that by such a scene "the question has been set at rest!" "On occasion of a visit to this seminary by a royal chaplain, Mr. Malan says, This pious and excellent man came to me, evidently much affected, and with tears in his eyes, Oh! it is most admirable,' he exclaimed with emotion, it is truly most astonishing, and all to the glory of God. I could never have imagined it, and I am happy to have seen and heard it myself. What has happened?' said I. I first went,' he replied, to that dear little child, who is the lowest in the school,' [query, how comes there to be a lowest and a highest ?] and I said to him, even with an appearance of harshness and severity, So you are lowest, my child?" Yes, sir,' he replied, with candor and modesty. And are you not ashamed?' added I in the same tone. 'Sir,' said this poor child with wonderful calmness, I assure you that it is not my fault I do all that is at present in my power; but God has not yet given me a good memory.' I could do nothing but silently embrace him, [had this embrace no tendency to excite emulation ?] for he had melted my heart. Upon leaving the amiable boy who was lowest, I went to the boy at the top of the class, and said to him, Well, my friend, you occupy the highest place. It is a post of honor and glory. I congratulate you on your attainment.' Upon this the modest youth fixed his eyes upon the ground, and said with an air of embarrassment, ‹ Sir, I am not entitled to any praise; all the glory belongs to God: and, if I relaxed my efforts, I should sin against him.'" Pho! Let us contrast the profane drivelling of this poor weak creature on emulation, with Mr. Wood's truly philosophical, and truly religious views of the same principle. "After telling us, that these answers were certainly most satisfactory,' the reverend gentleman proceeds to detail another scene, in which all the boys at once threw up the medals, which they had formerly obtained, (and no wonder, seeing they were no longer regarded as marks of honor by him who conferred them,) assigning as their reason, it is the glory of God that we are anxious to obtain.' What a contrast, we readily acknowledge, do such scenes as these present to the more simple and natural ones, of which alone Market Street can boast! But, to the following incident our own seminary, with all its odious emulation, can contribute innumerable parallels. I witnessed in my school, what is rarely to be met with in colleges conducted on worldly principles, namely, during the hours of recreation, a boy who was further advanced, retiring to a corner of the school, or of the playground, and patiently and kindly teaching one or two others, who had not made such progress.' The chapter on Punishments is equally excellent. Mr. Wood sets out with this undeniable proposition, that in every large seminary for the education of young pupils, as well as in every other large community, punishments of some kind or other are essential to its right management. This proposition is indeed so undeniable that he would have forborne to state it, were it not that thoughtless people, when they hear of schools managed without corporal punishment, suppose that all punishment whatever has been abolished in such establishments. That is a gross and a rather important mistake. Now, preventive measures are always to be preferred to remedial or retributive ones; and it is plain that the arrangements of the monitorial system are, by its provision, on this account, well calculated, to a certain extent, to supersede the necessity of punishment, but it operates this effect-not by the abolition of punishment, but by its certainty. Of what use, asks Mr. Wood, would a monitor or assistant be, if the little urchin, his pupil, might laugh in his face, and petulantly and with impunity tell him, that he would attend or not, just as he himself pleased? Dr. Bell would fain have us to believe, that in his system of monitorial su perintendence, the fear of punishment age-was tried for a while in the Ses has no place. But unfortunately the sional School: a new master had a doctor lets the cat out of the bag with- whim or crotchet on the subject that out knowing that pussy has made her led him to despise the wisdom of his escape. "The business of our little ancestors-and among them, that of teachers," quoth he, "is not to correct, his own old father, who had been a but to prevent faults-not to deter from flogger. The resolution against corpoill behavior by the fear of punishment, ral punishment was "heard with much but by preventing ill behavior, to pre- satisfaction" by the thoughtless boys, clude the use of punishment." All the most unprejudiced of all judgesthis is very pretty-and to a certain the taws dwindled into a length of extent it is true. But hear the doctor mere neat leather. Unequivocal sympagain." Scarcely," says he, "can toms of insubordination soon showed an offence be committed without in- themselves over the school,-the stant detection and immediate correc- warning voices of the masters lost all tion." That is an awkward contra- their power. Mr. Wood went for a diction, and leaves the mind of the week or two to his sheriffdoms at gentle reader in a state of scepti- Peebles; on his return the master cism. had a most rueful countenance indeed Well, then-is the punishment-for-he was comforted by being told that punishment there must be-to be cor- he might show the taws-but confessed poral? And is corporal punishment that he had already been reluctantly such a very horrid-such a very shock- compelled not only to show them, but ing thing, as it is pictured by the sen- to use them too. Mr. Wood