Ar the present moment when so much importance is given to education, and when the new-fang led ways of school boards and compulsory instruction stir up so many resistances, and originate so many petty grievances throughout the country, without yet having had time to show whether or not their real advantage is equal to the momentary harm which can sometimes be traced to them, it is interesting and instructive to turn to a much older and long-established system invented many hundred years before the school boards, and which far more intimately concerns the bulk of, for example, the readers of Maga,' than any popular system, the design of which is to force the children of the poor into a reluctant acquaintance with the three standards, or the three R's, if the public pleases, the system under which boys are trained for the highest offices of the State, and for the functions of the higher order in the social hierarchy of England. This system is not new-it is not a matter of theory, but of fact; it has its history running over hundreds of years, both for good and evil. It is like England itself, a growth of centuries, and, like the British Constitution, built upon all kinds of expedients and compromises. It has evolved itself, not out of a fertile brain, but out of the slow progress of the ages, changing reluctantly, yet yielding a little to every new wave of moral pressure. Such a great school as Eton, for example, is an illustration less of any theoretical system than of the manner in which the English mind resists, yet follows, the greater tide of intelligence, lying quiescent if not stagnant as long as

national feeling permits; rarely tak ing any lead in mental progress, but yet never long behind in any revolution. The difference between our method of training our own sons, and those which we think it right to adopt for the children of the people, is very curious. For the latter, every new innovation is taken into consideration, schemes of all kinds for the forming of the intelligence, and for the breaking down into digestible form of the masses of information with which it is the mission of the age to gorge its young; while for the former, we cling tenaciously to the old methods, and keep fast hold upon the old lore with as little admixture as possible. In all this there is a perversity which is almost paradoxical-since, if any system could be perfected by wealth, by leisure, by long assurance of superiority and tranquil possession, it ought to be the public-school system of England, which yet remains, in its chief lines, very much what it was at the period of its establishment; whereas in the new system of popular primary instruction, we anxiously seek every modern improvement, and study as a duty the best and most improved methods. of conveying information.

Let us consider, for instance, what would be the fate in our new schemes of such an institution as Latin verse. After centuries of examples to prove that this exercise is a torture to the soul of youth, without any compensating advantage save in a very few cases, Latin verse still holds its place triumphantly as part of the work of every lad who goes through a correct classical education. It has been fought over from gen

eration to generation. Fathers and grandfathers who have been subjected to its laborious process, with, they know best, how little efficacy, not only permit, but prefer that their boys should continue the same exercise which had brought themselves so much woe. But in their parish schools they would put a stop to any similar infliction with indignant promptitude; or if they stood for a moment in doubt on the subject, would be assailed with correspondence in the newspapers full of indignation and complaint. So it is that while we thus take all the pains we can, sometimes officiously, fussily, with more zeal than discretion, for the completion and improvement of those processes by which the children of the people are to be drilled into the primary rules of knowledge, we are as little satisfied as ever, and as little perfect as ever in the system which trains our own successors,the generation which is to rule the world after us, and lead its thought -or which, at least, we hope will do so, unless the revolutionary principles which alarm some of us should be more swift in their working than any of us divine or reckon upon. The public schools have been discussed lately in several contemporary publications with more or less censure and praise-but scarcely any of their various critics have expressed real satisfaction with them, or any conviction that their methods were of essential excellence. We are told that the boys lead a happy life; that those who will learn may learn, though those who will not, cannot be compelled to do so; that, on the whole, the working is improved and the standard higher than might have been expected: but no one ventures to say that the system is perfect, or that the highest attainable level is reached. We boast that the new

patches which we have put on the old garment show what excellent stuff the old fabric was to sustain these new and alien incorporations; and fling up our caps and hurrah for the old school which has become scientific without ceasing to be classical, and adopted the new without giving up the old. How it has mollified the Cerberus of science by cunning sops-adding museums, observatories, nay, even workshops, without relinquishing one scrap of Latin composition; and how, with all its additions and postscripts, it is still the same place in which we defied all the powers of pedagogy to put more than the smallest amount of information-little Latin and less Greek-into our own brains, is a subject of general triumph. Commissioners have sat upon the subject, and witnesses have been examined, and reports written -but at bottom we do not believe that there is any real desire in the mind of the upper classes in England to reform the constitution of the public schools.

