a difficult problem was in some measure being solved in it-that of training the humbler classes by the most thorough technical instruction for the practical work of the world, without altogether excluding them from the humanising and enlivening influences of literature and art.

At this school, as well as at many others, the classes of which I attended, I was greatly struck by the extraordinary skill in teaching displayed by the masters, and the proficiency of the pupils their ready and pertinent answers, and the clear and accurate style in which they were given-and also by the general equality of attainments in members of the same form. "In the sixth form of an English public school," I observed to the director of a West Prussian Gymnasium, you would find a few more brilliant scholars than any in your class, with a larger proportion of idlers and dunces." "It is our principle," he replied, "to adapt our instruction to the wants of the average boy-to see that he is brought up to the prescribed mark at the proper time, and to leave the more gifted to find the additional aliment they need as best they may." I also noticed the fixed and apparently pleased attention paid to his commands, and the eagerness manifested by the boys to answer the questions put to them; and I asked him whether they were excited by the prospect of prizes, honor-lists, and competitive examinations. He replied that the principle of competition was almost entirely excluded from their educational system, as tending to foster a servile view of education, and to lead to spasmodic and exhausting efforts and feverish excitement, rather than to the healthy and harmonious development of the mental powers.

On coming out of the schoolroom, I watched the boys at their compulsory gymnastic exercises, in their ugly, grassless yard, and contrasted their quiet, spiritless demeanor with the obstreperous gaiety of our own noisy youngsters at their rough and hardy games. The director assured me that the German boy was not, as I supposed, indifferent to play, but that the authorities did nothing to promote it. "I think," he added, laughing, "that they like a tame, Philistine people (ein zahmes philister

haftes Volk); and, besides, there is an ebullient energy in the English nature of which we know but little.'

I then inquired into the social position of the pupils, whose performances in his form had excited my admiration, and was told that all classes of society were represented-noblesse, bankers, wealthy merchants-down to the smallest tradesmen; and that four of the boys in his form were sons of day laborers, who were unable to pay, without assistance, the marvellously small schulgeld. One of his difficulties, he said, arose from the poverty of the boys' parents, who made bitter complaints when a change of classbooks necessitated a new outlay, however small. The father of one of his boys had lately complained to him of the heavy expense of educating his son (47. a year); to which the Doctor replied that learning, unfortunately, did cost money, but that it was, after all, the cheapest thing "going," and that he had made a calculation, according to which a lesson in Tacitus, including firing in the winter, cost a boy exactly five pfennigs (one halfpenny).

According to the latest report of the Minister of Education for the winter semester of 1876, there are in Prussia with its 23,000,000 inhabitants, 232 Gymnasia, with 2,528 Ober-lehrer and Ordentliche-lehrer, 281 Wissenschaftliche Hülfs-lehrer, 408 Technische-lehrer, 150 Religions-lehrer, and 177 Probe Candidaten, and (including the preparatory schools originally connected with the Gymnasia) about 76,000 pupils; 34 Progymnasia, with 268 teachers (of all kinds) and 3,737 pupils; 80 Real-schulen (I. Ordnung), with (including the preparatory schools) 1,420 teachers (of all kinds) and 30,874 pupils; 17 Real-schulen (II. Ordnung), with (including preparatory schools) 284 teachers (of all kinds) and 6,898 pupils; 92 Höhere Bürgerschulen and Gewerbe-schulen, with (including preparatory schools) 843 teachers (of all kinds) and 17,086 pupils. Altogether the schools for the upper and middle classes in Prussia, under direct Government control and supervision, are frequented by 134,595 scholars, and taught by 6,359 teachers.

In conclusion, I shall venture, at the risk of being tedious, to notice the chief points of comparison between English

us.

and German schools, and more especially those points in which the Germans seem to me to have an advantage over There is probably little danger of our overlooking those in which the superiority is on our side.

In the first place, the Germans have the advantage of a uniform system of education, framed by a succession of able statesmen and scholars, carefully superintended by the Government, modified and expanded, from time to time, in accordance with the wants of the age, and embracing the whole ascending scale of instruction, from the earliest lessons of the elementary school to the most abstruse lectures of the university, and the technical academy.

