ushered into the presence of a Dreadful Being with whiskers and a white neckcloth, and gleaming teeth, who, in harsh tones, bids him mind his book, for Caneborough House is no place for idle boys. The shivering little wretch has scarcely ceased listening to the noise of the carriage wheels which have brought him to this educational jail die away, when he hears the voice he is to obey as an oracle booming out against some recalcitrant Master Smith or Master Jones, shearing away this boy's dinner, or dooming that luckless scholar to be immediately delivered to the tormentors. On the agonies of the first afternoon spent in the class-room or the playground by a delicate and tender-nurtured boy, surrounded by grinning young yahoos who pull his hair, assail him with brutal questions, and rummage his playbox as though they were Russian custom-house officers, I forbear to dwell. He looks around for sympathy; on no side does he receive it. The ushers pester him with interrogations wellnigh as intolerable as those of his schoolboys; the servants small-tooth comb his head as though it were a wool mattress, and they were carding it; and, as a new boy, are apt to be tart and querulous with him. He has not had time as yet to conciliate the lady who takes care of the linen, and the cake and gingerbread woman does not know him sufficiently to give him trust. Perhaps the little boy is sent, not to Caneborough House Select Academy (for the sons of gentlemen only), but to a great public school-to Eton, Rugby, Harrow, Winchester, Merchant Tailor's, or Charterhouse, which you please. Give him eight, or even nine years of age; and woe betide the unhappy little neophyte.

Fagging may not be the monstrous system of boy-despotism it was some years since; but, by all accounts, it is still brutal, tyrannical, and irrational. Pity the little boy fretting in a corner of his boarding-house, stealing furtively under

cloisters, or about playing-fields, bumped, cuffed, kicked, jeered at, made corvéable and taillable, forced to become an accomplice in conspiracies against authority, to spend his pocket money in dainties that make him sick, creeping shudderingly into a school, as a criminal with a bad case against him edges himself into the Old Bailey dock He has been taught at home that shameful punishment is due only to mendacity, to dishonesty, to rebellious obstinacy; he finds himself disgracefully punished for having a bad memory or an imperfect ear for rhythm; for omitting a syllable, for confounding the name of a river with that of a country-both river and country having vanished for a period of some nineteen hundred years from the face of the earth. The first night at school to a little boy is one of cold horror and bleak misery. The first month at school is a round of cruelty and oppression and insult. You know the philosophical toys called Rupert's Drops. In them behold the image of a schoolboy too early sent away from home to "rough it." They are hard at one end, these drops, as the nether millstone, and you may hammer them on an anvil, almost without making any impression on them; but give the taper end but a tap with your finger nail, and they dissolve at once into infinitesimal atoms. These drops have been too suddenly annealed, and their particles, beneath a thin coating of hardness, are yet in a state of repulsion. And thus, too, little boys may be too suddenly "roughened."

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I anticipate your objections. The boy must begin his ordeal of induration at some time or another. He can't go on for ever under the tuition and management of women. He must "rough it" sooner orlater. Why not commence early? That way the twig is bent the tree 's inclined," &c., &c., &c. Doubtless, my dear. But don't begin too soon. Don't begin with a tendril; wait till you have a twig, or, better still, a stout young sapling.

The twig, too early made to "rough it," is often nipped by the frost, and shivered by the evening blast. In my young days the principle of "roughing it" was carried to extremity in every grade. Young lords roughed it precisely as young chimney sweeps did. Fighting at school was vaguely supposed to make boys hardy, and capable of enduring pain. Beating was thought to be as good for their health as for their morals; and as good for their minds as for their morals. Boys were cast headlong, as it were, at ten years of age, into the cockpit of a man-of-war, to "rough it" as reefers. The result of all this "roughing it" was, according to some old. ladies and gentlemen who yet flourish and speak with authority, the growth of a fine, bold, sturdy, enduring race of English youths, who only lacked opportunity to turn out Nelsons, Collingwoods, Wellingtons, Angleseas, Captain Cooks, and Mungo Parks. My uncle William, who was in the navy, used to sing an old song, beginning, if I remember correctly, thus:—

