plicable than infinity. He sees a bird flying in
the air, and a fish swimming in the water, but
needs no pseudo-interpreter to explain to him
the adaptation of the birdie's wing or the fish's
fin and tail. He has not lived long enough to
suspect that a creature could possibly be en-
dowed with organs fitted for its own discomfort
or destruction; as would seem to be the notion
of those wiseacres who open wide mouths to tell
us how well-fitted is the swallow for flying, and
the mole for burrowing in the ground-an occu-
pation not confined to moles.
Again, a child's ideas of physical pain are ex-
ceedingly limited; of mental sorrow are almost
nil. What fun it is when the credulous giant
sticks a bread-knife into his tremendous stomach,
and falls down dead beneath the table into a
heap of spilt porridge! And here we may as
well draw attention to an æsthetic law in the
construction of child-stories. Your good looks,
virtues, and rewards should be bestowed upon
little boys and girls, dogs, cats, piggywigs,
donkeys, monkeys, pigeons, Poll-parrots, cock-
292 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
1
robins, and such creatures as the little reader
may be familiarly conversant withal. He will be
thus imperceptibly drinking in through his ima-
gination a love for, and a belief in, all around
him. On the contrary, your uglinesses, vices,
stupidities, and punishments must be shared
amongst giants, foxes, wolves, and weasels, and
such creatures as are not likely to make a per-
sonal visit to the nursery. These unhappy crea-
tures will be the unconscious scapegoats of ini-
quity, and will carry away into the wilderness of
Nowhere cunning and greediness and cruelty,
and leave behind them the familiar shape of
dog and cat and piggywig clothed with all that
is good and kind and funny and lovable in
humanity. There is one melancholy exception
to this rule of æsthetic benevolence in the story
of Cock Robin. The familiar little brown birdie
that pecks up crumbs in our streets should
have been invested with some endearing and
homely quality, and a vice might have been
more safely settled on the shoulders of the
robin, as a rare visitant-and, by-the-by, a
most quarrelsome tike of a bird. But the
sparrow, poor birdikin, is a proof that a name
is a reality; he is the victim of sound, and owes
*
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 293
a perpetual infamy to the inexorable require-
ments of rhyme.
In all the old specimens of nursery nonsense
above alluded to we have either good jingling
sound, or the thread of a story reasonable in its
unreasonableness. Certain vapid publications
have recently made inroads amongst us, where
size and gorgeousness of illustration endeavour
vainly to compensate for poverty of fancy and
sterility of wit in the letterpress. The composi-
tion of their no-story stories would have disgraced
a nurserymaid in her novitiate. It is as easy
to be dull and flat and insipid in addressing
children as in addressing one's grown-up fellow-
Christians from a pulpit.
When the epoch of pleasant balderdash is
drawing to a close, the season for fable-reading
will be drawing near. And here I would strongly
recommend the purchase of a book of fables
illustrated by Tenniel, as being a marvel of
cheapness and goodness. The book has but
one fault, and that is common to all of its kind;
in other words, an explanatory moral is appended
to each story. It would seem to me that a fable
were worth nothing unless it carried its moral on
the face of it. It would, perhaps, be as well that
294 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
a child should read a fable again and again as
an ordinary undidactic story. The moral would
be enforced all the better if it came gradually
upon his intelligence; and in many cases the
lesson would be mentally grasped without ever
having passed into a definite form of words.
Illustrated books of natural history might now
be introduced, and that excellent German book
of pictured arithmetic by whose admirably
arranged illustrations a child is led to count
without perceptible effort. Meanwhile, let us
suppose that a daily lesson is being given in
reading and spelling. To carry on fun side by
side with instruction, let us be throwing in from
time to time book after book, until we have
exhausted all the volumes illustrated by Bennett,
Cruickshank, Tenniel, and Weir.
Meanwhile, the intelligence of our little charge
will have expanded, and we may with safety
entrust him with serious and sacred reading.
My own beau-ideal of a child's Bible would be
a large copy of the four Gospels only, interleaved
with photographs from every picture of note
illustrative of the sacred life. I think the imagi-
nary publisher, referred to on a previous page,
would be conferring an inestimable boon upon
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 295
..
our children, if he would but endeavour to make
a probable fortune by collecting photographic
copies of all the higher-class scripture-paintings
in the great galleries of Europe. The study of
such a Testament as I refer to would not be
confined to Sundays. The teaching of its in-
exhaustible wisdom would be spread over the
whole week. Conscious delight would be the
companion of unconscious instruction. I would
make, of course, this distinction in its perusal,
that I would reserve it until the last evening
hour, and would remove all other books before
its pages were opened, and would read from time.
to time a simple parable, abstaining. sacredly
from all explanatory remark, and allowing the
simple words to have their natural effect upon
the little hearer's understanding.
Between the ages of six and nine instruction-
that is to say, sedentary and regular instruction
-should be limited to reading aloud, writing, and
the earliest rules of arithmetic, and, during the
last year, short daily exercises in dictation. But
meanwhile the little intellect may be educated
in a hundred ways. We have no right as yet to
throw the mind back upon itself. Our teaching
must as yet be objective in all things; never
296 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
!
subjective, never introspective. We have no
right to introduce the considerations of gener-
alities or abstracts. The science of grammar is
not yet due.
If a foreign language be now taught at all,
it had far better be taught orally and without
rules. It will be taken in without perceptible
effort. I have known a child between three and
five speak English and Gaelic, without being
aware that she was a linguist. She never spoke
Gaelic to her kindred, or English to her nurse.
I am inclined, however, to think that the acqui-
sition was a perilous, or, at all events, not a very
usefully intellectual one. Our own language, in
all the variety and versatility of its idiom, should
first be grasped and unconsciously wielded, be-
fore a foreign intrusion is permitted. With a
grown boy the science of grammar may be safely
and usefully employed as a logical strengthener
of the understanding; but mere linguistic quick-
ness and loquacity may be left to the generality
of parrots and couriers and a few exceptional
cases amongst our embassy-attachés.
Our teaching should as yet, I repeat, be ob-
jective; and no effort should be spared to make
it entertaining. At the same time, we have no
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 297
right to be always teaching. We may so attempt
to improve many occasions as to spoil all. Men
and women can claim the right of occasional or
exceptional relaxation; but children are bound
only to occasional or exceptional work. We
may, however, cheat them with a fond and par-
donable guile. We may read to them the story
of Robinson Crusoe, and awaken their curiosity
regarding far distant lands and sail-traversed
seas. We may read the pilgrimage of Christian,
and throw a dimly defined solemnity into their
ideas of human life. We may visit a menagerie
with them, and make them familiar with the
shapes and habits of its varied and beautiful
prisoners. We may walk with them on the sea-
shore, and gather pebbles and shells, and observe
the curious forms of sea-beach life. We may
ramble through lanes and woods at all seasons
of the year, and note with them when the cuckoo
comes and the swallow goes away; how the
beech comes early into his spring-dress of green,
and the oak puts on reluctantly his autumn suit
of brown. We may profitably visit a farmer
friend, and discourse with his labouring-men, and
hear secrets about wheat and oats and turnips.
We may wander occasionally in amongst ship-
1
}
298 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
ping at some port-town, and see the various builds
of ships that come from Italy and Dutchland
and America; and we may hereby show what
a wonderful brotherhood is mankind-how that
one man sows in one hemisphere for his brother
to reap in the other; and on a globe or map we
may now point out with a finger the sea-tracks
of tea and almonds and raisins and figs and
oranges, as they journey from their native lands
to our cupboards and dessert-plates. And mean-
while we shall have awakened a curiosity in the
mind of our little one regarding the dwellers in
these far-off lands. To gratify and utilize this
curiosity, we should be disposed to purchase
books of travel and coloured illustrations of
costumes. But all the while we should be careful
to use no vilifying term in respect to any large
section of humanity, for fear of awakening in our
hearer's breast the feeling of conceit and self-
sufficiency. While we should be doing our
utmost to train him according to the simplicity
of Christ's teaching, employing for that purpose -
the Teacher's own golden words, and as little as
possible of human pinchbeck, we should be afraid
to put limits to his ideas of God's goodness, by
speaking of any people, however black their
CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY. 299
faces, as lost sheep and wanderers in an outer
darkness. Above all, we should be very careful
indeed never to speak a disparaging word of any
denomination of Christian brethren; we should
give him as little as possible of metaphysico-
doctrinal teaching; we should endeavour to
stave off as long as possible the days-which,
with life prolonged, will come inevitably—when
it will dawn upon him, and gradually become
painfully distinct and palpable, how cordially
we Christians do hate one another.
Many of the suggestions here made regarding
amusements, toys, reading, and instruction, would
seem to be practicable only in the case of children
whose parents' were, at all events, in comfort-
able circumstances. But why should not infant-
schools, attended by children of the poor, be
abundantly supplied with toys and pictured
books? A great number of useless and unedi-
fying print might be removed to make room
for the opportune and absorbing stories of Red
Riding Hood and Cock Robin. There are scat-
tered up and down the country a vast number
of ladies, old and young, sowing seed in gravel;
there are, especially in the green sister-island,
many well-intentioned ecclesiastics disseminat-
300 CHILDHOOD AND THE NURSERY.
ing social and political diarrhoea, by turning,
turning, turning their discordant barrel-organs
of polemical strife. If these all would relin-
quish their engrossing but sometimes mischie-
vous and at all times unprofitable occupations,
and go, as colporteuses and colporteurs, from
poor district to poor district, with parcels of
wooden boxes laden with toy-treasures, and
bales of pictured books replete with exhilarating
and healthy bag-wash, then would the dear
ladies, young and old, be engaged in a way
suited to the kindness of their hearts, and many
of the polemical ecclesiastics would be occupied
in a missionary enterprise congenial to their
understandings.
GIRLHOOD, ETC.
301
X.
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD, AND
HOME.

AM standing upon the edge of my pre-
sent subject, shivering. After taking
the plunge, I wonder whether I shall
ever rise to the surface again, or whether I shall
be pulled in by the hair to shore. However, it
is of no use to stand and catch one's death of
cold, so
•
(splash).
The case stands simply thus. The subject-
matter of many of my chapters has been drawn,
to a great extent, from personal observation and
experience. For the immediately ensuing few
pages I must trust to the perilous guidance of
divination. I was previously expending only ·
interest, and am now proceeding to draw upon
my capital. From early boyhood to early man-
hood my days were passed in monastic seclusion,
$
!
302
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
and it is only within the last eight or nine years
that my eyes have been opened to the value of
feminine society and companionship. I remem-
ber reading, somewhere in the pages of Dugald
Stewart, that a man will probably judge more
accurately of the quality of a wine and the merits
of a picture, if he be neither familiarized with
the wine in question, nor given to dabble in
amateur painting. If inexperience be requisite
to ensure impartiality, I feel myself admirably
adapted to give counsel on the difficult question
of feminine education.
We are all agreed that, during childhood, the
studies of both sexes should be identical. It is
usually at about the age of seven that boys and
girls are set upon separate roads that, at every
step taken, diverge more and more from one an-
other. Indeed, we may take a capital Y to re-
present the educational routes of the two sexes.
For a while, boys and girls proceed side by side
along the stem—only that the stem should be a
thin one—until they reach the point of bifurca-
tion, at which, intellectually speaking, they part
company for ever the boys taking the wide
path, and the girls the thin upstroke.
whereas, in days of remote antiquity, boys and
But
i
AND HOME.
303
1
girls, after thus separating, went in diametrically
opposite directions, with their backs, as it were,
turned on one another, in these our own days
we are disposed to lessen more and more the
angle of divergence, and are hopeful that the
time is not very far distant when that angle will
be zero, or an angle of inappreciable magnitude.
