'I have got a supper for you, such as neither Charles nor Prince Rupert ever tasted, or deserved to taste; you deserve anything after this evening's goodness in reading so much to your impetuous but loving cousin.'

Thoroughness in Early Instruction.

W. G. B.

EVERYONE Who has devoted any measure of practical attention to the subject, has made up his mind that the value of education depends on the thoroughness of the instructional process in its successive stages, much rather than upon the quantity or variety of knowledge supposed to be communicated by the teacher. And everyone who has closely conversed with the multitude of young or old persons around him, has discovered that this thoroughness of early instruction is a blessing which very few minds indeed have ever enjoyed. We are surrounded on all sides by whole regiments of soldiers in the battle of life, who have not thoroughly learned even the goose-step, much less the use of their arms and the evolutions of battle. A man of disciplined intelligence, whose business brings him into contact with the common people who fill the church and the forum, is constantly mortified by ascertaining that scarcely one person in a score appears to have the proper use of his inward faculties, or any vigorous enjoyment from the functions of his intellectual being. In matters of external business they may be accurate, prompt, and diligent, though even this is far from being a true representation of the character of the majority; but in everything relating to the operations and enjoyments of the mind, the masses of those who are said to have received a good education are mere children. Vividness of conception, accuracy of apprehension, strength of reasoning, confidence in their own perceptions of truth, correctness in the use of language, and a ready insight into the stickcoat-and-hat construction of a scarecrow sophism, are not attainments which can be truly attributed to the generality. Their speech bewrayeth them. They are mere Galileans. Their minds have never been quickened into continuous action. You might look in at their eyes for years together to discover only how much the inner man' was 'at home in the body. Their talk,' as the Son of Sirach justly observes, 'is of oxen, and their glory is in the goad.' Yes; that talk, even among the upper classes of the great crowd, in what does it consist? In a series of futile interjections, of stereotyped descriptions of the weather, of inquiries after the valuable health of their companions, of the utterances of vain hopes, frivolous, pernicious slang, or theological, political, or commercial common places. A picture is 'pretty;' a dress is nice; a bill is good; a book is interesting; a sermon is 'striking and beyond this short catalogue of adjectives, they seldom enter into the regions of criticism. These are your broad-clothed, broad

based seat-holders,' who, as they never were reasoned into their opinions, can never be reasoned out of them; these are your young round-collared gentlemen and crinolined ladies, who judge of all things in earth and heaven according to their respectability; these are your multitudinous shopkeepers, artizans, and labourers, who, having no sense of their own in politics or religion, resign their interest in one to the keeping of a landlord or a customer, in the other, to the charge of a priest or a loud-mouthed newspaper divine. These are the people, and they are legion, who never know exactly what to think' on any subject under the sun; but who dread, denounce, and if they can will destroy, any man of well-defined convictions and honest speech; who anathematize as 'eccentric' every soul that moves in an orbit which has not the mob for its centre, and as 'crotchety,' every spirit that conscientiously thinks over its opinions one by one; and who raise, of course, an overwhelming and wonderful caw, if a wood-cutter applies the axe of reformation to the roots of any one of their ecclesiastical or political rookeries. These are the people, in short, who never make any real progress in thought or life, because they never made any real beginning. Their souls are unfurnished with those driving wheels, exactly cogged and firmly fixed, by which they might be brought into gear with the machinery of the spiritual and intellectual universe, and receive a permanent impulsion from its forces. Their spindles hang loose in their sockets, and if they move at all, it is only by the action of a flabby strap that comes to them from the great revolving drum of popular opinion. The production of their lives is an empty uniform hum, not work-for nothing within them is strong enough to work in a world of realities.

Now, although a large part of this evil must certainly, gentle reader, be set down to the adult sloth, sensuality, vanity, and obstinacy of mankind, will it not be at once a charitable and a practically profitable view of the matter, if we resolve much of the general incapacity to think and act with vigour into the defects of early education-I mean, the slovenly, incomplete, rubbishing quality of their school instruction?