Now and then, however, a storm rises in one of our great educational institutions. A small boy, who has been over-disciplined for his good by his schoolboy superior, is so lost

to all the traditions of the school as to cry out lustily and rouse his parents and the public; or, at another time, it is a college fray, suddenly throwing open the noisy world of undergraduate life, and calling the attention of the world to the fact that young men are as silly as boys, though, unfortunately, beyond the reach of flogging, and put their governors to sore shifts to know how to punish and restrain them. These two cases are yet fresh in the public mind. The last has not yet ceased to be a subject of lively conversation, though, happily, the newspapers have had enough of it; and it is so far more important than

the other, that it has thrown the most uncomfortable light upon the helplessness of university authorities, and the difficulties for which they seem to have found no solution. The difficulties of the school boards are bad enough. Whether a child which is doing essential service to its parents and family, either by taking charge of its younger brothers and sisters, or by actually earning money to aid the family pittance, ought to be forcibly removed from those high uses to be crammed with reading and 'rithmetic, is a hard problem. But, at all events, for the moment it is encountered with dauntless courage and a high hand-and is solved arbitrarily, whether for good or evil. On the higher levels we scarcely venture on the same trenchant practice. Nobody is bold; and when matters are perhaps once in a way carried with a high hand, the heart fails after the hand has smitten, and the sudden stroke is healed with anodyne plasters before it has had time to work.

Both school and college are, however, put unofficially upon their trial every time that any scandal occurs in either; and the same lines of attack and of defence are followed without much result. We do not hope to be much more successful than our neighbours in the discussion of these questions; and yet there are some practical lights to be thrown on the subject which we think worth consideration. School is the point upon which both attack and defence are most easy, and on that we will limit ourselves to description, taking Eton as the example of the public school. It has the advantage or disadvantage of being, in point of numbers, the greatest of English schools; perhaps, we may add, in point of social influence and importance also. It is more largely repre

sented in the ranks of the governing classes, in Parliament-even in the successive Ministries that rule over us. It has thus a sort of secret backing-up of affectionate prejudice among those who sway the minds of the world. Its assailants, on the other hand, are chiefly strangers; and the chorus of voices which declare periodically that its standards are low, and its working indifferent, rise in most part from critics inadequately qualified, without any actual knowledge of the system they condemn. A great many of them, as is very natural, treat of the Eton of twenty, nay, of fifty years ago, applying censures quite applicable then, to the Eton of to-day, to which they are wholly inapplicable; for no institution in the kingdom has changed more within these periods than this,

headquarters of scholastic conservatism and aristocratic prejudice as it is. Within the recollection of many Eton taught nothing but classics, and these without any special precautions taken that they should be taught well. The supply of masters was kept up by a regular routine,-successful enough on the whole, though with no more right to be successful than any other kind of hereditary succession. Boys with certain influential qualifications were entered upon the foundation-"into college," according to the ordinary term-as King's scholars, receiving the advantage of an almost gratuitous education, without any proper preliminary test of talent or preparation. They passed on, in due time, still without any real examination, to scholarships at King's College, Cambridge; then, after their due term of residence there, to fellowships in that college, and thence back again to Eton as masters,— never perhaps, during the whole time, having gone through any searching process of investigation into their intellectual claims to

these advantages. This was all according to the institution of the royal and saintly founder, a very fit way in his time, no doubt, of securing a proper supply of instructors, and in more modern days a most comfortable system, insuring a good career and a tolerable income to a certain number of privileged families. And as King Henry knew nothing of modern science, there was no provision in his school for anything but that study of the dead tongues and their literature which was the sole learning of his time. The first master who ever taught mathematics at Eton, or made the schoolboy students of Ovid and Demosthenes aware of the existence of Euclid, was, or rather is, the Rev. Stephen Hawtrey, a gentleman still vigorous enough to be the popular head of a large school formed upon the model of Eton, St. Mark's School at Windsor, where an interesting experiment is being tried as to the possibility of forming a new establishment on the old lines, at prices suited to the requirements of parents not rich enough to send their sons to Eton, but ambitious of a similar training for them. Mr. Hawtrey began the mathematical school at Eton with not more than one or two duly qualified assistant masters, sundry subordinates of quite inferior pretensions being kept on hand as good enough to convey the early precepts of arithmetic to the youthful mind. These were the sole representatives, along with two masters of modern languages, occupying then a not very clearly defined position, of all that modern information, science, and culture have done for the world.