smiled, sitive educationists of this thin-skinned "suaviter in modo," and the master age? Have schoolmasters generally frowned "fortiter in re," and once been the monsters of cruelty and inca- more the Sessional School became of pacity that they have been described all the scenes in this noisy world, the by eloquent declaimers against the rod most orderly and composed. and taws? Dr. Johnson, we all know, once exclaimed, "Rod! I honor thee !" Mr. Wood confesses that it is with other feelings than those of unmingled gratitude or veneration, that he has been accustomed to regard that implement. This is candid. But he regards it as a justifiable and indispensable implement in every such large establishment as the Sessional School. And so do we. Were it banished from the school-he holds -and so do we-that we should either sacrifice its general order, or else be compelled to have recourse to some substitute neither less degrading and revolting, nor more unobjectionable. Often, says he, have we seen the bringing out of a child to receive a single stripe on the hand, restore order and attention, which the young teachers and their assistants had been unable previously to procure. Indeed, the abolition of corporal punishment -by way of conciliation and concession, we presume, to the spirit of the We are frequently told, says Mr. Wood, about establishments from which every species of corporal punishment has been banished, with the most complete success. There is frequently, in such cases, either falsehood or deception. In some instances, where teachers have proudly asserted that they had ceased to employ corporal punishment," they had acquired the pernicious habit-of striking their pupils with their fists! When they ceased to be floggers-they became pugilists. In another school which made a similar boast, Mr. Wood said to some children, "Your master has no taws?" To which they all replied, "Ah! but he has a cane !" In another school, Mr. Wood saw one boy after another brought up-first to be touched with a cane-by way of form -a formal expression of blame and censure; but from the trembling, and other symptoms of terror in their looks, it was plain to his eye that they hadwhen he was not by to see-been caned and preciously well caned too -for on caning either a boy or a man it is difficult to preserve the golden mean. At all events, the taws being of leather-we believe-and a cane being a species of tree-the former is not so apt as the latter to fracture the skull. A dominie may be thrown off his guard, in a sudden fit of passion, and severely administer the taws to a boy's shoulders-but heaven pity the boy when the dominie has recourse to his cane. The short and the long of it is this, that a simple, humane, and authoritative schoolmaster can contrive to manage a large school of medium idleness and wickedness by the terror of the taws-without very frequently performing the manual or platoon exercise; but if there be no taws in that particular school, it is the same thing, to all intents and purposes, as if there were no taws in the universe-and were there no taws in the universe there need be no laws either-for, in that case, laws would be dead letters -and society would be subverted. Besides, the answer to the question, Why is a schoolmaster like—or rather unlike a schoolboy ?" "because the one whips tops and the other whips bottoms," would lose its meaning-and there would be one joke less in the world, which, in the present dearth of wit, the world could ill spare. For these and other reasons, we are decidedly for the taws. From what, in the name of all that is pitiful, arises this timidity about the taws? Is the hand-perhaps not very well washed, of a towsey-headed schoolboy, so sacred-that to touch it with the taws is to violate the sanctity of human nature in the whole boy? Wherefore this spiritualising of matter? This enshrining of soul in the thumb and the little finger? This deification of the bunch of fives? Why, one of the most obvious uses of a body is to be occasionally chastised. The hand of the dominie does not more naturally flourish the taws, by means of its beautiful mechanism, than that of the pupil stretched out and expanded to receive the smack. It is vile Epicureanism thus to whine away about the pain in the palm-far better that Stoicism that declares such pain to be no evil-and the tingle in the fingers to be no more to a wise boy than the flourish itself is to the taws. To be serious-which it is not easy to be, when one sees or hears of fullgrown Englishinen, and Scotsmen, and even Irishmen, sighing and weeping, and even groaning in agony, over the horrors of that system of occasional personal chastisement or correction, which, we venture to assert, must have prevailed all over the world from the Fall, and will prevail till the Millennium ;-to be serious we say— which it is not easy to be-when one hears it said that we are a flogged nation, merely because a certain discipline is supported by an appeal to the body, in our academies, our fleets, and our armies-and also to a far greater extent than there, in the privacy, the sacred privacy, of domestic life, where we verily believe more bodily correction or chastisement ten times over is practised, without a murmur or with much murmuring, than in all the barrack-yards, on all the decks of all the ships in his Majesty's service, and in all the schools put together, Sessional, Parochial, Central, or on the very edge of the circumference, in Great Britain and Ireland, and our foreign dominions, including even the West India Islands, both windward and leeward ;-to be serious, we repeatwhich it is not