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think the schoolmasters, and the parents too, little knew what was going on daily and continually in those rude masses of unformed humanity. What folly! what wickedness! If I can judge by what drained from all parts of England into Charterhouse, the private schools of England were as bad as could be, and the time had come for a great change of some sort or other.

Of course there was everywhere the fond idea of a nice little school in a quiet town, with at least a fair proportion of gentlemanly lads, enough to give a tone to the school, sons of clergymen and country gentlemen. Boys were charged by their parents to choose good friends and avoid the bad fellows they were sure to find. At Higginson's I and my brother were under orders to associate as little with the other day boys as we could help, that is, with certain exceptions. But we were also made fully aware that boys of a lower caste were more likely to be black sheep than professionals or country lads.

Looking back, I am pretty sure that the sons of grocers, tailors, and small manufacturers were not worse than the rest, and that the danger lay in unsuspected quarters.

The private schoolmaster of the ordinary type is known by his cane. The punishment by the rod at a public school is a solemnity, an execution. The cane is personal. It becomes part of the man; it is his sting, his tusk, his horn. It becomes habitual. He cannot help using it in and out of season, on undeserving as well as deserving objects. Some time since I had the acquaintance of a very good

scholar, and a very kind gentleman, who had been master of one of the many schools destroyed, or temporarily blighted, by the operation of the Endowed Schools Act. The future of the school was now to be commercial; so parents not intending that line for their sons did not send them to the school, and some were even already taking their sons away.

My friend felt much aggrieved, and showed it. He had always carried a cane, and now he used it with a vengeance, his time being short. The way in which people put it was that he had made up his mind to whip the school away before the Commissioners could have the handling of it. Before that came to pass he accepted a small living in my neighbourhood, where I had to visit him officially. As I walked with him round his house, his garden, and his parish one day, and even as he showed an immense quantity of plate presented to him by the parents of his scholars, he kept continually switching his cane. He called my attention to the fact. 'You see I can't do without my rod of office. A schoolmaster is lost without his ferule.' It occurred to me that had any little boy fallen in our way he might easily have come in for a capricious dispensation.

REV. JAMES DEAN.

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CHAPTER XLVII.

A PRIVATE TUTOR.

IN my 'Reminiscences' I have several times mentioned James Dean. My brother James read with him for some time in the long interval between school and college. He was my chief coadjutor in our little agitation against the Reform Bill of 1831. He had the honour to engage the last thoughts of the Unreformed House of Commons. But he was by no means a man just for one occasion, to appear and disappear; on the contrary, he was for half a century perhaps the most constant and invariable quantity in the statics of Derby society. He must have been about thirty-three when I first became familiar with his tall, spare, upright figure, his keen selfpossessed expression, and his guarded address. A humourist used to liken him to a pike, but I don't think the said humourist liked him so well as I did.

He was of Brasenose, and a Hulme Exhibitioner. He became tutor to the young Curzons of Kedleston Hall, at home, abroad, and at Eton. The last was

an exceptional arrangement. I believe he was a successful tutor. It was one of his pupils, so I suppose, who wrote the Prize Poem, Alpes ab Annibale Superata, in 1822. With the Curzons he got on very well. They had their faults, but they were genial and well-mannered.

With another pupil Dean was not so successful. They travelled. Dean had the usual English enthu

VOL. I.

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siasm for churches, and wished to have the pupil at his elbow to receive his outpourings. The pupil came to hate churches. He was so sated with them that he could no longer tell one church from another, and accordingly refused to enter them. When Dean mentioned the next step of their tour, the pupil asked, 'Is there a church there? Because if there is I won't go there.' This was rather too much for the tutor, and I suppose he made some attempt to force the pupil, or to get round him, for they parted company at last, somewhere in the north of Italy.

Dean remained always on friendly and even affectionate terms with the Curzon family, and this gave him an almost unique position in Derby, not so much to be envied as admired. He was equally of the country circle, which was one; and of the town circles, which were several. He was welcome everywhere, for he brought news from what, to a certain extent, was an outer, or an inner world. He was both a county and a town guide. I should think he generally did his best to secure mutual respect. The townspeople were a little disposed to resent the unavoidable line he had to draw between county and town. But after all there is nothing townspeople like to talk about so much as the people they are doomed never to meet on at all equal, or social, terms. In this case the townspeople might easily persuade themselves of a moral superiority.

The position of a bachelor at large, a garçon to the end of his days, and a link between circles, while residing in a town, was exceptional in the case of a clergyman. I could not claim for my friend those

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pastoral qualities which I have elsewhere awarded to the old High Church,' in the comparison with the 'Low Church.' He held small livings, with very small populations, one of them in the neighbourhood of Lord Ferrers, a connection of the Curzons; but he would have been out of place in a rural parsonage, and he was in his place in the town.

Whenever the weather allowed he would be found on the pavement of Derby, making calls of politeness or kindness; or, at a later hour, dropping in for tea and a quiet evening's talk. He paid regular visits to the five clergymen's widows in Large's Hospital, on Nun's Green. But though he could do his duty and hold his own with equals and superiors, he lacked the quasi parental qualities necessary for dealing with inferiors, and even servants.

He had once to reconstruct and contract his establishment-so at least he felt. My friends undertook to find for him a servant-of-all-work not spoilt by town ways. They installed in his kitchen a dairymaid from my Northamptonshire parish, Moreton Pinckney, who was to be helped by charwomen. The poor girl burst into tears after her first encounter with my friend, and, after crying and sobbing for a fortnight incessantly, had to leave.

Dean everywhere, and always, stood up for faith and truth with vigour and promptitude. He never lost his temper, and never said disagreeable things, to his equals at least. But I think the attitude of a man always standing on his defence, without a definite line of action, and without an absolute devotion to any one circle, told injuriously on him, chilling his