This is now entirely changedthe mathematical faculty has developed naturally into science in all its most important branches, and if it does not quite balance the classical,

VOL. CXXVIII.-NO. DCCLXXVII.

is almost threatening to do so. Men of eminent reputation in most of these departments share in the training which still remains, in the first place, in the hands of the classical tutors, now chosen on principles very different from those which prevailed in the old days when it was enough to be a Fellow of King's.

"Perhaps the greatest and most important of all the changes made in Eton since I first went there," says a recent scholar, "is in the appointment of the masters. The old system of confining the Eton masterships to King's men has entirely died out. A new master occasionally appears who has gone through the regular course, from 'college' at Eton to a scholarship, and subsequently a fellowship at King's; but this is no longer the rule. Not only do men appear who, though old Etonians, were oppidans during their school career, and have graduated at different colleges, or even at another university, but men who were not at Eton at all, and whose only claim is that they are the best scholars of their day. And these new masters, fresh from the universities, do not, as was the custom when I first went to Eton, begin with the lower forms and rise by seniority, by the time the gloss of their learning is rubbed off, to the higher levels. They have each, indeed, a division low down in the school, but they also assist in the teaching of the boys at the top. It is an old custom that every boy in the first three divisions (now in the first four), known under the general name of the first hundred, must choose two 'extra subjects' to be studied at special lectures, besides the ordinary school-work. And it has recently been the rule to give the

classical extra subjects to some of these distinguished young scholars, so that their scholarship is

E

made at once of advantage to the higher boys."

"The Eton education is now much more general than it was. It embraces not only classics, mathematics, and foreign languages, but also most of the branches of natural science, and even, since the last innovation, practical mechanics; while special prizes encourage the study of history and English composition. I remember, on the other hand, when even mathematics was looked upon as an unimportant part of the education, and French lessons were given in a sort of extra school in the spare hours of the morning, the shirking' of which met with a far less heavy penalty than the missing of any other lessons. So much, indeed, was it considered an extra, that the general excuse proffered by an absentee was that he had 'forgotten it.' This, of course, is entirely changed at present, and the study of French forms a part of the regular course of lessons as important as any other."

While these changes have taken place in respect to masters and systems of teaching, the tests to which the boys themselves are subjected have also been made much more severe. Formerly, after a certain period, the examinations, never very searching, dropped altogether, and a tolerably well trained boy of fifteen or sixteen, having passed his "upper division trials, might rise to the head of the school without any further competition; while his unsuccessful class-fellow on the lower levels, not able to pass that bridge, might vegetate on in the inferior parts of the school, an ignominious "lower boy," till a formidable growth of whiskers and six feet of stature compelled his parents to withdraw him. So far as the school was concerned, he might have remained a lower boy

till he was forty. Now every step has to be fought for; and if the youth cannot pass a certain standard at a certain age, he has to leave Eton, whatever his other qualities may be.

The ladies

In point of discipline, another sweeping change has been made at Eton. In the times which we have been discussing, the boarding-houses were of two kinds,-masters and dames; the latter a little cheaper than the former. In some of the dames' houses the discipline might be good, but there was no safeguard whatever, nor any particular reason why it should be so. appointed to these posts held them by interest alone, and required no special training or qualifications to fit them for the charge, out of school hours, of some twenty or thirty bold schoolboys accustomed to the utmost freedom. These dames' houses have been entirely swept away, with one remarkable exception. "Evans's still exists, mainly, I believe," says our informant, "because even the present rage for reform at Eton dares not disturb such an old and beloved institution." When women do a thing well, they generally do it very well; and there is one such popular house. But all the other "dames" are abolished and ended. The houses have passed into the hands of masters-no longer exclusively classical, as in the old days, but not less perfectly trained or qualified because their departments are those of modern sciences and languages. These gentlemen often retain the title of their predecessors, and are generally called "my dame" by the matter-of-fact schoolboy, when they do not happen to be "my tutor" as well. But the invidious distinction between the houses of tutors and those of dames exists no longer; and the discipline and order of the respective houses are dependent up