easy to be-when one looks abroad over the whole system of animated being, rational and irrational--from man to mouse, from homo sapiens to ridiculus mus, and beholds how all that breathe, and move, carry on their very existence by a continued process of discipline, at least as corporal as it is mental; here, the old mother or father ape being seen sitting on the branch of a tree, with one of a plaguy progeny held firm between parental knees, and cuffed in kind correction by two pair of salutary paws, into a more subdued chatter there, the middle-aged mother, or father man, sitting on a chair also made out of the branch of a tree, and polishing up squalling Dickey into a betterbehaved Christian boy, by the welltined, and well-placed application of one pair of taws;-to be serious-when in the dreadful din of this world's passions, roaring louder than the hurricanes that sweep the seas of ships, and the shores of houses, we see people stopping at the door of some small school-house, or large academy, and with all the earnest intentness of philosophical eavesdroppers, listening, their soul sitting in the ear from which the cotton pea has just been withdrawn, in hopes to discern the smack of a pawmy, or the sob of a begrutten bairn, in the midst of all the busy and blessed murmur of the human skep, (see Dr. Jamieson); and should they hear-or think they hear -such smack or sob, then off like a shot, to pen, and print, and publish an outcry to the world, a cry of blood, as if all the childish population of the United Kingdoms were at that hour being [?] flogged to death;-to be serious, finally when Britain, the bulwark of the world, begins whimpering like a little girl with her finger in her mouth, about pawmies on the skelped hands of urchins, who, when they grow up, will, for her sake, be ready with those self-same hands-then horn-hard-to take in a reef in the top gallant sail of some glorious ship that foresees the storm;-why, hang it, we must be done-when we think on all these things, and a thousand more, we read Mr. Wood's Chapter on Punishments with perfect approbation, and in sym pathy with his sentiments feel revived, and strengthened, our sober, but not passionate, attachinent to the taws! To conclude with a single sentence let there be no exaggeration of trifles-no attempt to turn real taws into imaginary cart-whips; let all dominies be decent men, and most of them Christians; let children continue to believe what nature teaches them, that occasional corporal chastisement is all for their good, and that to care, much more to cry for a pawmy, is a crime which conscience will continue to smart and blush for, long after all remorse has ceased to disturb the dominie, who, perhaps, most unjustly and somewhat too severely inflicted it; let this be the creed of the Country-and we need not fear the result. The volume concludes with a chapter on the supposed dangers of general education. It is a good chapter, but we cannot help thinking that Mr. Wood adopts too cautious-too timid a tone; that he seems disposed to allow too much force to the commonplace objections to the Instruction of the People. Of course, he utterly despises such objections; but he condescends to argue upon them at greater length, and with more earnestness, than, on such a thread-bare topic, needed to have been expected from such a man. Who are they who would keep the lower orders in ignorance? We never could discover that; and have always been at a loss to know where the lovers of darkness reside, and from what high or humble places they have lifted up their voices against education. THE WANDERER. A MAN of blanched and fearful eld Sheep beside in still disorder Cropped the grass and eyed their warder, That aged traveller was bent And a look was in his face That showed he was intent to trace With a dim but earnest thought, Deeds in perished ages wrought. The traveller sat upon the turf, To him, that merry crowing child And propped his bowed frame with his Was not less marvellous and wild hands, Like sailor flung from out the surf, And laid, a wreck, on desert sands. And each glance of failing vision Across the yellow-lighted dell So lengthened out, so greyly drawn For his existence' tangled skein A thread to gird the world had been ; Forth the umbered shape was stretched Like a thought from dream-land fetched, Till its glimmer reached a hollow,Farther than his eye could follow; A little nook amid the valley, The old man rose, and stood upright, To reach that nook amid the dell So wasted, tremulous, and slow, Before the sun's last gem was gone, He stopped, and lifted to his brow But soon he turned his head to hear 22 ATHENEUM, VOL. 2, 3d series. Than if a night-cloud caught from far The children twain, who scared his ears, A four-years' life one shout had been The other was a fairy queen, With wonder he, and she with awe, "Twas thus the nymph, to whom was given "Say whose were these, the slab and mound?" That old man said, each word a groan, The maiden closer clasped her brother, She wedded in her wretchedness She whispered, on her death-bed lying, 'Tell him I thought of him in dying; And say, no peace his soul shall have Till he hath prayed upon my grave; And though a hundred years go by, Till there he kneels he cannot die.'" No dry leaf trembles more than he, When on the bare bough shaking; His limbs might well more steady be If the fixed world were quaking. And have ye seen, in ancient hall, And for those children twain to see, That old man sinking silently There was a darkness on his brow, The shadow of the coming blow, When down upon his knees he sank Amid that swell of foliage dank. |