At present it would appear that girls are
educated on two plans-the homely and the
ornamental. A girl may never quit the parental
hearth, and may owe her limited mental develop-
ment partly to the instruction of a governess, and
mainly to what she casually hears or desultorily
reads. She will, however, in all probability
arrive at proficiency in all the practical mys-
teries of housewifery that conduce so much to
neatness, comfort, and economy. Or a girl may
pass a term of years laying in a stock of artificial
accomplishments, with her attention fixed upon
an ideal drawing-room in the future, wherein,
with wax-flowers here, crochet-work there, and
. pretty articles of inutility everywhere, she will,
day after day, and evening after evening, enter-
tain or be entertained, bore or be bored, with a
delicate minced-meat of conversation, or the
meaningless brilliancies of pianoforte bagatelles.
304
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
The zenith of either method of training can only
be arrived at in matrimony, into which estate a
pupil trained upon the former plan will enter for
a life of busy, useful, but unrefining drudgery,
and one trained upon the latter for a life of
factitious enjoyment and purposeless display.
For the education of a boy the one great
requisite is held to be a Latin grammar, and for
that of a girl a piano. In the first case, three
reasons may be given for the thing required.
The boy must either be puzzled and bullied,
because his father was so treated before him;
or he must have a difficult and impracticable
task set him to keep him out of peril and mis-
chief; or he must have his reasoning powers
educed, cultivated, and strengthened. In the
other case, a girl must in due time do something
to amuse guests in the parental home before
marriage, and in her own home afterwards.
Let us take the third and most sensible reason
for connecting boy-training with the inevitable
grammar. Are girls endowed with reasoning
faculties? or is reason a something that belongs
exclusively to males, as manes to lions, and
combs to cocks? And, furthermore, are the
graces of society to be cultivated only by our
!
+
}
1
f
AND HOME.
305
women-folk ? If music be their perquisite, or
rather their special burthen, why should not
dancing-after Turk fashion-be thrown in, to
boot? Would it not be a great saving of trouble
to us men to be allowed our chibouques and our
siesta, as we gazed upon wives and daughters
and nieces and sisters pirouetting and capering
and swanning before us? But, after all, it is
more than probable that logic and grace are
both of them of the common gender; that a
woman is not unsexed by the exercise of her
thinking faculties, and that a man is bound in
all fairness to contribute his quota to the amuse-
ment-fund of general society.
Antiquity tells us a mournful tale concerning
womankind; and barbarism, wherever pene-
trated, confirms the dismal record. Nay; this
very, confirmation is confirmed by what we
see in the midst of our own supposed civilisa-
tion. Chivalry is said to have raised woman
to a pedestal of honour. As far as I can read.
the riddle of medieval chivalric thought, I can
see, indeed, that the worship of the Virgin
Mother invested womanhood with a sanctity
never known or conceived before; but that
feeling would appear, beyond the precincts of
U
ì
305 GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
conventual life, to have been speedily, and al-
most universally, limited and vulgarized by the
war-loving and rank-respecting instincts of the
times. In all old pleasant stories our heroines
are invariably, or almost invariably, young and
beautiful. The interest of these stories usually
hinges upon the fact that their chastity is for a
while in extreme peril; which circumstance
of itself pleads powerfully against the theory
of contemporaneous male virtue. They may
through the opening pages of a romance be
disguised in poor habiliments, and occupied in
menial services; but in the sequel they are dis-
covered, to our exceeding comfort, to be the
nieces or daughters of exiled lords or murdered
monarchs. In even democratic communities of
ancient Hellas they carried aristocratic predi-
lections to a further length; and a youth who
might figure as a drudge and a bastard at the
beginning of a play would be raised, in the last
act, to filial relationship with some immortal
but amorous occupant of Olympus. Chivalry
did much to raise the social rank of womanhood;
but chivalry only went a certain way in the right
direction. It was left for reason to complete
the work begun by sentiment, or point the way

AND HOME.
307
:
towards its completion; for democracy to im-
prove upon the vague and partial theories of
feudalism. It is to the New World that we are
indebted for the sensible but unromantic doctrine
of woman's equality with man; of equality under
all circumstances and through all ages, as con-
trasted with her divinity in youth, drudgery in
maturity, and obliteration in age. In other
words, our modern theories would inculcate
upon men the duty of regarding women as their
companions and friends, instead of petting them
with an affectionate condescension, a tender pity,
or a thinly-disguised contempt; the propriety,
in short, of viewing them as complements under
all varieties of time and incident, and not as
supplements simply indoors and domestic.
Let us follow, in imagination, two favourable
specimens of our representative women through
their matrimonial and maternal careers. The
homely mother of the Martha-type will find it
impossible to resist the stream of fashion, and
will be constrained to give her daughters at least
a sprinkling of the current accomplishments.
She may show a bold front, and argue, with a
pertinacious and half-incredulous good-humour,
in favour of primitive simplicity; but the heart
308
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
น
within her will dilate with pride, and perhaps
her eyes will fill with tears of pleasure, as a
daughter prattles away idiomatically Anglican
French to a distinguished foreigner, or screams
a bewildering cantata to words as incompre-
hensible to the singer as to the innocent dam, or
lets fall from the piano on to the carpet the
trickling notes of the most fashionable and re-
cently-published pianoforte cascade. Her orna-
mental vis-a-vis will take, with more or less of
awkwardness and reluctance, to the fulfilment of
petty household duties, and will grow to value
less and less her once treasured linguistic and.
musical accomplishments, as she discovers the
advantages of unaffected talk over the repetition
of vapid set phrases, or begins to be almost as
heartily tired of her show musical pieces as her
husband or her husband's friends.
In either case we should have a wife to whom
the brain of a highly-educated husband would
be as a sealed book; a wife that would be unable
or unwilling to discuss with her partner any pro-
blem of social, political, or religious interest; to
follow the course of his reading or his specula-
tions; to walk side by side with him beyond
the narrow circle of domestic and personal in-
AND HOME.
309
terests. In either case we should have a mother
unqualified to carry out the mental training of a
daughter, and unable even dimly to appreciate
the mental condition of an intelligent and well-
read son ; one who, if such a son were discussing
broadly and generously a question of difficulty,
would look on him with fear and wonderment,
like a hen upon a foster duckling, as it were
venturing upon a, to her, untraversed alien pond.
And here I may not inappropriately refer to
an institution in feminine educational systems,
whether homely or ornamental, which happily
has never as yet obtained a footing in systems
of male training; and that is, the formal recog-
nition of finishing classes. At a certain age or
at a certain epoch in mental progress, a girl is
introduced to finishing governesses and finishing
masters. From the hands of these petty omni-
scients she is supposed to issue absolutely per-
fect; tota, teres, atque rotunda; a new edition of
Eve as she came from the ribs of her husband
and the hands of her Maker. It is, perhaps, from
a faith in this creed of optimist and ne-plus-ultrà
training that intellectual pursuits so little engage
the attention of our grown womanhood. They
may reason unconsciously with themselves that
"
?
310
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
such as in youth have rounded the circle of
attainable knowledge may be allowed in maturer
years to relax wearied brains with the trifles of
light literature and the sensuous excitement of
novel-reading. But alas! this circle of know-
ledge can be rounded by neither sex, by no age,
no ability, no industry, no genius. The first
school-bench on which we sit is our mother's or
our nurse's knee. Children and age with all the
intervening epochs are but rising forms in our
common school-curriculum. At length the day
arrives when there is astonishment, and perhaps
sorrow, in the chamber where our old school-
garments are found lying; and some comrades
will suppose that we have absconded, and others
that we have gone home for the vacation; and
a pious few will feel assured that we have been
called to receive the real finishing lessons from
the lips of the Great Teacher.
The goal to which all a girl's thoughts are
directed, from childhood upwards, is matrimony.
In every tale she reads the heroine is followed
by her with absorbing interest, as she pursues a
tortuous pathway through two entire volumes
and three-quarters of a third to a Rosamond's
bower, in which is standing a clergyman in a
AND HOME.
311
+
surplice. Now surely, in the name of all that is
logical, if wedlock is thus to pre-occupy all the
thoughts of girlhood, it should be kept as care-
fully before the mind of boyhood as the goal
of all ultimate endeavour, seeing that wedlock
is a condition that affects one sex as much as
the other. At all events, a woman can never be
married, but, from the necessities of the case,
a man must be married at the same moment.
And yet we should regard with unqualified and
merited contempt a wretch that should maunder
through a sentimental youth into manhood,
wasting his thoughts and energies upon mawkish
anticipations of connubial bliss. We feel in-
tuitively that a man should pursue some definite
useful career, independently of all connected
with marriage; that he should take in due time
the wife that God may throw in his way; but
that until that day, and ever after it, he can only
win respect of himself and his fellows by the
prosecution of a fixed and honest calling.
Why, then, should the world of usefulness be
closed against feminine aspirations? Why
should all chance of independence be denied?
Why should the happiness of half humanity be
staked upon what, in seven cases out of ten, is a
312
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
matter of utterest contingency? Why should a
man be allowed to push his way to fortune, and
a woman be compelled to wait until she be pulled
into it? It would seem as though we had two
separate creeds for the two sexes, and believed
in freedom of the will for man, and in fatalism
for woman. There is an extremely beautiful
fairy tale, exquisitely handled by our poet-
laureate, of a sleeping princess awakened by the
true lover's kiss. The story is thus far true in
its suggestions, that warm and reciprocated love
throws a superlative charm into the life of man
or woman; but it is false if it suggest that
woman has no duties or responsibilities of weight
anterior to wedlock, and no subsequent duties
and responsibilities disconnected with her new
condition.
The most effectual remedy for the present
unreasonable relationship of the two sexes to
one another would be to improve the education
of both boys and girls, and assimilate the now
diverse systems to one another. There are cer-
tain mechanical operations, such as sewing and
the like, that might be left in statu quo; but even
in regard to them we must remember that there
is nothing in them necessarily feminine, as many
AND HOME.
313
of our trades would indicate, and also that their
simplification by machinery will probably pro-
ceed during the next generation at a very rapid
rate. There are certain boyish sports that would
overtax a girl's strength; but a girl requires
sport of some kind as much as a boy, and the
present melancholy limitation of her pastimes
is due to our mischievous and superstitious wor-
ship of spurious gentility. Our girls are trained
to ladyhood, not womanhood; for an artificial
life within parlour walls, rather than for a natural
life of open-air, generous, and catholic habits and
aims. But, whilst the amusements of boys and
girls should differ in degree rather than in kind,
-should be, in fact, only modifications of one
another adapted to differences in physical powers,
—it is difficult to conceive a single sound argu-
ment that could be adduced to justify any ma-
terial divergence in exclusively mental studies;
at all events, in such studies as are followed
with objects purely educatory and prepara-
tive. The study of Latin is said with truth
to lead to accuracy of thought and perspi-
cuity of expression. The same might be
said of the exhaustively analytical study of
even a fractional part of a master-work in any

314
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
language. But accuracy of thought and per-
spicuity of expression are as requisite for women
as for men. The elementary study of mathema-
tical science leads to mental habits of close and
exact reasoning. Many of our social anomalies
are connected with the melancholy fact, that
the great majority of women never reason at
all; nay, actually pride themselves on following
impulse and intuition. The study of the ancient
poets is said to refine and elevate. The same
might be said regarding the study of all modern
poetry of surpassing excellence. No one for a
moment would venture to assert that refinement
and elevation of sentiment were incompatible
with the most graceful and delicate type of
womanhood. A smattering of French or of
Italian, acquired simply for carrying on, at con-
tingent and distant intervals, an artificial, insin-
cere, and unspontaneous conversation, is almost
as useless to a human being as it would be to a
quadruped. To sketch, and sing, and play, for
such as are not obviously destitute of taste and
faculty for one or all, are sexless accomplish-
ments, although at present we hear little of them
in our boys' schools. Whilst we should pray
that their influence might be shed impartially
1
{
AND HOME.
