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Ursuline Convent for a military hospital. Pestalozzi was, therefore, obliged to break up the school, and he himself went to a medicinal spring on the Gurnigel in the Canton Bern. Here,' he says, 'I enjoyed days of recreation. I needed them. It is a wonder that I am still alive. I shall not forget those days as long as I live; they saved me: but I could not live without my work.' He came down from the Gurnigel, and began to teach in the primary schools (i.e. schools for children from four to eight years old) of Burgdorf, the second town in the Canton. Here the director was jealous of him, and he met with much opposition. It was whispered,' he tells us, that I myself could not write nor work accounts, nor even read properly. Popular reports,' he adds, are not always entirely wrong. It is true I could not write nor read nor work accounts well.'

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A strange account has been left us of his teaching in the school by Ramsauer, then a scholar in it, and afterwards one of Pestalozzi's assistants :—

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I got about as much regular schooling as the other scholars,' he writes-that is, none at all; but Pestalozzi's sacred zeal, his devoted love, which caused him to be entirely unmindful of himself, his serious and depressed state of mind, which struck even the children, made the deepest impression on me, and knit my childlike and grateful heart to his for ever. Pestalozzi's intention was, that all the instruction given in this school should start from form, number, and language, and should have constant reference to these elements. There was no regular plan, not any time-table. He taught nothing

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but drawing, ciphering, and exercises in language. He had not patience to allow things to be gone over a second time, or to put questions (in arithmetic), and in his enormous zeal for the instruction of the whole school, he seemed not to concern himself in the slightest degree for the individual scholar. The best things we had with him were the exercises in language, at least those which he gave us on the paper-hangings of the school-room, which were real exercises in observation. "Boys," he would say (he never named the girls), "what do you see?" Answer "A hole in the wainscot." Pestalozzi"Very good. Now repeat after me-I see a hole in the wainscot. I see a long hole in the wainscot. Through the hole I see the wall. Through the long narrow hole I see the wall," and so forth. As Pestalozzi, in his zeal, did not tie himself to any particular time, we generally went on until eleven o'clock with whatever we had commenced at eight, and by ten o'clock he was always tired and hoarse. We knew when it was eleven by the noise of the other school children in the street, and then we usually all ran out without bidding good-bye.'

After this account of Pestalozzi's instruction, we can hardly wonder that the school rector at Burgdorf was not grateful for his assistance.

In less than a year Pestalozzi left this school in bad health, and joined Krüsi in opening a new school in Burgdorf Castle, for which he afterwards (1802) obtained Government aid. Here he was assisted in carrying out his system by Krüsi, Tobler, and Buss. He now embodied the results of his ex

THE INSTITUTE AT YVERDUN.

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perience in a work which has obtained great celebrity-How Gertrude Teaches her Children.'

In 1802 Pestalozzi, for once in his life a successful and popular man, was elected a member of a deputation sent by the Swiss people to Paris.

On the restoration of the Cantons in 1804, the Castle of Burgdorf was again occupied by one of the chief magistrates, and Pestalozzi and his establishment were moved to the Monastery of Buchsee. Here the teachers gave the principal direction to another, the since celebrated Fellenberg, 'not without my consent,' says Pestalozzi, but to my profound mortification.' He therefore soon accepted an invitation from the inhabitants of Yverdun to open an institution there, and within a twelvemonth he was followed by his old assistants, who had found government by Fellenberg less to their taste than nogovernment by Pestalozzi.

The Yverdun Institute had soon a wide-world reputation. Pestalozzian teachers went from it to Madrid, to Naples, to St. Petersburg. Kings and philosophers joined in doing it honour. But, as Pestalozzi himself has testified, these praises were but as a laurel-wreath encircling a skull. The life of the Pestalozzian institutions had been the love which the old man had infused into all the members, teachers as well as children; but this life was wanting at Yverdun. The establishment was much too large to be carried on successfully without more method and discipline than Pestalozzi, remarkable, as he himself says, for his 'unrivalled incapacity to govern,' was master of. The assistants began each

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to take his own line, and even the outward show of unity was soon at an end. Nothing is less interesting or profitable than the details of bygone quarrels, so I will not go into the great feud between Niederer and Schmid, which in its day made a good deal of noise in the scholastic world, as even less important disputes have done and will do in the world at large. There were, too, many mistakes made at Yverdun. Pestalozzi was mad with enthusiasm to improve elementary education, especially for the poor, throughout Europe. His zeal led him to announce his schemes and methods before he had given them a fair trial; hence many foolish things came abroad as Pestalozzianism, and hindered the reception of principles and practices which better deserved the name. Pestalozzi, too, unfortunately thought that his influence depended on the opinion which was formed of his institution; so he published a highly-coloured account of it, and tried to conceal its defects from the strangers by whom he was constantly visited (see Appendix, p. 311). His highly active imagination,' says Raumer, himself for some time an inmate of the institution, led him to see and describe as actually existing whatever he hoped sooner or later to realise.' The enemies of change made the most of these discrepancies, and this, joined with financial difficulties consequent on Pestalozzi's mismanagement, and with the scandals which arose out of the dissensions of the Pestalozzians, brought his institution to a speedy and unhonoured close.

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Thus the sun went down in clouds, and the old

EARLY EDUCATION.

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man, when he died at the age of eighty in 1827, had seen the apparent failure of all his toils. He had not, however, failed in reality. It has been said of him that his true function was to educate ideas, not children, and when twenty years later the centenary of his birth was celebrated by schoolmasters, not only in his native country, but throughout Germany, it was found that Pestalozzian ideas had been sown, and were bearing fruit, over the greater part of central Europe.

PESTALOZZIANISM.

As it seems to the present writer, the worst part of our educational course-the part which is wrong in theory and pernicious in practice is our instruction of children, say between the ages of seven and twelve. Before seven years old, there is often no formal instruction, and perhaps there should be none. Pestalozzi would have children systematically taught from the cradle; but I cannot help doubting the wisdom, or at least the necessity of this. Nature offers the succession of impressions to the child's senses without any regular order. Art should come to her assistance, says Pestalozzi, and organise a connected series of such impressions. It may well be questioned, however, if the child will be benefited by being put through any course of the kind. Lord Lytton wittily, and in my opinion wisely, applies to this subject the story of the man who thought his bees would make honey faster if, instead of going in

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