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Even long after this I could not help thinking it rather infra dig. for a bishop to be a good entomologist, or for a dean to be a good Egyptologist. Of course I wished to believe myself not much to be pitied for my own ignorance in these matters, but that does not wholly account for a prejudice dating as far back as I can remember.

In those days there was much the same unaccountable and irrational prejudice against foreign languages. It must be considered that boys came home from school to spend their holidays with their sisters, both knowing much of which the others were utterly ignorant. The boys were stronger in their self-esteem, and they would take care to make out, at least to themselves, that what they knew was infinitely the better worth knowing.

I must now tell my younger readers that ignorance upon matters generally or widely known is sure to entail upon them painful inconveniences and lamentable losses. It will frequently make them solitary in a social circle, tyros in a crowd of proficients, and savages in the thick of civilisation. We need not estimate exactly the advantages of these studies when a man is likely to find himself nowhere without them. Of trifles of human invention it may be too often said that we had best know nothing of them; but the very least of Nature's trifles bears the stamp of divinity, and is worth knowing.

GAINSBOROUGH GRAMMAR SCHOOL.

283

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS OF THE PERIOD.

I HAVE described the day school at Gainsborough to which I walked down town' from the completion of my fifth year to the completion of my seventh. My chief recollection of it is sitting on a stool under the mistress's little three-legged work-stand upstairs, and going down every morning to the front parlour to read Æsop's Fables with the old widow of an Independent minister. Upstairs I spent most of my time in looking up at the pretty faces gathered round me, and some of them I now remember well. One little face passed away when I was still at the school, and often have I bethought myself that in me is now. the only vestige of that sweet little life left in created things. My brother John had a rougher time of it in the boys' schoolroom below.

But was there no other school there? There was the Grammar School, of which Dr. Cox was master. I find it won't do to call a schoolmaster a brute, for somebody is sure to spring up and aver that he was the mildest and kindest of men. My eldest brother went there till thirteen, and he always ascribed the prolongation of the lobe of one ear to Dr. Cox's habit of seizing a boy by the ear to arrest his attention, and pulling it to emphasise his own expressions. His discipline was sufficiently harsh to provoke several outbreaks of feeling in the town, and some discussion among the trustees.

That he was allowed to hold on speaks well for his diligence and his competency. My brother Henry, who was always rather critical in matters of speech, must have had high respect for his authority, in spite of his rough ways. My father having once chastised him for some peccadillo, ordered him up to his chamber, pronouncing the first vowel in the word as the French do in ami. My brother, upon going out of the room, hung on the threshold, and turning round, said, 'Dr. Cox calls it " chamber", giving the usual pronunciation.

The doctor had a delicate wife, to whom he was said not to be particularly kind. She died, and then he affected to be heartbroken, and in this mood he inscribed on her tomb some very tender elegiacs, which prove him a good scholar, and which, happily, few of his fellow-townsmen could compare with what else they might happen to know of him. He also published what he called 'The Wanderings of Woe,' consisting chiefly, as far as I can remember, of unpleasant comments on the people of Gainsborough. He contrasted his thin, sickly wife with the broadshouldered' dames among whom a perverse fate had planted her. The comment made at the time was that if he had been as kind to the poor lady when alive, as he was when kindness availed not, she might have been still living to enjoy it.

The survivors of that period, now, alas! rari nantes in gurgite vasto, would contribute much to the history of education if they would put on record some notice of the small classical schools it was their fortune or misfortune to pass through. Most of our

INVITA MINERVA.

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new arrivals at Charterhouse were from private schools, with which both the boys and the parents were thoroughly disgusted.

I am disposed to think they did some injustice to the instruction itself. As I remember, after being at Charterhouse a couple of years, boys used to affirm that they knew more when they came to Charterhouse than they did now. That I do not quite believe. I never yet met with anybody who did common justice to his early teachers, or was aware of his debt to them. These boys had learnt something at Charterhouse, and they had thereby learnt to appreciate better their former schools.

One thing, however, presents itself as the almost universal fault or misfortune of all these schools. The masters hated the work, and of course they especially hated the boys who presented unusual difficulties. The work was a necessity of existence. The masters had a quarrel with the whole order of things, and with Fate. One well-known master, with a name that promised better things, used his cane freely even on tender lads whose delicacy of constitution aggravated the consequences of every blow they received; and he had no better way of strengthening a boy's weak memory than ordering him to stay in a whole summer afternoon and write a forgotten word a thousand times. The only thing these poor lads learnt was the art of handling five pens at once. In my own time, at Charterhouse, two sons of schoolmasters, who evidently did what they had seen their fathers doing, were sent away for bullying.

A very good scholar, or a man with a decided literary taste, might easily be fond of teaching—that is, of teaching those who could be taught. When his personal qualities and his circumstances enabled him to pick and choose his pupils and scholars, he did good work, he enjoyed it, and he left a good name behind him in a large circle of scholars bound to him by a sort of filial obligation. But few of the private tutors, or private schoolmasters, or masters of small grammar schools, eking out their pay with boarders, could pick and choose. They had to take boys as they came, and get on with them as well as they could. These boys had generally been unmanageable at home, and they were unmanageable at school. They had less correction at school because they shared it with many; and they had more power at school because they had associates like themselves.

What then were the poor masters to do, loath, or not even able, to expel, and finding gentle means, even if that were their own nature, utterly useless? Their work was often one protracted struggle with boys who could not or would not learn. Over these boys they broke their tempers, their strength, and often their characters. On these boys they wasted the precious time and the precious breath that might have been well spent upon better natures. What was worse, the habit once formed, the master behaved to all alike, and became as rough with the lambs as with the wolves of his mixed flock.

But, looking back at the strange elements flowing from all quarters into Charterhouse, as we read that Rome became the sentina gentium, I cannot but

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