Secondly, the Germans have an advantage over us in possessing a numerous class of learned men, who make teaching the sole business of their lives, and are subjected to the close inspection of competent authorities appointed by the State. The masters in a German school are, generally speaking, better teachers than those of our best schools; not because they are more learned, conscientious or zealous, but because they are specially trained for their work; be cause there is among them a more rigid division of labor, and because they have more power over their pupils. It may be said indeed magister nascitur, non fit; but teaching, like poetry, requires art as well as genius, and no Director of a German school would appoint a master until he had had some practice in the art on which his success depends. In England, on the contrary, we assume that the good scholar will be a good teacher. A good degree, a bachelor's cap and gown, are ample qualifications; and the possessor of these is introduced, without any special training, to the form of a public school, and left, without guidance, to blunder his way, by the rule of "trial and error," like any civil first lord of the admiralty, to the efficient performance of his duties. That, under the circumstances, the tutor and the first lord so often prove efficient is only another proof of the energy of our race; but who shall say how many boys and iron-clads are sunk during the noviciate?

Again, the German master is a more efficient teacher because he is not over

burdened with form work or the domestic superintendence of his boys; and because he is only called upon to give instruction in cognate subjects. Three lessons a day is considered very full work, and the masters of the higher forms seldom give more than seventeen, or the head-master more than ten, in the week. A tutor, it is thought, should give no more lessons than he can give with the whole force and freshness of his mind, without undue exhaustion; and, above all, he should have time for prosecuting the private studies which enhance the value and efficiency of his work. The master of a Gymnasium, or other public school, would soon lose caste among his colleagues, and all hope of advancement in his profession, if he did not prove, from time to time, by some scholarlike treatise, that he was making good progress in some particular path of learning. How different is the case in most of our schools! Many an English tutor, in addition to the management of "a house," has to give four or five lessons a day, and has neither time for social recreation, nor even for such an amount of private study as would enable him to keep himself at the level of scholarship he attained at college. It is no unheard of thing, even in our best schools, for a young master to be expected to teach Greek, Latin, French, history, geography, arithmetic and geometry, and to give seven or eight-and-twenty lessons a week. How is it possible for him ever to make himself a thorough master of any of these subjects?

The German master is able to give more efficient lessons because his form is better prepared to receive them. only the first entrance into the school, but into each succeeding form, is guarded against the incompetent by a very strict examination. Consequently, the master knows exactly what to expect of his pupils; and neither loses time, as we are often obliged to do, in filling up holes in the foundation on which he has to build, nor in teaching one half the class what the other half already knows. It can never happen to him, in the middle of a lesson in Aeschylus, to discover that some of his hearers hold unsound views in regard to the conjugation of the Greek verbs in με !

The German master has an easier task

than the English master, because he has greater power over his pupils, and because his efforts to teach are generally met by an equal eagerness to learn. The maintenance of discipline never weighs upon his mind. The force brought to bear upon the German boy is absolutely overwhelming. Behind his class-master (ordinarius), rise the majestic forms of the Herr Director and the Schul-collegium; while, in the distance, loom large and awful the Dii-majores of Berlin-the "Minister der GeistlichenUnterrichts- und Medicinal-Angelegenheiten;" nay, the Emperor himself, with a hundred legions at his back! What can a poor little Teuton do against such odds? The English boy, on the other hand, has only to face his tutor, or, at worst, an armed alliance of tutor and father; and he may often indulge a hope, that the operations of the latter may be checked or neutralised by the irregular, but very effective, forces of his natural ally-his mother.

The German boy is naturally more eager to do well in his class, not only because he very soon becomes aware that all his success in life is at stake, but because there is no other field in which he

can gain distinction. But when an English boy enters his school, it is not the Newcastle scholar or the Tomline scholar who is pointed out to him as the object of his cult, but the captain of the boats, or of "the eleven; the heroes of Lord's or Henley. As an "oar," or a 'bat," he may find distinction, not only at school, but at college and in general society.

In these and some other respects, which it would be tedious to enlarge upon here, the German schools are superior to our own. Some of these advantages

we cannot hope, cannot, perhaps, even wish to share, because they cannot be obtained without the sacrifice of what we value still more highly; but they are for the most part quite within our reach.. The fair and candid spirit in which educational matters are now discussed by the heads of our great schools, the earnestness with which educational reforms. are advocated at our universities, by men whose "interests" might tempt them to "let well alone," encourage us to hope that some reformer will arise to do for the upper and middle classes what has already been done for the great mass of the people.—Macmillan's Magazine.

JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his NEW SERIES.- VOL. XXVI., No. 3

determination, votes for the sixpences,. and, in the emphatic Americanism," goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hill-tops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration

19

for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honors with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the

class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphytepsis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favorite school of Dickens and Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the tru ant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue :

"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"

“Truly, sir, I take mine ease."

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"

here, by this water, to learn by root-ofheart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment."

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman!"

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers. Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, of the far end of a telescope. SainteBeauve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their books diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stu

pid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them-by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogntists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belve-, dere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit lors; good people laughing, drinking, and making love, as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some