It seems to be fair to say that a foolish man or woman is a foolish boy or girl grown up; and if the poor fatuous blundering adult, all whose ideas are fragments of fog, never had the opportunity of knowing in early life that it was possible to have clear conceptions, that enjoyment and utility depend upon accurate information and thought, that a mind ought to go with exactness, like a clock or a chronometer, and not to flounder in mud like a blind eel in the darkness, is it wonderful that the deficiencies of youth have affected the character of age? Certain it is that in all ranks of society thoroughness of early instruction is the exception, and not the rule, and that this evil is perhaps more rife among schools of the upper class than among the lower. And I believe, further, that it is the miserable quality of the teaching common in schools, which is accountable, in a large measure, for the comparative rarity in society of minds whose life is - either pleasurable to themselves or profitable to the world.

6

There is but one method of making real progress, either in general mental ability, or in any particular knowledge, and that is by obtaining a complete mastery of the elements in whatever department of study the mind is required to exert its energies, and it is precisely the common failure at the threshold, the failure of the pupil to attain such a complete mastery of the elements, which makes every successive step a toil and difficulty, and leaving school,' a time to be regarded as one for the throwing up of hats and the execution of dances in the air. No one who numbers schoolboys among his acquaintances (and if you get on the right side of them they are very interesting companions), can doubt that the majority of these young gentlemen regard the classics as a bore, and entertain by no means a reverential feeling towards the Providence which permitted the writings of the Greeks and Romans to escape the ravages of time, and the conflagration of the libraries of antiquity. There is nothing at which boys feel generally more astonishment than at the zeal with which the elder, and therefore stronger portion of the race, compel them to spend their jolliest years in making out such dry and intolerably difficult stuff as this ancient literature, in which every word is covered like a chrysalis in a tangled cocoon of inflections, and every sentence perplexed by an arrangement of the parts, which seems to them to have been contrived by the very genius of vexation and disorder. So far from rejoicing in the glories of the Greeks and Romans, it is certain that most schoolboys sincerely wish that they had never lived; just as truly as a boy, in my hearing, expressed his unsophisticated joy when he heard that poor Kerchever Arnold was dead.*

Now it is incontestable that much of this pain and weariness accompanying the process of a classical education arises from the fact that the majority of schoolboys never were thoroughly grounded in the first elements of Greek and Latin, they never thoroughly knew their declensions, their conjugations, and the simpler rules of syntax. They are always halting in uncertainty from doubt, or consciously imperfect knowledge of some portion of the rudiments. Now it is the case of a noun, now it is the tense of a passive verb, now it is a part of that 'horrible subjunctive,' which is the subject of hesitation; all of which are matters supposed to be perfectly mastered in the junior classes. But they never were mastered; and the doubt goes up through successive stages, even perhaps to the height of the sixth form, entangling at every step the feet of the unhappy disciple, and preventing him from feeling that joy in his labour under the sun, which belongs alone to the man who is master of the situation. It is all the same with his French, his German, his Euclid, his arithmetic, his history, and his geography. Progress in any one of these depends upon a thorough knowledge of the elements, and if, as is usually the case, he is set to work upon things too high for him,' there can be but one result-he feels as those pigs must have felt at

It is proper to explain, for the sake of the uninitiated, that this gentleman was the most celebrated composer of difficult exercise books in modern times.

Sunderland, who were caught upon hooks that had been left overnight in a shed, baited for the deep sea fishery.

The examinations of the Government for the civil service have revealed an amount of inexact education which should attract the practical attention of all who have sons to send forth to battle in a world where exact knowledge will always be power. Intellectual and practical habits generally go together the one being the reflex of the other. Balaklava is the counterpart and outgrowth of Harrow, Westminster, and Eton. That frightful chaos of mud, misery, and despair of wreck, plague, waste, passion, and entanglement-of famishing heroism, ragged glory, and valour in the tatters of distress, was the natural adult development of spirits that at school and college learned nothing thoroughly, and did nothing well. minds which in youth were indefinite vapours, mere Will-o'-thewisps, did not become stars in maturity, but only more widely extended fogs, some of them deadly.

