Chapter VI: Part 6

Copley, the Painter, died 1815, aged 78; his son, Lord Lyndhurst, in
1863, attained his 91st year: his mother lived to see her son a
second time Lord High Chancellor. Stothard, for several months
before his decease, though his bodily infirmities prevented his
attending to his labours as an artist, would not relinquish his
attendance at the meetings and lectures of the Royal Academy and in
the library, notwithstanding extreme deafness prevented his hearing
what was passing. Mr. Constable, in a letter to a friend, written in
1838, says: “I passed an hour or two with Mr. Stothard on Sunday
evening. Poor man! the only elysium he has in this world he finds in
his own enchanting works. His daughter does all in her power to make
him happy and comfortable.” Leslie remarks that Stothard must have
possessed great constitutional serenity of mind; he was also, no
doubt, much supported by his art. His easel, indeed, bore evidence
of the many years he had passed before it; the lower bar, on which
his foot rested, being nearly worn through. He died April 27, 1834,
in his 80th year, at his house in Newman-street, where he had
resided more than forty years.

Sir M. A. Shee, Painter, P.R.A., died 1850, at the age of 80. J. M.
W. Turner, the greatest landscape painter, R.A., 1851, at 77; and
1854, Geo. Clint, painter of humour, 82; Wachter, the famous
historical painter, who died 1852, reached 90. Two aged Frenchmen
died 1853: Fontaine, the architect, 90; and Renouard, bibliographer,
98. James Ward, the animal painter, who died 1859, reached 91;
Alfred Chalon, 1860, at 80; and in 1859, David Cox, founder of our
Water-Colour School, 76.

In 1850 died Schadow, the Hungarian Sculptor, 86. In 1856, Sir R.
Westmacott, the sculptor, R.A.; and next year, Christian Rauch, the
German sculptor, at 80.

Matthew Cotes Wyatt, the Sculptor of the colossal Wellington statue,
died 1862, at 86. The oldest engraver of the above period was John
Landseer, who died 1852, aged 90.

Sir John Soane, R.A., the Architect, died 1837, having reached the
age of 84, bequeathing his museum, in Lincoln’s-inn Fields, to the
nation. Sir John was the son of a Berkshire bricklayer, and by his
own energy rose to eminence as an architect: he designed a greater
number of public edifices than any contemporary. His last work
(1833), the State-Paper Office, in St. James’s-park, was very unlike
any other of his designs; it was taken down in 1862.

Foster, the Artist, of Derby, celebrated the hundredth anniversary
of his birthday on November 8, 1862, when he was entertained by his
friends in the county hall. Mr. Foster served under Abercrombie in
Egypt, and left the army on the day on which Nelson died. He has
been five times married; and his youngest child, born sixty-eight
years after his eldest, is now (1862) only ten years of age.

The great ages in the following records must be considered very remarkable:

Mr. Henry H. Breen, writing from St. Lucia, states that Louis Mutal,
a Negro, died in the island in 1851, at the age of 135 years. Mutal
was a native of Macouba, in the island of Martinique, and about 1785
settled in St. Lucia as a dealer in trade; after his death was found
among his papers his marriage contract with his slave, Marie
Catherine, in 1771, which establishes the fact of his being then 55
years of age, and consequently of his having been born in 1716. This
is followed by a certificate, showing that the marriage contract was
published and recorded in 1772. The date of his death in the parish
register has been carefully verified by Mr. Breen, who adds: “There
are now living in this island several persons of the age of 90, or
upwards,” in a population of about 26,000 souls. The particulars
are:

Madame Toraille, coloured aged 90
Madame Morel, coloured ” 90
Madame Jacob, coloured ” 92
Madame St. Philip, white ” 92
Madame Guy de Mareil, white ” 93
Mademoiselle Vitalis, white ” 96
Madame Anne, black ” 102
Madame Coudrey, coloured ” 106
Madame Baudoin, white ” 106 [65]

Another Correspondent, writing from Malta in 1855, states that Tony
Proctor, a free coloured man, died at Tallahassee, Florida, June 16,
1854, aged 112. He was at the battle of Quebec, as the servant of an
English officer, in 1759; and he was at the beginning of the
revolutionary war in the vicinity of Boston, at the time the tea was
thrown overboard; and was afterwards present at the battle of
Lexington.[66]

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Footnote 65:

Communicated to _Notes and Queries_, August 4, 1855.

Footnote 66:

_Notes and Queries_, September 8, 1855.

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THE HAPPY OLD MAN.

