students. I can hardly understand how a system which called on boys to commit to memory page after page of rules drawn up in somewhat barbarous Latin, and learned in my own case, I feel sure, without a word of comment, illustration, or explanation, to do this moreover long before they had advanced sufficiently far for more than a very few of these rules to correspond with anything that had fallen under their own observation, can have held its ground for over three centuries, and can find staunch defenders even now. I can only be thankful that my own experience of the system was just long enough to prevent me, during twenty-five years' life as a schoolmaster, from ever permitting a boy to say any grammatical rule to me in Latin words, or to quote to me any example that he had learnt by heart, without ascertaining that he knew its meaning and application, the reason why' he had it on his lips.

Need I say that in bringing forward these autobiographical details, I have no wish to vilify the instructors of my youth, or to condemn wholesale the educational system under which young Englishmen have been trained for three centuries? Still less shall I be suspected of a desire to undervalue the use of the ancient languages as still unrivalled instruments of education. Of the special teacher under whom we trod this stony path, I am sure that his surviving pupils have none but kindly recollections. But the state of things which I have described is a form of evil which, under one and another disguise, may meet us in any system or in the teaching of any subject. In teaching science, history, the English language, nay, in training the young child to read aloud, or in imparting the first rudiments of religious knowledge, there will always be the same danger; the tendency to allow dead and mechanical toil to take the place of living and fruitful work on the part both of the teacher and of the pupil. It is so easy to be contented with outside results, and not to look below the surface; it is so difficult to go down and down to the level of the young mind, and rouse, and stir, and coax, and tempt it to think, and work, and give real and full play and exercise to its faculties. And it is not the teacher only who is responsible. There is a sense, no doubt, in which the minds of the young are active enough, but there is a sense also in which they are often exceedingly the reverse. Real mental effort, any attempt at reflection, is apt to prove very trying, very distasteful to them: thinking, setting the mind really to work, what a Roman would call intentio animi, is a thing which to some gifted spirits may be a delightful pastime, but to which the minds of most growing boys have an instinctive aversion. They will often welcome a good deal of humdrum drudgery in preference to a very limited amount of such mental gymnastics. Have we never heard of Oxford undergraduates who prefer learning their little modicum of Euclid by heart to really mastering it? Yet to overcome this aversion, to train or win his pupils to take a real and hearty

pleasure in such active exercise, is surely the very first aim, as it is the main mark and note, of the good teacher.

I turn a leaf in the book of my own early experiences, and all is changed. It was a time of national stir and change. The great Reform Bill had been passed, and we boys had taken our sides and fought our battles, with words or otherwise, as Reformers or AntiReformers, with all the sturdy keenness of young Englishmen. A number of schools had been started in the neighbourhood of London in connection with King's College, then in its first youth. At the head of one, within reach of a daily walk-till he migrated at the end of a year to a school nearer our own home, whither we and most of his pupils followed him-was placed a young man then fresh from high mathematical honours at Cambridge, full of fire, enthusiasm, and original ability. I shall not undertake to describe fully the reform, not the bit-by-bit, but the radical, the entire reform, which he worked in the system under which we had been thus far taught. He took, I remember, the bold step of flinging, not without some audacious words of iconoclastic ridicule, our Latin Syntax to the winds, and substituting a few, a very few, rules that he gave us on a blackboard, which now for the first time became one of the instruments of our education. He, first of all, at a time when the real study of comparative philology was almost unknown in England, gave us some glimpses into what I may call the science of language; he taught us to try to group together facts for ourselves, and to form laws from what we observed and met. And he did more, he taught us something, at the same time, of the beauty and charm of literature, old and new. We were still very young boys, even those who formed his first class,' and quite unfit to read continuously such an author as Tacitus. But yet I still remember he will have forgotten-how, quite early, almost at the outset of our career, he had the courage to introduce us to the magnificent passage that closes the Life of Agricola, made us laboriously translate it into English, and I presume, for I can still repeat it almost verbatim, commit it to memory; he revealed to some of us for the first time that Latin authors are something more than merely puzzling sentences in an unfamiliar language. I recall, too, the manner in which, every Saturday, instead of a dull reading lesson, he would summon seven or eight of us to read one after another, in the presence of a roomful of our schoolfellows, some stirring or pathetic passage from the Old or New Testament, or from English poetry or prose, and how we coveted above all things the distinction of being reported at home as the best reader of the week. It was a simple expedient, but at all events it cured us for life of either practising ourselves, or patiently enduring in others, a lifeless and mechanical style of reading aloud. Every Saturday also, for a time, we drew without copy, from previous study, a map of Palestine. Physical geography was then in its cradle, the author of Sinai and Palestine a schoolboy at Rugby,

and of the real configuration of that historic land I fear we, perhaps our teacher, knew little: but the interest which the study of its history and geography inspired laid in one at least of his pupils the seeds of a future harvest. Among the first authorities in Europe on such a subject is one known to the world at large for his services to the cause of music, known to no narrow circle for his services to general literature; I think that Sir George Grove would date the first germ of his articles on the Geography and History of Palestine, as well as on general geography-perhaps the origin of the Palestine Exploration enterprise-to those Saturday maps and Saturday studies of Blunt's Coincidences and other works on Old Testament History, at a suburban Grammar School, under the teaching of the present Professor of Astronomy in the University of Oxford. But this was not all; no week passed—and this, it will be remembered, is a period separated from the present by full half a century, during which science has been slowly winning its way towards obtaining a partial admission into the regular course of an English schoolboy's education-no single week in which we did not receive and eagerly look forward to at least one lesson in natural science. Heat, elementary hydrostatics, mechanics and optics, electricity, and above all chemistry-to something of the elements of all these we were introduced in turn. There was not one among us, at all events in our teacher's own class, who could not at that time draw with sufficient accuracy not merely the proverbial common pump, but a low pressure steam engine of the day. What is more, we learned, if not any very large amount of scientific knowledge-limited pocket-money and domestic objections to turning our bedrooms into laboratories restrained and froze the genial current of nascent science in our souls-yet a sense of the greatness and importance of the world of science, whose door was at least set ajar for us, a sense that once given us nothing could efface. It became impossible for any one of us to look henceforth on science as a foe. Our favourite literature in our homes was for a time two manuals then in vogue, long since superseded, Mrs. Marcet's Conversations and Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, together with Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest. Our favourite indoor recreation was the manipulation of a really excellent electrifying machine (as it was then called) manufactured for us by an elder brother, and the reproduction of the chemical experiments which we had seen at school. Both occupations were somewhat discountenanced, though for different reasons, by those who had to test the power of the last home-made Leyden jar, the result of a skilful treatment of a discarded decanter, or to inhale the odours of what was then called 'azotic' and other unpleasant gases.