315
܂
on feminine boarding-schools and boy grammar-
schools, we would pray with equal fervour that
a considerable number of accomplishments of
the wax-flower species might in course of time
be dispensed with altogether and everywhere,
and removed to make way for healthier or more
improving occupations. In general terms, we
would advocate such modifications on either side
as might conduce to tone down the rudeness
and brutality now too characteristic of our man-
hood, and raise the great mass of our women-
folk from pretty sillinesses, affected minauderies,
love of display, and covetousness of passing and
worthless admiration, to the cultivation of such
tastes and the prosecution of such studies as,
without detracting from grace and elegance,
would increase their self-respect, and multiply
manifold their powers of domestic and public
utility.
If the education of the young of both sexes
were assimilated to the full extent of our advo-
cacy, it would soon cease to be regarded as a
necessity that boys and girls should hold so
much aloof from each other. As it is, little
boys and girls, while clad in almost similar
habiliments, say good-bye to each other outside
X
316 GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
the doorways of their nurseries, and after long
years of heterogeneous pursuits, meet together
as strangers on the threshold of mature life.
Is there any reason in nature for this long
estrangement?
Under present circumstances, it would be
utopian absurdity to advocate the consociation
of boys and girls in school-studies. It may
not, however, be unprofitable to suggest its
ultimate, at least partial, feasibility. So long
as the subject-matter of our instruction is studi-
ously made dry and wearisome, and our methods
of stimulating to exertion, enforcing attention,
and inculcating theories are more or less tinged
with brutality, it would be premature and in-
opportune to remove girls from the tranquil
insipidity of a nursery to the boisterous vulgarity
of a boys' schoolroom. So long also as our
universities are open to youthful idlers of un-
limited wealth and foolishly and wickedly wor-
shipped rank, so long as our colleges continue
to be to ever so slight an extent-young gen-
tlemen's clubs, it would be unpardonable rash-
ness and folly to trust our youthful womanhood
within their precincts as students. But, if a
college or an university were modified into a
1
:
i
་
AND HOME.
317
:
bond fide place of mental instruction, what
possible objection could be made to the matri-
culation of students, resident or non-resident, of
both sexes? We see no impropriety in men
and women going together to the theatre; to the
opera; to a popular lecture on subjects scientific,
literary, æsthetic; or to the house of God. Where
would be the impropriety in youthful students
of the two sexes attending together systematic
courses of instruction in subjects of sound, use-
ful, practical, secular knowledge, or in con-
tending together as candidates in academic
examination-rooms? Let us bear in mind this
important fact, that the education of at least half
our population already rests in the hands of
women, and that-with the exception of the
Ladies' College and the College of Preceptors
in London, and the recently founded Alexandra
College in Dublin,-no efforts are made on a
great or adequate scale to provide high instruc-
tion to youthful womanhood, or furnish to the
public trustworthy guarantees of the capacities
of lady-teachers. The melancholy fact is that
our whole educational system is in a chaotic
state. In the teaching, however, of one sex we
have made, and are making, efforts to bring
:
318
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
order out of confusion; but in the teaching of
the other we have been, and are still, shamefully,
stupidly, and barbarously remiss. And we are
paying dearly for our remissness. Our women-
folk exact a terrible but wholly unconscious
vengeance of us for our stupidity, negligence,
or tyranny. They may not interfere with us in
matters commercial or political, but in things
social and religious they, in all the sincerity of
undeveloped intellectualism, hold us tight bound
within the limits of foolish conventionalities and
anachronous superstitions. They make hypo-
crites of many of us, and fools of nearly all.
We-the men—are not the gainers by this treat-
ment; and, of course, the women are very much
the losers.
To me it would appear that the world is a
place of work; that an idler is the chief of
sinners; and that happiness and virtue lie in
action, when action has for object the increase
of the sum total of human happiness, know-
ledge, and virtue. To exclude one-half of
mankind from the theatre of virtuous activity,
and confine it within a waiting-room of expect-
ancy or a prison of inertia would seem to be
cruel, wicked, and stupid in the extreme. The
AND HOME.
319
ancient Church of Christendom-from which I
and the majority of my readers are dissenters,
and the practical wisdom of which we are
too prone to disparage-honours the rite of
matrimony with the holy title of 'Sacrament.'
But, while it sanctifies the social estate, it en-
nobles and utilizes the isolated condition of
maidenhood. In the city of my present abode
are many convents, one of which alone-that of
the Sisters of Presentation-half supports and
entirely instructs three hundred little ragged
children. These excellent women are not singu-
lar in this poor distracted Catholic country in
their benevolence and wisdom. Their instruc-
tion is not limited to things sacred, but they
hallow by their administration the teaching of
secular elements. In Protestant lands it is
not unusual for the female relations of squires,
rectors, vicars, and curates, to take a part-and,
I doubt not, to some extent an useful part—in
Sunday-school teaching. But the rough week-
day work is left altogether to unhonoured and
poorly-paid hireling instructors. I am far from
advocating a diminution of the already scanty
payments of these latter, but I could wish some
self-sacrifice and self-devotion shown, in a plain
* 320
,
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOODHOOD,
and practical way, by well-born, cultivated, re-
fined, and wealthy women, whose talents and
energies were not fully occupied in the manage-
ment of their own families, or of the families
of their nearest kindred. Wherever I go, I see
women of ability and goodness passing lives of
utterest listlessness and inutility in the midst.
of ignorance more or less profound, and I am
impressed to the heart that the noblest of all
occupations is the enlightenment of ignorance;
that such is a higher-perhaps only a little
higher-occupation than the alleviation of physi-
cal misery. Indeed, I have many times called
to mind a sacred parable, when I have seen
women of good parts, intellectual and spiritual,
standing aloof, in maidenhood, from the business.
of the outer world. I have thought that a
Divine Teacher would say to them: 'Wherefore
stand ye all the day idle?'-and that, if their
answer were: 'Because no man hath hired us ;'
He would say: 'Go ye also into MY vineyard;
and that going they would receive, every one of
them, a penny.
1
Among the children of our poor lies, partly,
the sphere of woman's activity for the coming
century. The harvest is great, and the labourers,
>
AND HOME.
321
:
:
we feel assured, will not be few or idle. But the
experience of past times has taught us the salu-
tary lesson, that we must not begin with our
little ones at the wrong end, physically or men-
tally; that patience must be our rod, and the
way of common-sense our method; that we
must cultivate subordinate faculties with unre-
mitting industry; and deal carefully-and only
with legitimate permission—with faculties ulti-
mate and spiritual. We must bow to the plain
fact, that a ladder reaching to heaven must, to be
useful, have its feet upon the ground; and that
the safest way to spiritual excellence lies through
physical health and mental strength. At the
same time, we should be far from even suggest-
ing that health of body and mind were alone
sufficient for the perfect development of human
excellence. We only speak of the effectuation of
these conditions as a means towards an end, as`an
instrument for the completion of the greatest of all
conceivable works-the elevation and improve-
ment of our common humanity. We would use,
in all modesty and humility, the room of secular
training and instruction as the ante-chamber
wherein to robe ourselves respectfully and deco-
rously, ere we were ushered into the Presence.
X
322
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
But, apart from the wide field of instructing
our innumerable poor, there are many social
problems whose solution can only be satisfac-
torily settled by woman's agency. Our marriage
laws are fraught with perilous anomalies. We
are all thoroughly conscious that an offence
against nature is being committed when feminine
youth, poverty, and beauty are united to age,
decrepitude, wealth, and lechery; when hands
are clasped in holy places symbolically of the
unholy union of property with property; when
the temporary concubine flaunts unabashed in
our public places; and debased unwomanly
women patrol our most multitudinous thorough-
fares. The redress of all these evils, and of many
more analogous ones, rests with the women-folk
of the coming century. That they should be
prepared for the great mission before them, it
is absolutely necessary that a definite and sys-
tematic training should be gone through by
them in childhood and girlhood. I do not for
a moment suppose that the next generation is
to experience a dearth of wives and mothers;
but I do suppose and confidently believe that the
next generation will behold multitudes of women
impressed with the belief, and acting on the
AND HOME.
323
. belief, that womanhood has duties beautiful as
those of wifehood, holy as those of maternity.
In the face of facts, it is absurd or imperti-
nent to state that woman is incapable of the
work here supposedly set before her. In this
very generation, the noblest example of self-
devotion in the cause of physically suffering
humanity has been set by Florence Nightingale.
Among the foremost of English living writers
stands Miss Braddon; the accursed institution.
of slavery was effectually undermined by one
work of Mrs. Beecher Stowe; the philanthropy
of Miss Carpenter is as affectionately appre-
ciated in India as in Britain; and the monarch
most honoured throughout the world, and the
best-beloved by her own subjects, is a Queen.
However, there are many pious but timid
souls that look upon the scheme of woman's
interference in matters socio-political as a devout
but chimerical imagination. They can see no
practical method of adapting existing institutions
to work harmoniously with novel theories; or
are terrified out of all quiet reasoning by petty
contemporaneous satire. In this case, as in all
cases, where there is a will, there is a way. If
the reader will turn to the thirty-third volume
6
:
324
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
of The Travels of Busbequius Bungfungus, he
will find the following remarkable and sugges-
tive passage in a description of the beautiful
but rarely-visited island of Alicubi. About a
century ago :' says the great but little appreciated
traveller: 'a social movement of a highly interest-
ing character took place amongst this cultivated
and virtuous people. It was originated by the
then reigning queen, Nommoc Esnes, a woman
who combined the gentlest virtues of her sex
with masculine firmness and sagacity. After
binding herself by a public declaration to be
uninfluenced in her choice by considerations of
metaphysics, doctrinal theology, party-politics,
or lineage, but to have regard only to dignity of
character, kindliness of heart, and practical good-
sense, this monarch designated a lady as her
colleague in what was afterwards named "The
This second
Council of Honourable Women."
designated, after a similar fashion, a third; the
third, a fourth; and so on, until the number of
a hundred was completed. The Council has
never been allowed to over-pass this number.
On state occasions its members take precedence
of all others of their sex, without regard to age,
wealth, or rank. No scandal has occurred to
}
AND HOME.
325
lower its character and lessen thereby its influ-
ence for good. It is, however, provided that a
scandalous proceeding fully proved against any
one member shall entail the immediate dissolu-
tion of the whole body, and that its re-inaugura-
tion shall rest with the lady of highest social
position for the time being. The Council sits
for a limited period once a year. Its functions
are merely deliberative, and limited to the dis-
cussion of questions of purely domestic and
social economy. It is only when a motion has
received the assent of three-fourths of the entire
body that it is submitted for consideration to
the Supreme Legislative Assembly. Such a
motion meets invariably with a deferential hear-
ing, and, in the generality of instances, passes,
in a more or less modified form, into law. It is
almost impossible to conceive the amount of
social benefit that has been already achieved by
this simple but admirable institution. Happily
there seems but little chance of its utility being
ever diminished, as the method of ever-varying
co-optation seems likely to ensure the society
against stagnation or ossification in sentiment;
the newest comer having under all ordinary
circumstances the right of nomination to a vacant
326
GIRLHOOD, WOMANHOOD,
place. One hundred years ago the nobles and
wealthy merchants of the island maintained
numerous hareems, or lived a life of celibacy, at
their pleasure; girls were throughout girlhood
kept inactive, and fed on pease-porridge, to give
them a premature but unwholesome plumpness,
and passed weary years singing monotonous
jingles to the music of the two-stringed tom-
tom; a bride was led to the dwelling of her
future lord with a rope around her neck and
waist, and her hands bound fast behind her
back; married women wore heavy ear-rings at
all times, and grotesque nose-rings on festal
days; the great majority of female infants were
killed by exposure in the open streets; and aged
and infirm women, so soon as they became the
slightest burthen to their relatives, were buried
alive in the public market-place. All these
barbarous customs, together with many other
analogous ones, have been abolished; and now,
to all intents and purposes, the sexes are placed
socially and politically upon an equal footing.
