necessary. And it is not at all likely or desirable, that in this country, the central government should ever have the power of founding schools, appointing masters and mistresses, and wielding the influence and patronage which such an arrangement would give them. Yet the existing system has its definite sphere of useful action, the limitations of which are clearly marked out. Local organisations are needed to take up and help forward the work, without interfering either with the government inspection and grants, or the existing school management. English institutions are generally of gradual development and of slow growth. They are seldom founded on the overthrow of older institutions. It would appear to be in keeping with the national character that we should gradually improve, develope, and supplement existing organisations, rather than revolutionise them. Where there is sufficient public spirit and sincere desire to help forward the education of the people, to form a good general committee, representing all the chief sections of the community, this may be done. There is no more reason why sectarian differences should interfere with the impartial distribution of funds appropriated to such a purpose, than with those adminis tered by municipal governments, or guardians of the poor. The government system has already prepared a clear line of impartiality, and as many local committees as are necessary may adopt the same general principles with perfect security.

CLASSICAL EDUCATION.

Classical Instruction. Why? When? For Whom? By W. B. HODGSON, LL.D. F.C.P.

OUR shores are visited from time to time by intelligent foreigners eager to study our political institutions, our social customs, our processes of agriculture, or of manufacture. Let us suppose that such a one as the Parsee gentleman, whose zeal in the cause of Indian women won the sympathy of us all, a few days ago-understanding our language, but only slightly acquainted with our history and social condition, had arrived in this country anxious to to extend his knowledge and to turn his observations to practical account. I may well be excused from attempting to sketch in even the vaguest outline the elaborate and complex civilisation, with its bright lights and dark shadows-which would attract and bewilder, and almost overwhelm his attention. Let us suppose that, after a time, he gained some general insight into our mode of government, our manners, our religion, our laws, our mechanical industry, our commerce, our manifold and ever multiplying relations

with all other nations of the globe, our rich and various literature our national character. Such a man might reflect thus: childrer are in this country as in every other, born weak, helpless, ignorant, -yielding easily, with a few marked individual exceptions, to the plastic hands of those who would mould them in this or that form, to this or that belief-capable of healthy growth and development from within, under the application of outward stimulus, but also of being crushed, stunted, or perverted; of becoming, in short, either lovely flowers and useful fruit, or useless-it may be even noxious-weeds. Such a reflection as this would naturally suggest the question: What is done in the way of teaching and training to qualify and dispose the embryo citisens of this great nation to take a useful and honourable place in the social system in which they are destined to live, to promote their own good, and that of their fellows; and, not least, to ensure that the next generation shall be wiser, better, happier, than that which is swiftly moving off the stage of life? To such a man as I have supposed it might perhaps occur:-In this country there are rich people and poor people; all have not equal means or opportunities; from all, equal results are not to be expected; but, surely, in the case of even the moderately rich, all will be done that the most enlightened intelligence can suggest to form, and store, and guide the youthful mind, and in the case of those less favoured by fortune, this same object will also be aimed at, and proportionately realised. Probably, then, the children of parents of the higher class are carefully instructed in the nature of their own constitution, bodily and mental, the conditions on which its soundness and happy working inevitably depend; its relations towards the diversified existences, animate and inanimate, which surround it; the terms on which future well-being must be, if at all, attained. In the structure and use of their own language- so rich and flexible and strong, so that even thought itself might grow clearer from the clear medium of its utterance. In the art of tracing the relation of cause and effect so as to avoid not only mental error and confusion, but unwise and injurious conduct also; in the elements of the arts and sciences, on the knowledge and application of which hangs the prosperity of the world, and especially of this nation; in their own country's literature-abounding, as it does, in noble monuments of every kind of mental activity, and with equal power to instruct, to rouse, to purify, to direct, to charm, to polish, to strengthen, to refine, to make strong the delicate, to make delicate the strong; in the languages and literatures of other nations, whose social characteristics are more or less different, but with all of whom the advantage and even the necessity of free intercourse are daily on the increase, and from all of whom much is to be learned, without the sacrifice, nay, to the enhancing of national and individual originality and independence.

Our supposed foreign visitor might not, and probably would not, work out in any great detail the programme of a system of instruction (i. e. building up), such as he might expect to find; but it is not at all improbable that, looking at the facts of the case, and

estimating future obligations and necessities, he would reckon most confidently on finding a foremost place assigned to such studies as I have roughly indicated. Well, what would be his astonishment if he were told that in the school-training, not of the poor only, but of the rich also, the very rich, every one of these subjects is more or less neglected, that what seemed to him the most important and indispensable things of all are left to future chance, or, at the most, to a later provision; that during the whole course of the school-life, extending over ten, twelve, or more years, the mind is applied almost exclusively, in the best cases mainly, to the languages and literatures of two ancient nations who ceased to exist centuries ago, who lived before even the infancy of our modern arts and sciences, whose religion and morals were widely at variance, if not wholly inconsistent, with the religion and morals which here prevail, and which are held as a revelation from heaven itself, nations whose people, whose great men even were stained with gross vices, whose military glories (in the case of one of these at least) have so dazzled the eye and corrupted the moral sense of subsequent generations as greatly to retard the peaceful progress of commerce and civilisation! Even if he found, as doubtless he would find on farther inquiry, that these literatures contain much, very much, that is beautiful and good, and that examples of heroism and virtue, worthy of all praise, are scattered over the blood-stained records of their history, I do not think that his astonishment would be greatly diminished; while it would be vastly increased, and would approach amazement and even incredulity, were he to learn that, on the authority of able men, themselves the subjects of this system and favourable to its continuance; this system, as pursued in its most richly endowed and in all ways most favoured institutions, is declared a failure—" a failure," and here I quote the "Times" Summary of the Report of the recent Commissioners-"a failure even if tested by those better specimens, not exceeding one-third of the whole, who go up to the Universities. Though a very large number of these have literally nothing to show for the results of their school-hours from childhood to manhood, but a knowledge of Latin and Greek, with a little English and arithmetic, we have here the strongest testimony that their knowledge of the former is most inaccurate, and their knowledge of the latter contemptible. A great deal is taught under these two heads, but very little is learned under either. A small proportion become brilliant composers and finished scholars, if they do not manage to pick up a good deal of information for themselves; but the great multitude cannot construe an easy author at sight, or write Latin prose without glaring mistakes, or answer simple questions in grammar, or get through a problem in the first two books of Euclid, or apply the higher rules of arithmetic. A great many, amounting to about a third at Christ Church, and a fifth at Exeter College, fail to pass the common Matriculation Examination. Not less than a fourth are plucked for their Little-go, a most elementary examination in the very subjects which we have just mentioned; and of the rest