Those

What, then, are the causes of this wide-spread evil? They are manifestly these, and in a knowledge of the springs of the mischief, we shall come to learn the remedy :-First (to lay the blame where most teachers mistakingly think that it is wholly due), the common want of thoroughness in knowledge and the use of the faculties arises from the innate stupidity, slothfulness, and inattention of the majority of children, when left to their own devices. Now and then a child arises in a family with a natural aptitude for exact learning. It is born with a predisposition to minute accuracy, from some exquisite conformation of the brain; it takes to cases, tenses, and mathematical arguments, as naturally as a young duck to the water, or a swallow to the air. The mind receives perfect photographic images from the worlds of grammar and proportion, and the young scholar has a native ear for the harmonies of syntax, and feels the misery inflicted by a discord in construction as acutely as a worker on the score. But every one knows that this is far from being a true description of average boys and girls. These are by nature born like the wild ass's colt, and are to be taught exactness only by a process analogous to that by which you would accustom a colt to equal paces and good behaviour in the shafts. Of course children differ exceedingly in the measure of their natural application and accuracy of memory; but it is certainly true, that if left to themselves the large majority of them will content themselves with 'general knowledge,' to the utter neglect of details and minute particulars. And more than this, the process of reducing them to order, the task of fixing in their minds with immovable firmness a knowledge of those elemental forms of speech or argument on which all subsequent progress depends, is one of the most trying labours to which the mind of man or woman can be directed. The process of thoroughly instructing the youth of both sexes in the rudiments of the various knowledges immediately suggests images derived from all the most toilsome departments of the world of work. One thinks of the treadmill, of oakum-picking, of stone-breaking, of the crank, the hammer, and the beetle; the

thoughts involuntarily wander for a parable by which to portray such labour as that of conscientiously teaching average brains in youth the liberal arts of music and grammatical construction in the learned tongues-to the functions of the stone-paviour eternally ramming granite boulders into order upon the crowded thoroughfare-to the blacksmith smiting through a life-time of perspiration on his anvilto the navigator for ever digging into and wheeling off mountains of mud and clay, to construct channels for the water, or railways on the land. But indeed there is no physical labour which aptly or sufficiently symbolizes that of beating conjugations into a moderately gifted booby, or time-scales and irregular French verbs, and the forms of negative interrogation, into a volatile lass. As to the modern pretences of teaching without any considerable labour, without fagging on the part of either pupil or preceptor, no manner of faith is to be placed in them. Multiplication is vexation; Division is as bad,' to the majority of the younger students of these modes of calculation; and no amount of chaff, in the shape of assurance that the Rule of Three is delightful, will entice these young birds into the steel-trap of scientific arithmetic. God has not willed that the masses of mankind should acquire either exact knowledge, or the proper use of their mental faculties, otherwise than by a severe apprenticeship. There is nothing for it but hard work; and the greater number of heads will not work to advantage, until the elements have been wrought into their understandings and memories by the strenuous and persevering action upon them of a stronger and an older mind.

This brings us to the second cause of the common want of thoroughness in instruction-I mean the difficulty of finding persons who will expend the labour necessary to establish average children in a perfect knowledge of the rudiments. Schools and school-masters are plentiful as blackberries, and governesses are not very rare; and in the present day a very large number of these persons are endued with great genius and excellence, and with various accomplishments. But to know is one thing; to teach is quite another. Every intelligent man or woman loves an intelligent child; but it is not every one who knows how to be patient with a youngster whose very soul loathes the declensions, and whose nightly sleep acts like a diurnal Lethe upon the acquisitions of the day. The prophet still finds it difficult not to smite his stubborn ass, in the narrow and gloomy passes of the toilsome journey. It is not every one who knows Latin and Greek, French, German, and Euclid, who knows also how to accommodate the paces of his own mind to the slow movements and unelastic footsteps of the multitude to whom school is a purgatory through which they must painfully pass into the Heaven of adult life beyond. Besides, there are many who can strike a good blow for one who can keep on hammering; and it is this genius for repetition in the teaching of the rudiments which is so uncommon.

The less exactness and energy there is in a pupil, the more of these qualities must be put forth by the instructor; and there is no mesmerism so exhausting as this. Accordingly, no small proportion of