Meantime we were led through stage after stage of the severe discipline of mathematical study. I really dare hardly say to what dizzy heights we had been conducted by the time that the writer of these pages had reached the age of fifteen years. His own steps often

slipped as he tried to keep pace with one who afterwards, with unusually little effort, took the place of Senior Wrangler at the University of Cambridge, which he has recently, as one of the University Commissioners, helped to reconstruct. But I felt then, as I feel now, that even the study of mathematics was coloured with the warm glow of the activity and originality of the teacher's mind; and though from the day in which he wisely and trustfully allowed one of his pupils to give those mathematical hours to reading by himself in his own very sorry method Homer and Thucydides, I never did an hour of voluntary mathematical work, yet I have never felt that any of the time I spent on these studies was wholly wasted. I may add that our teacher, though he must, I fear, have suffered much in the process, read with us, with no inconsiderable effect on our minds, before we had reached the average age of the fifth form at modern Rugby, not only the Natural Theology and Evidences, and Hora Paulina of Paley, but at least the first half of Butler's Analogy, a copy of which I still possess, with the date of the year in which I laboriously read and re-read it for him.

I shall, I hope, be pardoned for this long and I fear egotistical record of a time so exceedingly distant. The motives that prompted it will be easily understood. I was anxious not only to give a lively picture of the practical working of two diametrically opposite educational systems, as I recall them out of what may seem to some the dark ages of education, but also to illustrate and emphasise the importance of life and enthusiasm, and of the power of imparting stimulus, on the part of the educator.

It was an additional pleasure to one who owes so much to other eminent teachers who have passed away to bear testimony to the debt which he and his friends incurred a long half-century ago at the hands of one whom I saw in October last standing up in a green old age on the platform at the Reading Church Congress, and speaking some very weighty and suggestive words on one of the most absorbing and difficult of the latest born subjects of thought. But above all I wished to bring forward this chapter in my own experience as some contribution to a hopeful estimate of the still somewhat uncertain prospects of the cause of higher and middle education in England.

It is a time of some perplexity and trouble. New subjects are calling for attention; subjects not wholly new for fuller treatment; fresh fields of knowledge have been opened to the human mind which were closed even to the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation. Much difficulty in harmonising and adjusting the claims of the new and of the old is felt by all earnest and open-minded teachers. They feel the value of the old; they feel also the worth and promise of the new. And yet there is no lack of warning voices. Can we, it is said, hope to teach boys really well, really thoroughly, if we attempt to teach them as boys more than one or two subjects?

Were not the old days of Latin and Greek pure and simple the golden days after all of sound and solid, as opposed to hollow and counterfeit, education? My own experience does not point in this direction. There is no doubt more than a possible, a very real, danger of teaching boys and girls too many subjects superficially, none thoroughly. But superficial teaching is not confined to a varied programme, and a boy may have given years to one or two subjects without having stirred the subsoil of his mind by the monotonous process. How many failures were dug as it were into the soil before one successful scholar, when pure scholarship in the limited sense of the word was the end-all and be-all of education, was at last produced? It is a question the answers to which I have always thought to be exceedingly disheartening.

Wisdom and watchfulness will be required to harmonise and adjust rival claims, to avoid over-pressure, pretentious work. But I cannot but be led to hope that we are learning from experience that whatever tends to enlighten and stimulate and interest any part of the growing mind will not be lost in its effect on other work, will quicken and enliven the mental sensibility, break up along the whole line of the intellectual range the callousness and indifference which are hardest of all to deal with.

Time taken from such obvious preparations for future life as bookkeeping, arithmetic, geography, and bestowed on some wellguided labour in mastering the key of an ancient language, may play its part in strengthening the mental muscles of the future merchant or man of business; hours given to the thorough study and appreciation of great poets may enlarge and enrich his intellectual resources. The bread that seemed cast upon the waters may come back in due time-the boy who is destined to lead a literary life may gain rather than lose from the patient attention, the ever-watchful observation required by the hours given to some natural science.

I do not feel at all inclined to despair because we all alike who care for the future of education feel the difficulty caused by the calls, the jostling, if I may say, of the many claimants for what Professor Huxley has so well called the footing of the most favoured nation.' The pioneers of education must feel their way, must, here as elsewhere, here in a very sacred cause, carry out reverently an Apostolic precept, that has its first application in the highest of all regions,

that of the attitude of man towards his Maker-must

prove all things,' prove them, test them fairly and honestly, and hold fast to that which experience shows to be sound and fruitful.

Some decent regard for the space on which I am unduly trespassing forbids me to enter into any detailed account of the educational atmosphere into which I passed for the last three years of boyhood, as they were spent under Arnold at Rugby. I have no doubt that I could interest any younger readers of these pages by