cation of old standing, to which the sons of gentlemen resort in considerable numbers, and where they continue to reside, from eight or nine, to eighteen years of age. We do not give this as a definition which would have satisfied Porphyry or Dun-Scotus, but as one sufficiently accurate for our purpose. The characteristic features of these schools are, their antiquity, the numbers, and the ages of the young people who are educated at them. We beg leave, however, to premise, that we have not the slightest intention of insinuating any thing to the disparagement of the present discipline or present rulers of these schools, as compared with other times and other men: we have no reason whatever to doubt that they are as ably governed at this, as they have been at any preceding period. Whatever objections we may have to these institutions, they are to faults, not depending upon present administration, but upon original construction.* At a public school (for such is the system established by immemorial custom), every boy is alternately tyrant and slave. The power which the elder part of these communities exercises over the younger, is exceedingly great -very difficult to be controlled-and accompanied, not unfrequently, with cruelty and caprice. It is the common law of the place, that the young should be implicitly obedient to the elder boys; and this obedience resembles more the submission of a slave to his master, or of a sailor to his captain, than the common and natural deference which would always be shown by one boy to another a few years older than himself. Now, this system we cannot help considering as an evil,— because it inflicts upon boys, for two or three years of their lives, many painful hardships, and much unpleasant servitude. These sufferings might perhaps be of some use *A public school is thought to be the best cure for the insolence of youthful aristocracy. This insolence, however, is not a little increased by the homage of masters, and would soon meet with its natural check in the world. There can be no occasion to bring 500 boys together to teach to a young nobleman that proper demeanour which he would learn so much better from the first English gentleman whom he might think proper to insult. in military schools; but, to give to a boy the habit of enduring privations to which he will never again be called upon to submit-to inure him to pains which he will never again feel-and to subject him to the privation of comforts, with which he will always in future abound is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in education. It is not the life in miniature which he is to lead hereafter-nor does it bear any relation to it: - he will never again be subjected to so much insolence and caprice; nor ever, in all human probability, called upon to make so many sacrifices. The servile obedience which it teaches, might be useful to a menial domestic; or the habits of enterprise which it encourages, prove of importance to a military partisan; but we cannot see what bearing it has upon the calm, regular, civil life, which the sons of gentlemen, destined to opulent idleness, or to any of the three learned professions, are destined to lead. Such a system makes many boys very miserable; and produces those bad effects upon the temper and disposition, which unjust suffering always does produce; but what good it does, we are much at a loss to conceive. Reasonable obedience is extremely usefulin forming the disposition. Submission to tyranny lays the foundation of hatred, suspicion, cunning, and a variety of odious passions. We are convinced that those young people will turn out to be the best men, who have been guarded most effectually, in their childhood, from every species of useless vexation: and experienced, in the greatest degree, the blessings of a wise and rational indulgence. But even if these effects upon future character are not produced, still, four or five years in childhood make a very considerable period of human existence: and it is by no means a trifling consideration whether they are past happily or unhappily. The wretchedness of school tyranny is trifling enough to a man who only contemplates it, in ease of body and tranquillity of mind, through the medium of twenty intervening years; but it is quite as real, and quite as acute, while it lasts, as any of the sufferings of mature life: and the utility of these sufferings, or the price paid in compensation for them, should be clearly made out to a conscientious parent, before he consents to expose his children to them. This system also gives to the elder boys an absurd and pernicious opinion of their own importance, which is often with difficulty effaced by a considerable commerce with the world. The head of a public school is generally a very conceited young man, utterly ignorant of his own dimensions, and losing all that habit of conciliation towards others, and that anxiety for self-improvement, which result from the natural modesty of youth. Nor is this conceit very easily and speedily gotten rid of; we have seen (if we mistake not) public-school importance lasting through the half of after-life, strutting in lawn, swelling in ermine, and displaying itself, both ridiculously and offensively, in the haunts and business of bearded men. There is a manliness in the athletic exercises of public schools, which is as seductive to the imagination as it is utterly unimportant in itself. Of what importance is it in after-life, whether a boy can play