roughing

Such was the rationale of those whose creed was it." The rugose system of training was to culminate in an adolescence of cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and hard port-wine drinking, which were then thought to be the only Graces fit to buckle on the armour of Mars. How many of the old ladies and gentlemen tell us so now, and that our greatest heroes owe half their heroism to their having "roughed it" at a public school! There are persons going into ecstasies now about a model public-school hero, a Captain Hodson, late a commander of horse in India. He was a brave soldier, I have not the slightest doubt; but his principal claim to the

wide-mouthed admiration of the gaby throng was, that he shot dead and in cold blood two effete and defenceless Asiatics, he being at that time, and for three weeks afterwards, in a state of semi-delirium. Against such a cut-throat deed as this I will place the meek, calm heroism, and undemonstrative chivalry of a poor Suffolk parson's pale weakly son, Horatio, Nelson, the merciful magnanimity of James Wolfe, the cheerful bravery and quiet fortitude of David Livingston. But there are times when the world is so eager for heroes, and withal has such a paucity of them, that the first rude soldier that comes to hand is made to serve as a hero forthwith. There is always a stock of laurels on hand, which must be got rid of somehow. Was it not only the other day that the Corporation of London, having determined to present the freedom of the city to some proper officer to procure a suitable great man, instructed the gold box to hold the precious vellum? Through some misapprehension, the proper officer ordered two gold boxes, which were duly manufactured and delivered; and the Corporation, with their extra casket on hand, were in sore perplexity as to what to do with it, till they pitched upon an ambassador who had just come home from the unhealthiest climate in the world without having died of cholera or yellow fever; and on him they immediately bestowed the vacant freedom and the spare gold box, with many speeches and much applause, and a capital lunch afterwards.

Have I not, may I not have lurking behind this defence of home education some little ulterior design or scheme of my We know that all families are not own? Cela se peut. wealthy enough to maintain a governess en permanence, with a staff of male tutors and professors to assist her, to say nothing of the drill-sergeant and the swimming-master, and the groom or coachman to attend young master on his morning airings in Rotten Row. Papa would grumble at the

inordinate expense such an educational establishment would entail, and most probably cut the matter short by dispatching young master to Caneborough House or to Rugby, incontinent. I do not want to be thought too much of a doctrinaire My plan is susceptible of modification. Keep your boys at home till twelve, and let mamma or the governess make home homely to them; but let them attend King's College, or the London University Junior School, or one of the admirable district colleges that are now rising in the suburbs. Surely this won't make milksops of them. Let them go and study Amo, Amas, beneath the auspices of Bachelors and Masters of Arts, but Bachelors and Masters who are not pedagogues for ever flourishing the ferule and the rod.

Some foolish parents object to send their sons to these metropolitan colleges, because, forsooth, they are afraid of the lads being exposed to the temptations of the streets as they go to or return from school. Ladies, are you afraid that your darlings will learn to pick pockets or rifle apple stalls? to clamber up behind cabs and mourning coaches? or to play hopscotch in the gutter? Don't the Eton boys walk about Eton, and sometimes stray out of bounds? Don't the young cadets parade Woolwich? Don't the Westminster boys saunter about the purlieus of one of the vilest parts of London? Are not the pupils of Charterhouse and Merchant Tailor's and Paul's obliged to traverse the city's busy streets? And don't the Blue-coat boys walk about everywhere, bare-headed and independent? Who ever saw a Blue-coat boy playing leapfrog or "cat" with a charity boy or a shoe-black? The young gentlemen of Christ's Hospital respect themselves, and make others respect them; and a Blue-coat Grecian in his last year is quite as aristocratic in his way as a captain in the Life Guards. A well-bred and well-dispositioned boy will learn