The mental culture of the sexes is almost identi-
cal. In legislative affairs the women-folk, through
the agency of their Council, have just as much of
indirect unobtrusive influence as a prudent wife
;
AND HOME.
327
}
has-I regret to say, only occasionally,-in the
commercial and political dealings of her hus-
band in my own native England. I only wish :'
continues the benevolent philosopher: 'that I
could say of my native land what I can say of
this happy island,—that you will never therein
see a poor girl wholly untaught, or a rich one
taught to no intelligible earthly purpose; that
all employments, not calling for the exercise of
great physical strength, are there open to both
sexes indifferently; that it there brings almost
as much of infamy on a man to cohabit with a
mistress as to live without a wife.'
For my own part, I sympathize most heartily
with the wise and benevolent philosopher, and I
could wish to live to the age of Methuselah, were
it only for the gratification of witnessing the
inevitable new order of things, in which an idle
man will be regarded as an unnatural monstro-
sity, and an idle woman as a creature singularly
and unaccountably afflicted or diseased.
328 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
*
XI.
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.

O keep a community of grown men
sweet there should be a judicious dis-
tribution of cakes and ale. Volun-
tary asceticism may work well in occasional in-
stances under very exceptional circumstances;
but forced asceticism is the fruitful source of hy-
pocrisy, cant, and vice. Among ancient nations
there were some that worshipped the Sun of
noonday, and some that worshipped the Moon
of midnight. Were I a heathen at all, I would
be a worshipper of the great fountain of colour,
taste, perfume, motion, and life. Indeed, I am
disposed to think that this great luminary was
made by God to cheer and flood its satellite
worlds with heat and warmth; although some
insist that its radiance serves only to expose
blunders in the Creator's workmanship, and its
!
1
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 329
Į
1
heat to breed maggots. There are fine rays
of light invisible to our ken, and fine notes of
insect-singers inaudible to our ears; the which
in their plenitude produce great catholic effects,
visible and audible. Even so, invisibly and in-
audibly, do Amusement, Fun, Humour, Dancing,
and Music operate in the building up of human
Virtue. There is in their working no noise as of
hammer; there is no speech nor language; but
their voices are heard among them.
As a man struck by lightning may die from
a momentary excess of vitality; as a nerve
overcharged with pleasurable sensation may be
a conductor of acute pain; so a man that usurps
for himself too much of gratification may brutify
his nature and deaden his capacity for enjoy-
ing what alone he holds to be enjoyable. The
secret of real enjoyment lies in giving or sharing
more than in taking. An air in music of which
our ears have been long satiated becomes, as it
were, born again as we play or sing it to fresh
listeners. A painter paints his picture anew,
and a musician re-writes his score, as spectators
or auditors gaze wonder-stricken at the canvas
or thrill with delight beneath voice and instru-
ment. Whenever we are natural, and give our-
330 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
selves fair-play, we act as lovers of our kind.
A misanthropist should be pitied as a diseased
thing. We should have hospitals erected for
cantankerous people, and should treat them
delicately as creatures suffering under some sort
of maniacal delusion. An ugly face and a mis-
shapen form may clothe, as they often clothe,
sweetness of disposition. This sweetness may
be fairly or charitably attributed entirely to its
representative; but the ugliness and distortion
are undoubtedly the outcomings of vice or
stupidity, parental or progenitorial; or of Acci-
dent. And Accident is the Devil. The ancient
Greeks would, on festal occasions, set a youth
of faultless form upon a pedestal for general
homage and wonderment. They were not far
in the wrong.
A vigorous and healthy and
well-formed man or woman may be warped
by adverse circumstance into evil ways; but
the progenitors of either must, for the most
part, have been cheerful and sober and virtuous
souls. According to some modern philoso-
phers, the progeny of a healthy baboon may
in the course of cyclic periods emerge into
manhood. The experience of ages has shown
us that the progeny of vicious men pass on,
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
331
physically, to annihilation through the condition
of baboonhood.
'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'
is a motto as generally acted on as decried. It
would, perhaps, be more unexceptionably worded
thus: Let us eat and drink well, lest to-morrow
we die ;' and, forasmuch as to eat and drink to
wholesome effect we should never feast alone,
we might hold to the correlative precept: 'Let
us give while our hands are open.' God knows ;
in a little while our hands will be folded across
our breasts, and our ears will be deaf to the words
of dissatisfaction or thankfulness. 'Live thou
each day as though it were thy last' is a double-
edged maxim. If taken in a spiritual sense, it
may make us saints; if in a physical one, liber-
tines; if in both senses, happy in ourselves and
the cause of happiness to others. We have yet
another motto, which is complementary to the
two already quoted: 'Let us work while it is yet
day; for the night cometh wherein no man can
work.'
}
But, before our hands be turned to labour, it is
necessary that our brains be cleared of cobwebs.
It is true that, if we thoroughly love our neighbour,
our love will be as subtle to influence his heart, as
4.
1
}
332 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
¡
is quicksilver to permeate the tissues of his body.
But in exact proportion to its efficacy as a motive
power is love a perilous thing if ill-regulated.
Many a criminal has swung on the gallows for
less of permanent mischief done than has bought
a good name and a good conscience for a tender-
hearted philanthropist. There are several ways
of well-doing wrongly. We may begin at the
beginning, and leave off soon and abruptly; or,
we may begin at the middle or close to the end.
A good motive may clear us before the eyes of
Omniscience; but, that it may be made to result
in alien good, it must be deftly managed and
rightly guided. As a steam-engine is to a car,
so is the responsibility of a stoker to that of
an ordinary driver. The sharper the chisel, the
more harm it will do in the hands of a bungler.
A reservoir of water should be as a store-house
of blessings; but, if it be insecurely happed in,
it may deluge an underlying plain with ruin.
The philosophers of old, in Greece and India,
had their summum bonum, or goal of action, as
had the alchemists of mediæval days their stone
of transmutation. The object of all endeavour
would be variously defined as 'Happiness:''En-
joyment: Wisdom: Self-satisfaction:' Ab-
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 333
sorption into Deity:' or 'Annihilation.' Any one
of these definitions may be re-defined in a multi-
plicity of ways. I would venture in all humility
to lay down a longer but less perplexing defi-
nition of the great duty of man, and, as a funda-
mental axiom, would assume it to be incumbent
upon each one of us to exert himself at all
times to the utmost to render himself physically
healthy, strong, and cheerful,-mentally sound of
judgment and well-informed,—morally just and
self-controlling,-spiritually trustful in God's wis-
dom and goodness; to dispose himself to think
and hope well of his neighbour; and only in his
own case to be severely critical of action, opinion,
or motive. It is very probable that my definition
is as lacking in originality as in terseness. Be it,
however, new or old, I hold it to be superior to the
now fashionable precepts of right action, which
I think might be fairly thus expressed: 'Heed
not the corporeal or mental condition of your
neighbour, but regard him only as a soul made
temporarily and indirectly visible; cram your
own spiritual nostrums, if possible, down his
throat; if he swallow them, even with a wry
face, well and good; if he spit them out, leave
him to his damnable perversity, and fold your-
!
}
334 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
:
self more than ever warmly in the mantle of
self-satisfaction.'
Not one department in my own many-sided
rule of right endeavour can be safely neglected.
At present, however, we shall restrict our atten-
tion to one section of one department, and for
the while ignore other necessarily co-existing
divisions. Thus a mathematician in some pro-
blems forgets for a while the variability of
certain variables, and a sportsman shuts one
eye to take aim at a partridge who would use
both eyes to gaze on a covey.
Our epoch has seen philanthropy and intelli-
gence side by side engaged in providing against
and mitigating disease. But we are not suffi-
ciently alive to the great importance of cultivat-
ing habits conducive to physical strength; and
we are lamentably forgetful or ignorant of the
duty of disseminating innocent-and healthy if
innocent-mirth and cheerfulness. As we have
each of us our peck of dirt to eat involuntarily
in life-time; so is there a countervailing peck
of pleasure that every human being insists on
swallowing. It were as useless to attempt de-
priving him of it altogether as to endeavour to
extract the oxygen out of the air he breathes.
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 335
All we can do for his own good and our own is
by example, precept, and assistance, to induce,
warn, and enable him to extend the eating of his
peck over a whole life, instead of gulping down
and bolting dog-fashion at intervals great snacks
of the delicious but perilous food.
I was told many years ago, upon good autho-
rity, of the means adopted by a sensible clergy-
man of exterminating Sunday drunkenness in
his parish; means, such as of late have been
countenanced by the public utterances of lead-
ing Presbyterian divines in Scotland and of an
eminent High-Church Bishop in England. This
sensible, liberal-minded, cunningly righteous
man started a cricket-club, which had its meet-
ings on Sunday afternoons, in which meetings he
himself took a prominent but not obtrusive or
domineering part. In course of time his church
was thronged upon a Sunday morning, and the
tavern was empty during the afternoon. He
had caught his congregation with a holy guile.
I think it impossible to over-estimate the
wisdom evinced in a procedure apparently
so simple. To appreciate it to some extent
adequately, let us reflect seriously but sadly
upon the countless multitudes of kindly, pious,
336
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
..
}
innocent people who, by a life-long well-in-
tentioned hindrance of harmless pleasures, all
unconsciously help to render more virulently
keen in others the thirst for lawless or debasing
gratifications. It requires only ordinary courage
and principle to pluck folly and vice by the
beard, but superlative dexterity and resolution
must be united to cope successfully with the pre-
judices of respectability, kindliness, and virtue.
\
Desires and passions in the moral world,
like force in the domain of physics, are in-
destructible. But a stream that cannot be
dammed may be diverted in its course; and
heat, if perilous or useless as heat, may be
transmuted into harmless or useful motion. To
seek to quench all pleasures because some at all
times and all in excess are pernicious were as
unreasonable as to fight against the sun's rays
because at times they strike fatally, or at any
time will singe us if concentrated in a burning-
glass. Of what use to thee is thy pomp and
glory and the multitude of thy riches? Canst
thou carry them with thee to thy grave?' says
the Seneca-school of flatulent morality. The
same might be said of a good dinner. We
cannot, if we wished it, carry a curry within us
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 337
>
to the year's end. But, for all that, a curry is
a pleasant thing when well made. To learn to
die is a necessary but difficult lesson, for the
mastering of which we should be all the better
prepared by marking, learning, and digesting
the comparatively a-b-c tasks that teach us how
to live.
The wife of a friend of my own is a great
favourite among all her husband's cronies. On
being asked by what means she had won her
popularity, she replied: 'I feed the men well.'
A wise though simple answer, and worthy of
consideration. As a moral institution, dinner
cannot be too highly valued. A Hungarian is
a chivalrous and romantic being; but chivalric
sentiment requires nutritious diet; and a Mag-
yar, in marrying, will inquire narrowly into the
culinary abilities of his intended. A German
maiden, after the trifles of intellectual training
have been laid aside, is occupied for two pro-
fitable years in the higher departments of
cookery and housekeeping. What a geological
cycle of progressive civilisation lies between the
clammy dough out of which a statuette might
be moulded and the brittle films that melt upon
the tongue like flakes of lukewarm snow! A
Y
تمر
338 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
man may talk scandal or write satiric criticism
before dinner; may crawl like a horse-fly over
the character or the writings of a neighbour,
and settle greedily upon sore places; but,
when he shall have well eaten and drunken,
the devils of vituperation and disparagement
are gone out of him, and his diaphragm is
pleasantly titillated by the invisible spirits of
Good-fellowship and Philanthropy.