well or ill at cricket ; or row a boat with the skill and precision of a waterman? If our young lords and esquires were hereafter to wrestle together in public, or the gentlemen of the Bar to exhibit Olympic games in Hilary Term, the glory attached to these exercises at public schools would be rational and important. But of what use is the body of an athlete, when we have good laws over our heads, -or when a pistol, a postchaise, or a porter can be hired for a few shillings? A gentleman does nothing but ride or walk; and yet such a ridiculous stress is laid upon the manliness of the exercises customary at public schools-exercises in which the greatest blockheads commonly excel the most which often render habits of idleness inveterate- and often lead to foolish expense and dissipation at a more advanced period of life. One of the supposed advantages of a public school, is the greater knowledge of the world which a boy is considered to derive from those situations; but if, by a knowledge of the world, is meant a knowledge of the forms and manners which are found to be the most pleas ing and useful in the world, a boy from a public school is almost always extremely deficient in these particulars; and his sister, who has remained at home at the apronstrings of her mother, is very much his superior in the science of manners. It is probably true, that a boy at a public school has made more observations on human character, because he has had more opportunities of observing, than have been enjoyed by young persons educated either at home or at private schools: but this little advance gained at a public school, is so soon overtaken at college or in the world, that, to have made it, is of the least possible consequence, and utterly undeserving of any risk incurred in the acquisition. Is it any injury to a man of thirty or thirty-five years of age-to a learned serjeant or venerable dean-that at eighteen they did not know so much of the world as some other boys of the same standing? They have probably escaped the arrogant character so often attendant upon this trifling superiority; nor is there much chance that they have ever fallen into the common and youthful error of mistaking a premature initiation into vice, for a knowledge of the ways of mankind: and, in addition to these salutary exemptions, a winter in London brings it all to a level; and offers to every novice the advantages which are supposed to be derived from this precocity of confidence and polish. According to the general prejudice in favour of public schools, it would be thought quite as absurd and superfluous to enumerate the illustrious characters who have been bred at our three great seminaries of this description, as it would be to descant upon the illustrious characters who have passed in and out of London over our three great bridges. Almost every conspicuous person is supposed to have been educated at public schools; and there are scarcely any means (as it is imagined) of making an actual comparison; and yet, great as the rage is, and long has been, for public schools, it is very remarkable, that the most eminent men in every art and science have not been educated in public schools; and this is true, even if we include, in the term of public - schools, not only Eton, Winchester, and Westminster, but the Charterhouse, St. Paul's School, Merchant Taylors', Rugby, and every school in England, at all conducted upon the plan of the three first. The great schools of Scotland we do not call public schools; because, in these, the mixture of domestic life gives to them a widely different character. Spenser, Pope, Shakspeare, Butler, Rochester, Spratt, Parnell, Garth, Congreve, Gay, Swift, Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Sir Philip Sidney, Savage, Arbuthnot, and Burns, among the poets, were not educated in the system of English schools. Sir Isaac Newton, Maclaurin, Wallis, Hamstead, Saunderson, Simpson, and Napier, among men of science, were not educated in public schools. The three best historians that the English language has produced, Clarendon, Hume, and Robertson, were not educated at public schools. Public schools have done little in England for the fine arts as in the examples of Inigo Jones, Vanbrugh, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Garrick, &c. The great medical writers and discoverers in Great Britain, Harvey, Cheselden, Hunter, Jenner, Meade, Brown, and Cullen, were not educated at public schools. Of the great writers on morals and metaphysics, it was not the system of public schools which produced Bacon, Shaftesbury, Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Hartley, or Dugald Stewart. The greatest discoverers in chemistry have not been brought up at public schools :—we mean Dr. Priestley, Dr. Black, and Mr. Davy. The only Englishmen who have evinced a remarkable genius, in modern times, for the art of war,—the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Peterborough, General Wolfe, and Lord Clive, were all trained in private schools. So were Lord Coke, Sir Matthew Hale, and Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, and Chief Justice Holt, among the lawyers. So also, among statesmen, were Lord Burleigh, Walsingham, the Earl of Strafford, Thurloe, Cromwell, Hampden, Lord Clarendon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sydney, Russell, Sir W. Temple, Lord Somers, Burke, Sheridan, Pitt. In addition to this list, we must not forget the names of such eminent scholars and men |