Fourth: Miss as good as a mile.

But the learned ideal has not even this advantage. The first stage, the study of the ancient languages, is so totally different from the study of the ancient literatures to which it is the preliminary, that the student who never goes beyond this first stage either gets no benefit at all, or a benefit which is not of the kind intended. Suppose I am within a walk, though a long one, of the British Museum, and hearing of some valuable books in the library, which I can see nowhere else, I set off to consult them. In this case it makes no difference to me how valuable the books are if I do not get as far as the Museum.* My friends may comfort me with the assurance that the walk must have done me good. Perhaps so; but I left home to get a knowledge of certain books, not to exercise my legs. Had exercise been my object I should probably have chosen another direction.

Now schoolmasters, since the Renascence, have been in the habit of leading all their pupils through the back slums. of the Seven Dials and Soho in the direction of the British Museum, with the avowed purpose of taking them to the library, although they knew full well that not one pupil in ten, not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. To produce a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they have condemned a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain "uneducated." And, ac cording to the theory of the schoolroom, one-half of the

* This illustration was suggested by a similar one in Prof. J. R. Seeley's essay "On the Teaching of English" in his Lectures and Essaysı

Fifth: Neglect of children.

human race-the women-have not been supposed to need education. For them " accomplishments" have been held sufficient.

§ 17. V. In conclusion I must point out one effect of the Renascence ideal which seems to me no less mischievous than those I have already mentioned. This ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance to the education of children. Directly their pupils were old enough for Latin Grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the children's time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor cared to know how to employ it. If the little ones could learn by heart forms of words which would afterwards "come in useful," the schoolmasters were ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod, but no other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. Absorbed in the world of books they overlooked the world of nature. Galileo complains that he could not induce them to look through his telescope, for they held that truth could be arrived at only by comparison of MSS. No wonder then that they had so little sympathy with children, and did not know how to teach them. It is by slow degrees that we are breaking away from the bad tradition then established, are getting to understand children, and with such leaders as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, are investigating the best education for them. We no longer think of them as immature men and women, but see that each stage has its own completeness, and that there is a perfection in childhood which must precede the perfection of manhood just as truly as the flower goes before the fruit. "Childhood," says Rousseau, "has its own ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;" and it is by studying these that we find out how children should be educated. Our connexion with the world of

Child's study of his surroundings.

nature seems much closer in our early years than ever afterwards. The child's mind seems drawn out to its surroundings. He is intensely interested in the new world in which he finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown people need a flapper, like the sages of Laputa, to call our attention from our own thoughts to anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and hears everything, and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his mind not so much with thought as with feeling. Hence it is that we most of us look back wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that though years may have brought "the philosophic mind,"

Nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower."

The material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which his faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed. But the Renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. If you think that the greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of course, place at the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at all. An English inspector, who seems to have thought children had been created with due regard to the Revised Code of the Privy Council, spoke of the infants who could not be classed by their performances in "the three R's" as "the fag end of the school;" and no doubt the Renascence schoolmasters considered the children the fag end of humanity. The great scholars were indeed far above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters who adopted their ideal were not. And what is a pedant? "A man who has got rid of his brains to make room for his

Aut Cæsar aut nihil.

learning."* The pedantic schoolmasters of the Renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be cleared of everything else, that it might have room for the languages of Greece and Rome. But what if the mind failed to take in its destined freight? In that case the schoolmasters had nothing else for it, and were content that it should go empty.

Miss J. D. Potter, in "Journal of Education." London, June, 1879.

23

II.

RENASCENCE TENDENCIES.

1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference between them.

§ 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said, whether we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the nineteenth century the "good time" is supposed to be "coming," but in the sixteenth century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian scholars gazed with admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece and Rome, and longed to restore the old languages, and as much as possible the old world, so that such works might be produced again. Many were suspected, not altogether perhaps without reason, of wishing to uproot Christianity itself,* that they might bring back the Golden Age of Pericles.

§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past in order to revive the remote

* See Erasmus's Ciceronianus, or account of it, in Henry Barnard's German Teachers.