And not
only is fasting an enemy to the merriment of the
good-humoured, but it is churlish even to the
sorrowful of their luxury of tears; for, when the
stomach is empty, the heart may be full, but
the eyes perforce are dry. So that hunger is.
inimical to cheerfulness and sympathy, which
twain have important work to do in rearing the
complicated fabrics of our happiness and virtue.
We are all aware how food influences indus-
try and valour. An English navvy will in con-
tinental countries receive double wages, because
his meat diet enables him to work double tides.
A French general has acknowledged that defi-
ciencies in their commissariat had much to do
with the defeat of the Austrians at Austerlitz.
If the conditions of all victories, ancient and
modern, could be rigidly investigated, we should
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 339
doubtless be amazed to find what an important
part in the destiny of empires has been played
by the gastric juice. But, while soldiers, sailors,
and labourers must feed well to work well,
they will recompense their work with pleasure,
instinctively obedient to a law of nature; and
the business of their commanders and em-
ployers is to divert the instinct, instead of
seeking, and vainly, seeking, its obliteration.
Where limited numbers of men are hedged off
from the world, as with a crew on a long voyage,
or a garrison in a foreign land, the necessity for
cheerfulness as a conservatrix of health is seen
and acknowledged; and games, theatrical and
other, are set on foot to dispel ennui and push
off disease. What is true of little communities
is true of the populations of hamlets, towns,
cities, and nations. The good and wise king
who wished his peasants might never lack a
chicken for the pot knew how antagonistic are
hunger and misery to order and progress. What
is true of communities of men is true of boys at
school.
There are several causes now in action that
operate against the healthy spread of cheerful-
The active members of our communities
ness.
340 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
are too eager in early life to store up con-
ventional knowledge; too intent in manhood
upon the acquisition of wealth; and we are all
too jealous at all times of our own special dignity
and social status. The same narrow selfishness
that actuates us in the pursuit of knowledge and
wealth, in the maintenance of petty social pri-
vileges, corrodes our best spiritual efforts and´
yearnings. We turn Heaven into a bourn of
egotism. We make of life a maze. Unless-you
be favoured with the clue, you may run your
head continually against an opposing hedge;
not, I hold it, to the pleasure of celestial on-
lookers. We are too prone to forget, if we ever
remarked, that the records of the Divine Life
are mainly filled with the details of physical
well-doing. Our modern introspectiveness, our
unwholesome and insincere disparagement of
mirth and pleasure, our debasement of the
epithets, originally and really innocent, 'sensual'
and 'sensuous,' is a relic less of Christian than
of Hellenic teaching. Not of genuinely Greek
teaching; for the Greeks, as a people, were
altogether free of this malady, and their livers
appear to have been singularly healthy. But
it was from amongst this wholesome-minded,
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
341
outward-looking, open-air race that came Plato,
the most splendidly unwholesome or most un-
healthily splendid of all great thinkers, the most
morbid of all introspective self-anatomizers.
He was the first to diagnose spiritual maladies
upon the plan adopted by Mongolian doctors
in physical disease, the examination and ana-
lysis of excretions. A good plan, viewed as an
auxiliary. Not a pleasant one, viewed anyhow.
The effect of Plato upon the world of thought
has been twofold, like that of wine, spirits, and
tobacco in the physical world; he has scattered
abroad much of mental pleasure and profit, and
an incalculable amount of spiritual mischief.
The purest type of Greek intellect was Aristotle,
who was, of all the teachers of the ancient world,
the greatest intellectual benefactor of his species.
The preaching of Plato may be likened to the
effects of opium or hachish, and the teaching of
Aristotle to the invigorating properties of sea-
bathing, open air, regular exercise, wholesome
diet, and quinine.
But to revert to the first mentioned of our
prevalent errors, the undue stress laid upon
early mental cultivation. It is quite true-and
pity 'tis, 'tis true that the vast majority of our
342 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
children learn little or nothing; but such as are
taught are usually taught too much. To achieve
success in class or the examination-room too
often requires exhaustive preparation. I remem-
ber to have been ordered to bed four days before
an examination-day; and I am almost sure that
the timely rest on that occasion saved me a
brain-fever. Only recently I had to unite with
two of my colleagues in desiring a youth of
rare abilities and attainments to quit his papers
and seek repose for a day or two on or near
the pier at Kingstown. Within the last few
days I have heard, to my extreme sorrow, that
one of my most promising and industrious pupils
has from over-study been seized with a strange
ocular weakness which will render reading to
him impossible for, probably, the space of a year.
And yet he is said to be, to all outward appear-
ances, in the best of health. So much are the
brains and nerves of professional men overtasked
by the exertions entailed by the universal desire
for wealth and the daily increase of competition,
that slowly but perceptibly the very symptoms
and remedies for disease are changing. Our
fevers, I am told, are running all to a low typhoïd
type; and men are continually sinking down
:
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 343
in the noonday of life from a mysterious lack
of vital force. Even so out of life, but a very
few months ago, sank that genial humorist, that
exquisitely imaginative poet, that good and un-
assuming and simple-hearted man, my dear
friend, Alexander Smith. But he fell a victim
not to selfish ambition, but to the petty calls that
press imperiously upon a man of narrow means
and wide tender sympathies. He worked for
bread, and achieved fame. A great gain. But
in winning fame he lost life. And the price to
me and to all that loved and love him seems too
great, too great.
Whilst, then, enlightenment is needed for
the ignorance amongst us, and creature com-
fort for our misery, we should put, as it were,
a safety-valve upon our covetousness and men-
tal ambition. The vice and the error are very
often in inferior natures closely related. The
youth who presses forward to academic dis-
tinction for ambition's sake alone, too often
is, miser-like, accumulating hoards that he will
never either enjoy himself or communicate to
others. The stress upon our youths might
easily be lightened by academic examiners.
coming frankly and sensibly and good-hu-
344 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
}
mouredly to a general agreement to set fewer
books and easier papers. Merit and originality
would be as easily and surely tested as before,
and at less cost of material to examiners and
examinees. As it is, in very many cases diffi-
cult papers are printed more for the public
than for students. They are clap-trap adver-
tisements of fictitious attainments. These are
occasionally thrown by members of one uni-
versity in the teeth of members of another. I
seldom peruse a course of university examina-
tion-papers without feeling thankful that I am
not likely to be ever again called upon to answer
the like, and wondering whether the proposers of
the questions could answer satisfactorily one in
three of their own questions. An acquaintance
of my own, at the close of his undergraduate-
ship in a renowned university, obtained the
highest prize for mathematical acquirements
by answering one half of one number out of a
paper containing twenty questions. It was said,
I believe without exaggeration, that the paper
would have furnished matter for serious and
prolonged study to the most advanced mathe-
maticians in Europe. It would appear to me.
that the duty of an examiner were to leave
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY 345
at home the trumpet of self-glorification, and,
instead of bewildering and humiliating an ex-
aminee, to elicit by a searching but not exhaus-
tive process the proofs of his actual acquirements.
Until of late years Latin and Greek were the
only disturbing elements thrown in to confuse
a child's faculties, and prevent his obtaining a
thorough grip of the intricate spelling and some-
what puzzling grammar of his own tongue.
French and German are now extensively em-
ployed to make an Irish stew of a boy's lin-
guistic powers. When once a pupil has
thoroughly mastered his own language so far
as to write correctly from dictation, to parse his
words, and analyse moderately complex sen-
tences, he may then, if he can afford the time,
be set with safety upon the study of alien
tongues, provided only that he be never in one
year set to commence with more than one. But,
after all, linguistic attainments may be valued
too highly. I would advocate the study of
Italian as a preparation for that of Latin, chiefly
because it would eventually lessen rather than
increase the total amount of difficulty to be
overcome. But I would advise a young classical
student to defer, if possible, the study of German
·
:
346 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
and French, until he were at least thoroughly
conversant with the leading difficulties and
idioms of the two ancient tongues. Under
any circumstances, the study of a modern
language is, as a mental process, utterly value-
less, if it be confined to the inculcation of right
accent and the increase of vocabulary. A boy
is only infinitesimally wiser than he was before,
when he has ascertained that chien means dog,
and that qu'est-ce que c'est que ça is pronounced
keskesaykesah.
A well-taught English boy in an upper-school
has often, to my own knowledge, carried away
French prizes from intelligent boys either born
in France or accustomed to daily familiar con-
verse in French. I have also known cases
where the leading prizes in French and German
have been monopolized by leading prize-holders
in Latin and Greek, although amongst their com-
petitors have been lads whose linguistic studies
had been confined almost entirely to the modern
tongues. I think that, in regard to modern.
languages, a lightening of boys' loads might be
made, by either deferring them until late, or
by allowing them a full systematic grammatical
course by themselves.
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 347
Again, as a rule, our boys are kept with their
noses too long at routine grindstones. I have
never known a great school to be supplied with
a library worth the name. No single school of
repute should be without a very extensive and
interesting one. Any school numerously attended
could, in the course of five years, supply itself with
one by imposing a trifling matriculation fee upon
every entrant to go towards the purchase of books.
A library so purchased should be superintended
by a committee consisting almost entirely of
boys. If the school hours extended from 10
A.M. to 4 P.M., at least two hours should be
allowed for thorough amusement or relaxation ;
and a pupil should be left to choose for himself
between the library and the play-ground.
It would be an absurdity to stock the former
only with didactically instructive books. Not a
novel should be omitted that tended to illustrate
history or to point a moral lesson.
Of course,
such novels as are written only with the view
of exciting the nerves should be eschewed, upon
the same grounds that we should refuse a child
in his play-hours either a cigar to smoke or a
brandy-flask to tipple. The most diligent cater-
ing should be employed to furnish children of
1
348 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
a reading turn with pleasant but not enervating,
useful but not tedious, literary food; and no
teacher conversant with boy-nature would crowd
his shelves with books whose spiritual lessons,
however beautiful in themselves, were hopelessly
in advance of puerile tastes and faculties.
It is the greatest possible mistake to suppose
that a boy is necessarily idle when in the play-
ground. He is so, if he loll against the wall,
or saunter with his hands in his pockets, and
churlishly refuse to join companions in a lively
game; and a physically healthy boy detected day
after day in such idle and selfish habits should be
punished over a considerable period by being set
to special tasks when his comrades have been
dismissed for the day. But the lads that unite
together for a hearty game of ball or cricket
are healthily at work in body, mind, and spirit.
They are oxygenating their blood, strengthening
their nerves, quickening their apprehensions, and
forming invaluable habits of good-temper, pre-
sence of mind, and self-control. Many writers
have expressed of late years a fear that the love
of play was becoming too absorbing with our
English boys. For my own part, I am of opinion
that a game is never too long for a set of lads,
.
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 349
so long as the very great majority of them are
heart and soul in the work before them; and
that all games are healthy, when sufficiently
amusing in themselves to dispense with the
poisonous alien excitements of drink or betting.
In a previous chapter, I have given my ex-
periences at the provincial and metropolitan
schools of St. Edward's. At the former we were
happily supplied with the sine-quâ-non of a
green field; and it was due in part to this bless-
ing, in part to our tender years, in part to the
watchful care of our elders, and in great part to
the important fact that our numbers were large
enough to excite enthusiasm, and small enough to
ensure manageability, that the tone of morality
amongst us was generally satisfactory. At
the metropolitan school we had three play-
yards, of which one only had any claim to the
epithet of spacious. As a blade of grass was an
impossibility in the very heart of Nineveh, our
games were very restricted in number and kind.
The chief games, indeed, were calculated to
brutalize the elder boys and break the spirits of
the younger. The monotony of such games as
we had, the dearth of light cheering amusement,
the absence of all literary pleasures, the deaden-
350 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
..