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many are only enabled to pass by the desperate exertions of College Tutors and coaches.' We need not follow this class of public schoolmen through the remainder of their University career, since the duty of teaching has then devolved upon others, but for their shortcomings at entrance the schools are mainly responsible. Most of them, says an Oxford tutor of great experience and judgment, 'are persons who were allowed as boys to carry their idleness with them from form to form, to work below their powers, and merely to move with the crowd; they are men of whom something might have been made, but now it is too late; they are grossly ignorant, and have contracted slovenly habits of mind.""

On recovering from his very natural amazement, our foreign friend might possibly be curious to know how a state of things so anomalous and perplexing had come about. Gradually he would learn that it had its remote origin in a period of European history between the decay of the old and the growth of the new civilisation, when it may be briefly and comprehensively asserted, that, Latin and its literature apart (for Greek was of later date as a branch of general school teaching), there were-1. No subjects to be learned; 2. No pupils to be taught; 3. No language in which teaching could be carried on. A few minutes may well be spent in considering this very curious position. There were 1. No subjects to be learned. Arts and sciences, as we now understand and pursue them, scarcely existed; they were confounded with the ancient literature in which scientific observations and theories were recorded; there were no modern languages or literatures to claim and repay study. Latin, or its practical synonyme, grammar was, accordingly, identical, coextensive with instruction. 2. There were no pupils to be taught. The mere idea of educating a whole people, of opening their mental eyes, forming their judgment, training their character, by means of knowledge, had not been even conceived. Not even the higher, or highest classes of the laity, were believed to need instruction. Ecclesiastics only needed and received instruction, and in their case it was naturally directed to the language in which the church offices were performed, in which the church history and traditions were enshrined. 3. There was no language, but Latin, in which teaching could be conducted. Neither English, nor French, nor Italian, nor German, nor Spanish, nor any other modern language, in anything like its present state, existed. You know as well as I how and when they came into being. Petrarch more than half regretted his having ever written in Italian the sonnets which are the title-deeds of his fame, and fancied that posterity would delight to read his Latin poem on Africa, which is quite forgotten. Through what medium, then, except Latin, could any one be taught? Latin, in which the learned of all countries wrote and corresponded with each other to later times-Petrarch, and Erasmus, and Milton, and even Locke. The influence of this threefold state of things was prolonged in spite of gradual progress. New subjects arose, but Latin held its place; a portion of the laity claimed a share of the instruction of

the time, and ecclesiastics taught them the Latin which only they knew, and that not well. New languages were gradually formed, and crept into general un-literary unscientific currency. But in European countries Latin still maintained its place more or less exclusively as the medium of teaching science and literature. Not many years ago, I travelled with a Piedmontese physician who spoke Italian badly, French not at all, whose local patois was a burden to himself, and who bitterly complained to me of his having been taught even medicine, as well as logic and rhetoric, through Latin, while in Italian he had never received a single lesson. In our own laud the change has gone somewhat farther in each of the three respects just stated. Other subjects of instruction have more or less recently, more or less grudgingly, been allowed to break in upon the sacred monopoly of Latin. First, Greek, now so glibly coupled with Latin, like Day with Martin, or Swan with Edgar, fought its way to admission through opposition, the story of which would now excite some amusement and surprise. Then mathematics, more lately; and it is now commonly declared that in this branch of study is found the needful and sufficient counterpoise to the old linguistic training, inasmuch as it exercises the reasoning faculties, the subject, however, being purely abstract, and one in which never occur the names of man or woman, or right or wrong, or duty or interest, of good or bad, praise or blame, or any other of those many things about which human reasoning is habitually employed in later and daily life, so that though, like chess, it is valuable for fixing the attention, it is a very inefficient training for ordinary thinking on moral questions. As Sir Wm. Hamilton has said:"The railroad of demonstration is a poor preparative for the hunting ground of probability." No other subject is taught otherwise than too excep tionally and incompletely to claim notice in this brief paper.

Yet, how marvellously changed is the whole aspect of the world since this system first took shape. I need not do more than hint at our progress in science, arts, literature, mechanical productions, and exchange at home and abroad; at the startling growth of foreign literatures; at the multiplication of sources of thought and subjects of interest general and deep; at the discovery of new and vast continents, over which is being rapidly spread a population speaking our language, in part living under this country's government, in part under a government of its own, in either case bound to us by many ties of interest and affection, and adding everywhere to the common fund of the world's thought and knowledge, "Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? What region of the wide earth is there that is not filled with both the record and the results of our national achievements?

Is everything to move on except education, which is to prepare for everything? Is progress to be universal except in that one thing which ought to herald, and facilitate and guide all progress? How long, one is driven to ask, is the present system to be maintained? In spite of coming changes, the extent of which we can