·
ing qualities of our ordinary studies, the lack
of all educated feminine company, the social
separation of master and pupil, the isolation of
child from boy, and of boy from youth,-all
combined to make our thousand lads as miser-
able, dull, and immoral a thousand as could
have been found clustered together within a
similar space in all Europe. I am far from being
a rich man, and pecuniarily it would be to me a
great boon to have my one son reared, clad, and
instructed gratuitously on this wealthy, and, in
intent, philanthropic foundation. But, if I were
twice as poor as I am, I would refuse the offer of
a presentation, if it were made me to-morrow.
I have seen enough of public-school men to
know that vice of a secret and dangerous kind is
too common at all our large isolated institutions.
Such vice can never be combated by authority
alone. Unless the senior classes be in friendly
league with their elders, it will work, unseen, un-
suspected, its insidious perilous way. But, from
all I have heard, I think that the tone of our
metropolitan St. Edward's was, in my time, lower
than that of any other public school in England.
Not a wall but was placarded with terms of a
shockingly obscene slang; and not one of these
10
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY. 351
:
1
unutterably filthy terms was, to all appearances,
understood by beadle, superintendent, or teacher.
We, the Hellenists, on one occasion, deliberated
about calling upon the Head-master to make
known the moral rottenness that was prevalent ;
but we were checked by the delicacy of the duty,
the dread of responsibility, and perhaps by the
feeling that to some extent our own characters,
on the average, had not passed uninjured through
the tainted atmosphere of the junior school.
I believe that many modes might be simulta-
neously adopted to purify a school thus vitiated ;
but I am convinced that the most effectual
of all would be to introduce a more hearty and
natural relationship between master and youth,
youth and boy, boy and child, to lighten the
hours of monotonous drill, to throw in a mixture
of amusing and not uninstructive work, and above
all to provide the means of sound, hearty, whole-
some, invigorating, manly play. Until this at
least be done, it will be chimerical to expect a
healthy moral tone amongst a crowd of lads
whose games, from necessities of locality, are in
certain cases demoralizing, and in all cases insuf-
ficient to exercise thoroughly their physical powers.
The perfection of a school would be a day-
:
352 ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
&
school whose size would entitle it to the designa-
tion of public. Indeed, if England were properly
supplied with schools, the instances would be
rare where a lad were scholastically educated
outside of his own county; beyond the reach of
home memories; outside the influences of native.
air. Even such a day-school would require
ample play-grounds and a well-stocked library,
although its pupils would begin and end their
day in their own homes. Some of them would,
doubtless, be strangers from a distance; but we
will suppose, for a school considered as perfect,
that these latter would never be huddled together
in boarding-houses so unwholesomely crammed
as to exclude the possibility of some approach to
domestic usages. If amusement, mental and phy-
sical, were requisite in so open an institution, how
infinitely more should the need be felt in institu-
tions walled in and sealed against the outer world,
and under most favouring circumstances convey-
ing, perforce, by their regulations, some dim asso-
ciations of prison-life to their boy inmates!
I have spoken of a library as a necessary
adjunct to every public school. A chemical
laboratory is, perhaps, as essential. It would be
well if great literary and scientific societies would
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY.
353
'
assist neighbouring public schools in forming
museums by supplying them with duplicates of
books, engravings, and natural curiosities. Many
a treasure might be contributed, also, by private ›
gentlemen that cared more for the instruction
of youth than the decoration of their chimney-
pieces or drawing-rooms. Indeed, it is sadden-
ing to think what possible treasures in the way
of pleasure and instruction giving are now mil-
dewing on unseen walls or feeding the moth in
unopened drawers! If a library and museum
were obtained, might we not press our demands
still further, and beg for an efficient band-master
and musical instruments, wind and string?
What next? What next?
Before a man leaves his home upon a frosty
morning, he should lay in a stock of caloric by
clothing himself in comfortable raiment, by
taking a good substantial meal, and warming
himself thoroughly at the fire; and similarly
boyhood should be fortified against the hard
work of after life by being timely charged with
· health, strength, and cheerfulness. Cold and
Hunger open the windows to Disease, and
Melancholy is too often the forerunner of
Wickedness.
-
Z
354 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
XII.
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
now.
HERE be some ages when great things
are a-doing, and others when great
things are a-hatching:' says the im-
mortal Busbequius Bungfungus in his exhaus-
At the close
tive History of the Universe.
of the last century the former process was
at work, and the latter process is at work
We are in a condition of nervous sus-
pense, like people waiting for the arrival of
the post, the firing of a signal-gun, or the start-
ing of a train. Not all, perhaps. Here and
there we meet with a man wrapt in a mantle
of enviable bigotry, and hugging old, com-
fortable, but unwholesome beliefs; and no small
number are to be found of men eager for
change for change's own sake, foolishly un-
grateful to a laborious past, and foolishly trust-

MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 355
..
ful in an untried future. In things religious,
political, social, we are equally perplexed. Some
fear we are at the backyard of the world; some
declare we are standing on its outer threshold.
Some say that we are drifting on to a lee-shore`
before the winds of scepticism and empiricism;
others, that we are moving out into deep waters.
It is no time for rest. We must keep the lead
heaving, and trust to a good look-out ahead, and
Providence.
In mechanics we in England are said to be
less original and inventive than our brethren in
France and America, but to be quick at utilizing
and improving upon alien ingenuity. An ana-
logous relationship exists in regard to matters
social and political. But, whilst French and
American thought are continually and power-
fully influencing us, we are continually asserting
independence; and, while we claim autocthonism
for the trunks of our institutions, we steal tools
from our neighbours to clip and trim the branches.
The three great interconnected anachronisms of
England are her mediæval educationalism, her
Tudor church-government, and her hereditary
legislation. The examples of the two great
republics-for France is virtually a republic
356 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
:
temporarily vulgarized by barrack-bureau im-
perialism-will gradually shame us into modifi-
cations. But we shall endeavour to conceal our
indebtedness by proceeding to work awkwardly
and fitfully. Common-sense will force us to
borrow, and Pride will persuade us to repudiate
the loan. And in the meanwhile we shall con-
sole ourselves for the humiliation of a com-
pulsory self-improvement by directing atten-
tion towards, and dwelling upon, the weak
points of our benefactors, and contrasting these
with the best and wisest of our own institu-
tions.
For some three centuries we have been
making trial of a state church. We threw away
certain advantages derived from universality
of faith, with the view of securing certain others
dependent on isolation. We cramped ourselves
in matters of religious sympathy, that we might
stretch our limbs at ease in matters political.
Our new ecclesiastical swathings conduced, in
England and Scotland, to the cure of our lame-
ness, and, with an ingratitude leavened with com-
mon-sense, we are now anxious to throw some at
least of our bandages away. Not that we are
an unbelieving, scoffing, materialistic genera-
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 357
tion; but that we are hungering for a food not
given us. The world of thought is altered since
the days when a Bible was chained to the parish
pulpit, when the priest was intellectually all
in all to his weekly hearers; their newspaper,
catechism, magazine, library. We seldom now-
a-days leave a place of worship on a Sunday
morning, but our women-folk and lads make de-
preciatory remarks upon the substance of the
recent sermon. Such remarks proceed more
often from disappointment than from irreverence.
There is a consciousness within us all that the
teaching of the sacred day is, as a rule, very
far beneath the teaching of days secular. If
this melancholy condition of affairs be suffered
to continue, it can only result in spiritual anarchy
and chaos. We cannot go on with impunity
for another age with our heads in a bush.
God and man will observe us-the One with
pity, and the other with scorn. We can no
more live on make-believe beliefs than on
imitation bread. We must either 'turn Our
clergy into merely ministering Levites; or, if
they are still to be our teachers, they must learn.
before they presume to teach. The older of
our two great Hebrew books is in itself a
358 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
compendium of the literature of-the Hellenic
race excepted-the most gifted people in the
world's history. What should we think of a
man that presumed to fill a Latin chair in an
university, after perusing only selections from
a few Latin authors through the medium of
ever so able a series of English translations?
Yet a similar presumption is shown by seven
in ten of our young graduates that approach,
with all the genuine temerity of a profound
ignorance, the treasures of religion, philosophy,
ethics, jurisprudence, poetry, and history con-
tained in the old Hebrew scriptures. We
need more of teaching and less of preaching,
and more of silence than of either. We need
an educated and comparatively unfettered as
well as a moral and respectable clergy. Per-
haps, if the regular use of sermons were abated,
religious knowledge would not diminish, and
Christian charity would flourish more abun-
dantly.
There are four aristocracies-of Beauty, Birth,
Wealth, Ability. No nature, however brutish,
can be insensible to the charms of the first. It
is the very puerility of affectation to disparage
the dignity of ancient lineage. The advantages
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 359
of Wealth are obvious. Ability has in times past
been too often the cat's-paw of Birth and Wealth,
but is now reasonably desirous to share profits
with her old employers. Whilst the claims of
Beauty to homage are universally acknowledged,
the claims to precedence on the part of Birth,
Wealth, and Ability, in cases where the three
are dissociated, are conflicting, and liable for a
while to conflict more and more with one
another.
In feudal times, a noble, for a grant of lands,
was bound in emergency to take the field with
an armed following at the call of his sovereign.
His military duties, however hazardous, were
simple in kind, calling more for the exercise of
dexterity, resolution, patience, decision, than for
that of purely intellectual faculties. His share
in legislation would usually be limited to guard-
ing the privileges of his order against encroach-
ment of the monarch from above, the ecclesiastic
at his side, the burgher from beneath. When
military tactics and legislative requirements were
thus simple and confined, there was nothing un-
reasonable in the transmission of duties and
privileges from father to son. But modern war-
fare is a difficult and intricate science, and
360 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
modern state-policy is a science still more diffi-
cult, intricate, and complex. We no longer
associate in our minds high military command
with nobility of descent. It is true that occa-
sionally the two are found in combination; but
the whole history of our Indian empire and
the incidents of the Crimean war have forced
us to the conclusion that between the two
there is no necessary and indissoluble connec-
tion. But, although we have allowed, without
a murmur, almost without notice, our here-
ditary soldier to disappear from the stage, we
cling fondly to the figment of hereditary legis-
lation; and this, too, although such names as
Pitt, Canning, Peel, Cobden, Bright, Gladstone,
and Disraeli plead with a silent satire against
us; although the members of our Upper House
of Legislature have for the most part con-
fessed ineptitude by absenteeism, and although
within the last year we have seen a commoner
proceed from the Lower House, where his
abilities were kept in countenance and his in-
fluence was but very moderate, to the House of
Lords, in which, ere his nobility was older than
his hat, without effort on his own part or opposi-
tion from others, he divided influence and pres-
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 361
tige with England's second earl and pro tempore
Premier ;-
Τρὶς μὲν ὀρέξατ' ἰών, τὸ δὲ τέτρατον ἵκετο τέκμωρ.
Some few years ago the institution of life-
peerages was suggested. It would be difficult
to devise a more conciliatory scheme for recon-
ciling the pretensions of self-made ability with
those of prescription. The names of ancient
houses would shine with all the more brilliancy,
if in future such peerages alone were conferred.
New things would hereby have grown old ere
old things had died away. No Englishman con-
versant with the traditions of his country would
view without sincerest regret the extinction of
any historic name or title; but no man with a
keen sense of propriety or of the ludicrous can
forbear to smile at mention of Napoleonic and
Soulouquian marquisates-Arcadian both,-or at
that of British stucco-noblesse, banker-barons,
beer-baronets, and knights-not military, for here
is congruity; but knights-scientific, mayoral,
aldermannic. Perhaps the acmè of absurd in-
congruity was reached when an enterprising and
philanthropic Parsee merchant was invested with
a title bearing reference to a civilisation already
1
1
362 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
semi-obsolete in the western world, and presented
with a coat of arms, which, maugre its elephants
and bamboos, was as much in keeping with his
country and his religion as would be the office
of Gold-stick in Waiting with the character and
antecedents of Garibaldi.
Whilst conventional ecclesiasticism is lagging
behind the intellectual requirements of the age,
and the legislative robes inherited by noblesse
are hanging moth-eaten in dusty wardrobes, we
have a spirit of exclusion working social mischief
in every section of the community. We have
labour scowling upon capital; we have com-
merce heedless of refining knowledge; we have
professions scornful of trade; we have rank in-
different to plebeianism; and plebeianism now
railing at, now fawning on, rank. We find una-
nimity only in the worship of material riches. It
is quite conceivable that, in course of time, the
pursuit of wealth might grow so keen amongst
us as to obliterate the distinctive marks now
jealously preserved between class and class,
order and order. But the homogeneity thus
achieved would be an amalgam of unutterable
vulgarity. We must search diligently until we
find some more ennobling instrument to assist us
;
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 363
in the difficult but necessary task of reconciling
antagonisms and harmonizing discords.
At present there are only two forces found
capable of training men to habits of order and
co-operation, those of ecclesiastical and military
discipline.
But the once general fellow-feeling of eccle-
siastics is now limited and particularized. The
priest abhors the parson, the parson is not
over-cordial with the minister, and the minister
has his own opinion of Erastian parson and
mediæval priest. It is obvious, then, that the
elixir of, harmony we are in quest of cannot be
looked for in the regions of theology and dog-
matism.
The citizen-soldiers of antiquity were volun-
tary agents. If they fought at all, it was be-
cause they were urged to fight by feelings
of hatred or the thirst of vengeance. The
soldier in our own standing army has a fellow-
feeling for a brother soldier in any similar ser-
vice, against whom, however, he is ready at a
moment's notice to move in hostility, mechani-
cally obedient to non-military dictation. It would
seem at first sight singularly paradoxical, that
between no bodies of men there should exist so
364 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
་་
warm and general a mutual sympathy as is found
between such as are set apart, as it were, for
each other's destruction. The truth is, that in
the naval and military worlds there is no dissent.
There is no doubt as to the material efficacy of
powder, shot, and steel; as to the moral efficacy
of sobriety, punctuality, self-control, self-forget-
fulness, and unquestioning obedience; and dis-
cipline is universally allowed to be the agency for
developing these latter invaluable habits and
qualities. The brotherly sympathy of soldier to
soldier, sailor to sailor, would appear, then, to be
founded, not upon a common element of destruc-
tiveness, but upon a common admiration for that
principle of self-sacrifice which characterizes the
true soldier and true sailor,—the abnegation of
personal wishes for the prosecution of general
ends.
No man enters upon a commercial career, but
with the one definite object in view of becoming
rich. And a man cannot attain to riches with-
out the exercise of many secondary virtues and
secondary talents. The judicious employment
of riches once acquired calls into play the
highest virtues of which man is capable. If
wealth were sought only for unselfish ends, it
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 365
were well if we all rushed on in quest of it;
but we all intuitively feel that the pursuit is
a perilous one.
A youth of ignoble nature may enter the army
with the view of indulging a taste for idle amuse-
ment, or trivial but harmless social enjoyment.
At all events, he is saved the peril of being put
to seek money for money's own sake. A youth
of fine faculties and high aspirations will, in a
military career, grow gradually to merge selfish
considerations in contemplating the innumerable
interests with which he is indissolubly linked.
For a young man entering upon life, with enough
of means to gratify moderate tastes, and enough
of sense and strength to withstand temptation,
I know of no training that can compete with an
ensigncy passed in a well-ordered regiment, or
with some six years spent upon a well-officered
man-of-war. I could wish that, in my own
sphere of endeavour, we could steal something of
the esprit-de-corps, the good temper, the brother-
liness, the tendency to pull together, that charac-
terize our countrymen, military and naval.
But it is obvious that, with all its virtues and
pleasant qualities, the military element in society,
while it may act to some extent as a moral
+
B
366 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
´regulator, can never act at all as a spiritually
harmonizing power; it can only be as a fly-
wheel on a great and complicated machine. The
godlike task of enlightenment and unification
was undertaken, erewhile, by the Church; and
would have succeeded, but for a blunder made
almost at the very outset, and persisted in to
this very day from mingled motives of piety,
fear, obstinacy, laziness, and stupidity. The early
patristic teachers of Christianity very naturally
exaggerated the value of chronological propin-
quity to the days of their Master. We are begin-
ning to see that a man may stand so near a
great and bright luminary as to be blinded, or at
least dazzled, by proximity. They would furnish
each his own special scheme of spiritual finality;
we in the teaching, held sacred by us and them,
see a nucleus eternal and immutable lying within
externals elastic as human circumstance. They
considered that a seal had been set upon human
aspiration; and we, with a feeling of mingled
sadness and modesty, are beginning to acknow-
ledge that, in things spiritual, mental, social, and
alas! even in things physical, we are still only in
our rudiments; we profess only to be feeling our
way in the lowermost folds of the cloud on which,
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 367
:
as on a stool, are resting the feet of the Inscru-
table. It has yet to be seen which creed will
prevail, that of rash, unreasoning, obstructive,
dogmatic assertion and counter-assertion, or that
of modest, unassuming, hopeful, charitable, pro-
gressive, undogmatizing inquiry. ·
Not very long ago I read in a public journal
how a friend went to call upon an English
bishop, Lord Auckland, and, after long search,
found the noble, the truly noble, prelate in a
little room, teaching writing and ciphering, to a
class of grown-up colliers. I have a certain
wishy-washy sentimental respect for the very
rank and life of our lay nobility.
As an
Englishman, I can no more divest myself en-
tirely of the feeling than, as a mere mortal, I
can divest myself of a belief in ghosts, a dread
of spilling salt, and a disinclination to walk.
underneath a ladder. In fact, I am not very
anxious to break down the bridge betwixt
the present and a historic past. But I have
a serious and profound reverence for spiritual
nobility; and, were it not that pilgrimages
have been a few centuries out of fashion, I
would walk a mile or two bare-foot to stand
bare-headed before an English noble that could.
368 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
thus set a money-seeking, rank-adoring, and
canting generation so splendid a lesson of piety,
kindliness, and common-sense.
1
Not very far from the spot where I am now
writing—and I am now writing in the west of Ire-,
land-an Irish Catholic bishop, not very long ago,
was riding one morning on a road where little
children were approaching a National School
doorway. He flourished his whip, as a marshal
would his bâton, and terrified the little scholars
back to their miserable pig-shared cabins. He
was no alien aristocrat; he was, like the little
scholars, a son of the soil, autochthonous.
These poor urchins, these unconscious inno-
cent sinners, were on their way to learn how to
read and write and spell from teachers not of
a heretical Protestant creed, but from teachers
unblest with ecclesiastical and episcopal sym-
pathy. Their little souls were only recently
discovered, and that upon political grounds only,
to be in peril from lay orthography and secular
slate-pencils. I have read the Gospels carefully
in Greek and in the mother-tongue; but I can
call to mind no single passage in which arith-
metic is objected to by the Saviour. I know
that He spoke against evil feelings that come
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 369
out of the heart. But, so far as I can recollect,
He never objects to good and useful things
entering the brain. At all events, the suc-
cessor of the apostles, on this occasion, drove
his little involuntary recusants back from the
clean and ventilated den of mental improvement
to their peat-smoked cabins of utterest ignorance,
dirt, and semi-starvation. Had St. Paul been
there to witness, how he would have wept—or
anathematized! Had Democritus been an on-
looker, how he would have roared with laughter!
A boy of eleven years of age, a Roman
Catholic, was, within the last fortnight, in need
of schooling in a city of western Ireland. On
inquiry, his elder brother, not a stranger to
myself, had reason to feel dissatisfied with
the quality of instruction furnished at a school
superintended by Catholic ecclesiastics. A
school superintended by a Protestant clergyman
was similarly sounded and abandoned. Last of
all a Model School, superintended by a Catholic
layman, was approached, and, whilst its classical
instruction was found meagre and rudimentary,
the humbler branches of writing, ciphering, read-
ing, spelling, and English grammar were ascer-
tained to be taught admirably well. The younger
2 A
:
370 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
;
brother entered his name as a pupil, and within a
day or two his elder brother was excommunicated.
Again; on each of the two last Sundays a feu-
de-joie of episcopal denunciations was discharged
over all Ireland. Bishops and priests read out
from altars the names of such parents as had
children in attendance at governmental schools,
and threatened these parents with excommuni-
cation unless the children were immediately with-
drawn. In other words, the citizens of a so-
called free people were threatened with social and
commercial isolation in this world and spiritual
damnation in the next, if they should venture
hereafter to purchase secular knowledge in the
best and cheapest and nearest market.
Let us incidentally remark that if such de-
nunciations were delivered from a communion-
table by a bishop in England, and allowed to
pass without an energetic and immediate protest
from his order, the Episcopal bench would be
washed away by a sudden flood of indignation,
and within a very few years you would as easily
light upon a native bishop as on a native elk.
But revenons à nos moutons. The Mondays
in these Irish cities were holidays to every
one of these children; were the preludes to a
"
f
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 371
long vacation.
Heaven only knows how long
and how fraught with mischief this vacation
may be to them! However-God be thanked!
-their parents are not excommunicated. Lucky
parents! What does it matter that their little
ones should grow up in idleness and ignorance,
should in after-life be pushed to the wall by the
thrift and industry of the Englishman, the culti-
vation and energy, of the Scot? What does it
matter? What are the odds so long as you are
happy? A mocking echo seems to answer :
'You are happy! happy!! happy!!!'
Reader, I trust sincerely that the recital of
these melancholy incidents has stirred within
your breast some feeling of indignation at
ecclesiastical tyranny, of contempt for laic
servility. And yet, strange to say, I am bound
by the Genius of Fair-play to interpose, and
endeavour to moderate the very feelings which
the recital of the above facts cannot but move
in the hearts of all that love liberty and en-
lightenment. The sad truth is that this ecclesi-
astical tyranny is but the natural product of
iniquity and foolishness elsewhere. These im-
perious prelates are acting without justifiable
reason, but not without provocation.
They are
A
372 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
the hierarchs of an old and venerable form
of Christianity, the creed of seven in ten of
their countrymen. This creed has been insulted
for centuries by an ascendency, favoured by
Government, of the church of a wealthy and
powerful minority. The greatest academic in-
stitution in their country is expressly bound by
its charter to antagonism with the religion of
the land. Here and there National Schools, sup-
ported by funds raised from public sources, from
Christians of all denominations, have been in-
directly but dishonestly used by foolish members,
not always female, of aristocratic Protestant
houses for the purpose of tampering with the
faith of little Catholic scholars. A system of
proselytism, unprecedented in European history,
and unparalleled in its weakness for good and
strength for mischief, is carried on by Protestant
missionaries in the western districts of Ireland,
where almost all the gentry, the members of pro-
fessions, and tradesmen belong to the old form
of faith. And in these districts, thus insolently
plagued, these Protestant missionaries -not
personally, but officially-are regarded with
detestation by every single educated laic Pro-
testant. These missionaries do not confine their
.
:
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 373
..
:
ministrations within the legitimate bounds of con-
secrated buildings, or prosecute a fair polemical
strife in book or pamphlet. They are authorized
by their society to placard the walls of towns
and villages with large papers resembling play-
bills, on one of which I have known a command-
ment to have been advertised as 'Lost, Stolen, or
Strayed,' and on another of which I have seen
Catholicism contrasted with Christianity, and
thereby indirectly but obviously identified with
Heathenism. Not one of these indecent placards
but will contain, usually in large staring capitals,
some words or expressions calculated to wound
acutely the feelings of a devout Catholic. This
wretched system, not of bonâ fide proselytism,—
for it is confessedly an utter failure in the busi-
ness of conversion, but of sectarian provoca-
tion, is abetted, not credulously abetted, by an
archbishop, many bishops, many noblemen, and
innumerable other old ladies, Irish and English.
My assertion as to failure is only partially
grounded on the following one fact. The wife
of a Protestant clergyman, who had been en-
gaged on the Irish Church Mission' for some
ten years from its commencement, stated to an
intimate friend of my own that not one single con-
<
374 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
version based upon conviction had ever been made
to her knowledge and satisfaction. I think that,
if I were an Irishman and a Catholic, I should
feel somewhat sore with a government that
favoured a church in Ireland, which, with the
view of winning the political support of English
Evangelicism, supported a mischievous and de-
moralizing crusade against the religion of my
poorer countrymen, abetted neophytes in preach-
ing against my mother as a heathen, and in
outraging the holiest feelings of my own nature.
But for all that, I should not be disposed to
wreak my vengeance on that government by not
allowing my children to learn reading, writing,
and arithmetic.
The subject, then, is not one for indignation,
unless the feeling be impartially directed against
wrong on either side; nor for contempt, for
there is too much cause for pity in the matter
when rightly probed; nor for laughter, for that.
on so serious a subject were Satanic; nor for
tears either, for tears may work off our own
sadness, but their shedding is of little use to
our fellows. There is an infinity of wretched-
ness, poverty, idleness, and ignorance in our
midst. A circle described with my present resi-
+
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 375
i
:
dence as centre, and with a radius of one mile
in length, would comprehend thousands of poor
that live upon a vegetable diet, that are housed
with swine, that are clothed in rags, that can-
not write an intelligible word, that cannot read.
a daily journal, that have a miserably limited
vocabulary of words, that understand us only
when we speak of local facts or special incidents,
that have no chronology, no history, no theology,
—except in words-no earthly hope in the future;
but for I now repeat that I am writing in the
west of Ireland-in their hearts a melancholy,
and perhaps a vengeful, brooding over a tradi-
tionally and onesidedly recorded past.
What remedies are we to apply?
For my own part, I am full of reverence for the
religion of action at all times; and for doctrinal
theology I can feel due respect at right times and
in proper places. But with all my respect for
religion and theology-two separate things, by
the by, I have the conviction in my heart and
conscience that the missionary required now-a-
days to upraise misery and enlighten ignorance
is the commonplace secular schoolmaster. We
have tried metaphysical dogmatism, and failed.
We have endeavoured to rear a spiritual fabric
:
i
*
376 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
..
...
:
upon a basement of intellectual ignorance; to
build, as it were, a palace of porphyry upon a
treacherous and filthy foundation of slime, refuse,
and excremental uncleanness. Let us begin
afresh; and begin at the beginning.
Not many years ago Sir Robert Peel with other
liberal statesmen introduced into this poorly
educated island a broad and national system of
scholastic and academic education. For a while
the Catholic priests were in ecstasies of delight,
and only the partisans of the old Establishment
were down-hearted and moody. After a while, it
was becoming apparent that the old Protestant
ascendency and monopoly were doomed. The
antagonistic hierarchy determined to make a
struggle for ascendency in their turn, and their
recent tactics have been to deal with educa-
tionalist statesmen as Alexander of Russia dealt
with Napoleon the First. They only differ in
this respect from the Czar, that this latter made
a wilderness of his country to save himself and
it, and our priests are making a wilderness of
Ireland to raise their own order and, at the expense
of all around them, their own order alone. If an
ecclesiastical ascendency of some kind or other
be a good thing, the old estate should be con-
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 377
tinued, and Irishmen should remember the
providence of the fox who discouraged a friend
when offering to comb off old parasites. 'Nay :'
said Reynard: 'the old ones are full of my
blood, and lazy; but, if they be removed, new
ones will come, who will all be empty and
hungry.' European history surely should have
taught us all that a priest may do us good
service at the desk, in the pulpit, or by the bed-
side, but that his presence in the schoolroom is
apt to stop the clock, and his interference on
the hustings to break the main-spring.
The national secular system of education in
Ireland is said by some of its enemies to sap
the morals of its pupils, by others to uproot
their nationalism, by others to undermine their
faith. It might with equal reason be said by
one and all to impede the action of their livers,
kidneys, and digestive organs. Catholic ser-
vants, male and female, spend years together
under Protestant roofs, and their nationality and
religion remain intact. Until within some twenty
years, it was not uncommon for such domestics
to attend morning and evening Protestant
prayers. Did these prayers convert them? I
have listened to yer prayers for ten years:' said a
}
378 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
1
i
coachman to a friend of mine: and the divil a
bit of harm they ever did me.' If an illiterate
peasant remains for years and years contemptu-
ously uninfluenced by the subtle influences of
domestic life, is it likely that an educated Catho-
lic youth will be diverted from his maternal
faith by the scientific or literary instruction of a
man that is bound by oath not to interfere with
his religion, and who, without the binding of an
oath, would never dream in honour or in inclina-
tion of overstepping the limits of strict profes-
sional engagements; who would as soon think
of stealing a dogma out of the conscience of a
student as of picking the handkerchief from his
pocket?
In reviewing the condition of the three great
divisions of the Britannic commonwealth, we
find Scotland industrious, educated, and pros-
perous; England industrious and prosperous;
and Ireland, for the most part, idle, uneducated,
discontented, and unthriving. In Scotland the
schoolmaster has achieved marvels. His bene-
ficent work, within the last fifty years, in the
schoolroom and the public press,—for an able
journalist is, in effect, a schoolmaster of men,—
has conduced very greatly to tone down re-
f
:
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 379
ligious and national prejudice, and pave the way
towards a broad and catholic treatment of re-
ligious questions, and an imperial as opposed to
a provincial estimate of high national interests.
In England there are anomalies sufficient to
supply us with an essay of antitheses. But what-
ever may be her religious, political, and social
abuses, and they are numerous enough, God
knows!-there is no unsoundness in the heart of
the people, no stagnation in the public conscience,
no gulph hopelessly impassable between class and
class, order and order, no cancer eating its slow
way, and defying cure or mitigation. In Ireland
we have two distinct races and languages. Be-
fore the country can be at peace, it is obvious
that the two races must either amalgamate, or
that one must give place to the other. Vigorous
efforts were made by Elizabeth to bring about
an union by the compulsory assimilation of
creeds. The process of extermination was con-
ceived and partially acted on by Cromwell. Re-
ligious proselytism, then, and physical force have
signally failed as agencies for producing peace
or tranquillity. The only instrument remaining
is that of sound mental instruction so administered
as to clash with prejudices and opinions neither
;
380 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
S
political nor religious. It is true that politico-
ecclesiastical leaders will oppose the spread of
an universally-dispensed national education, on
the ground that the importance of the conten-
tious among them is based upon the troubles
of the country; but ecclesiastics who love
light more than darkness, peace before ani-
mosity, who consider that patriotism is a part
of our duty towards mankind, and that this
latter is a very great part of our duty towards
God, will in no way hinder, even if they be
afraid to aid, the enlightenment in secular
knowledge of their countrymen. That states-
man will be blessed by coming generations of
Irishmen who shall make the schoolmaster in
Ireland what he is in Scotland; who, in despite
of Protestant ill-judged proselytism, of pig-
headed anachronous Orange partisanship, of anti-
quated Ultramontane anti-national cabals, and-
what is more formidable an impediment than all
else put together-the too general indifference to
improvement that dissensions and misgovernment
in past times have left behind them, shall press.
forward unremittingly towards the mental and
moral and social regeneration of this distracted
people; shall, with a faith in the efficacy of sound
*
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 381
knowledge, disregard threats and promises, and
preach a practical lesson in sociology from the
text: 'Let there be light!'
I conclude my last essay or reading with a
special appeal, suggested by the backward con-
dition of the island-and especially of the
province-in which I live, and the leading
rank in the civilised world held by the great
people in whose second city I am now pri-
vileged to speak; and I would parenthetically
observe that my title-page is so worded as to
deprive my remarks, here and elsewhere, of any
importance that might attach to them from my
academic position.
The future of Ireland is intimately bound
up for good or evil with the grave question of
secular education; and the sound secular edu-
cation of Irish youth is a matter of infinite
importance to England and to America. These
two great countries are both concerned in the
question whether Ireland is to continue with
an idle and illiterate gentry, with suicidally
antagonistic ecclesiasticisms, with a poorly edu-
cated middle-class, and a wholly neglected
peasantry, or whether her nobles are to be
shamed and her peasants encouraged to mental
1
382 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
✔
‚—a
self-improvement by the cultivation amongst
the commercial classes of industrious habits and
refining studies, by the formation, in fact, of what
now is absolutely non-existent, a rational, in-
telligent, educated, liberal public opinion. If
ecclesiastics shall be encouraged by the timidity
or the dishonesty of statesmen to foster idleness
and ignorance in childhood, boyhood, and youth,
there can be no reasonable grounds for anticipat-
ing future prosperity or peace for Ireland. And
the troubles of Ireland disturb the relationship
between England and America. And, when
these latter twain are in ill humour with one
another, the great round world is out of sorts.
The wealth of a nation lies, as we have said,
in the active brains, the honest hearts, and the
hard sinews of her men; and the hope of a
nation, in the intelligence, morality, and health
of her boys and girls. The man that tampers
with the education of children is the most in-
sidious enemy of his country; he is putting his
axe to the very root of her prosperity; he is
blighting the seed on which the harvest is to
depend. Ireland has now the pity of Europe,
but pity is a feeling too often dashed with con-
tempt. She must change that pity of others
#
MANHOOD AND THE WORLD. 383
..
into admiration, and her own random impulsive-
ness into continuity of purpose and genuine self-
respect. She must cease to lie abed in the
morning, praying God and the Executive to boil
eggs for her breakfast. Twenty years of patient
self-denial and self-improvement would win for
her something like what Hungary has won, and
liberal Englishmen would cheer her on her brave
and constitutional mission.
If there be an Irishman in America among
my
hearers or my readers that can view steadily
the causes and the cure of his fatherland's un-
happiness, can mingle patriotism with patience,
and prefer sober feasibility to hideous night-
mare chimera, such an one will give the weight
of all his influence, his good word, his favour-
ing sympathies, to the real unpretending lovers
of his old country; the underminers of political
ecclesiasticism, of obsolete political antagonism,
of religious inequality; the lovers of that com-
mon Christian element that is found alike in the
emotional Catholicism of the Irishman, the logi-
cal Presbyterianism of the Scot, the socio-politi-
cal Episcopalianism of the Englishman, but the
enemies of what in the first is the reflex of hatred
towards England, of what in the second is but the
384 MANHOOD AND THE WORLD.
faint memorial of wounds, cured long ago, re-
ligious and political, and of what in the third is to
a great extent a mark of national reserve and ex-
clusiveness. Such an Irishman will throw in his
lot with the friends of order as based upon in-
telligence; the foes of anarchy as based upon mis-
understanding and ignorance; the missionaries
of true and genuine and tolerant Catholicism;,
the disseminators of sound and wholesome in-
telligence; the fosterers of national but constitu-
tional aspirations; the cultivators of industry,
self-reliance, and self-respect; the would-be
interfusers of class with class, creed with creed,
race with race; the pioneers of a more than
material progress; the supporters of National or
Mixed Secular Education; in other words, the
PREACHERS AND TEACHERS OF PLAIN, UNAF-
FECTED, UNADULTERATED COMMON SENSE.
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH,
PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE.
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