The wisest and best productions of the human intellect, says Dr. Moore,[67] have proceeded from those who have lived through the bustling morning and meridian periods of their day, and calmly sat down to think and instruct others in the meditative evening of life. Even when the brilliancy of reason’s sunset yields to the advancing gloom, there is an indescribable beauty haunting the old man still, if in youth and vigour his soul was conversant with truth; and even when the chill of night is upon him, his eye seems to rest upon the glories for awhile departed; or he looks off into the stars, and reads in them his destiny with a gladness as quiet and as holy as their light.

How instructive is the usual state of memory and hope in advanced life! As the senses become dull, the nervous system slow, and the whole body unfit for active uses, the old man necessarily falls into constant abstraction. Like all debilitated persons, he feels his unfitness for action, and, of course, becomes querulous if improperly excited. Peacefulness, gentle exercise among flowers and trees, unstimulating diet, and the quiet company of books and philosophic toys, are suitable for him. With such helps his heart will beat kindly, and his intellect, however childlike, will maintain a beautiful power to the last. Objects of affection occasionally move him with more than their accustomed force. Young children are especially agreeable to him. When approaching him with the gentle love and reverence which unspoiled childhood is so apt to exhibit, his heart seems suddenly to kindle as the little fingers wander over his shrivelled hand and wrinkled brow. He smiles, and at once goes back in spirit to his childhood, and finds a world of fun, frolic, and liveliness before him; and he has tales of joy and beauty, which children and age and holy beings can best appreciate. Next to the children of his children, the old man, whose thoughts have been directed by the Bible, loves the society of persons of holy habits; and as he finds these more frequently among females, such are generally his associates. But all aged and infirm persons he deems fit company, because they, like himself, are busied in reviewing past impressions, rather than planning or plotting for a livelihood, or reasoning about ways and means. The past is his own, and he cons it over like a puzzling but at least an interesting lesson. If his soul have been trained to delight in truth, his will becomes weaned from this world of effort in proportion as he feels the weakness that disqualifies him from struggling on in it. Yet _in our ashes live their wonted fires:_ he feels an internal, a spiritual energy, awakening in a new manner the sympathies that belong to his being, and he feels as if his affections had been laid by to ripen into an intensity out of keeping with the usages and objects about him. He realises most fully the facts of a coming life, and even now lives apart from the present; and if his habits of reflection be not distracted, and his heart broken by hard and ignorant treatment, and if his soul have not been wedded to care by a love of gold without the possibility of divorce, and mammon have not branded his spirit with indelible misery, then is the old man ready to enter on a purely spiritual existence with alacrity and joy.

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Footnote 67:

_The Use of the Body to the Mind._

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PREPARATORY TO DEATH.

Jeremy Taylor, in his _Holy Dying_ (General Considerations Preparatory to Death), has this memorable passage, in which he illustrates the daily experiences of every thoughtful mind:

And because this consideration is of great usefulness and of great
necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit, all the
succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of
light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the
world, and every contingency to every man and to every creature,
doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the
old sexton Time throws up the earth and digs a grave where we must
lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies till they rise again
in a fair or in an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the
sun makes about the world divides between life and death; and death
possesses both those portions by the next morrow, and we are dead to
all those months which we have already lived, and we shall never
live them over again: and still God makes little periods of our age.
First we change our world, when we come from the womb to feel the
warmth of the sun. Then we sleep and enter into the image of death,
in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world
[who hath not felt this when stretched upon his bed at the close of
day?]: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy
our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but during
that state are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the
clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven
years our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal
prologue to the tragedy; and still every seven years it is odds but
we shall finish the last scene: and when nature, or chance, or vice,
takes our bodies in pieces, weakening some parts and loosing others,
we _taste the grave_ and the solemnities of our own funerals, first
in those parts that ministered to vice, and next in them that served
for ornament; and in a short time even they that served for
necessity become useless, and entangled like the wheels of a broken
clock. _Baldness_ is but a dressing to our funerals, the proper
ornament of mourning, and of a person entered very far into the
regions and possession of death: and we have many more of the same
signification: gray hairs, rotten teeth, dim eyes, trembling joints,
short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed
appetite. Every day’s necessity calls for a reparation of that
portion which death fed on all night when we lay in his lap and
slept in his outer chambers. The very spirits of a man prey upon the
daily portion of bread and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from
one death, and lays up for another: and while we think a thought we
die; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity;
we form our words with the breath of our nostrils, we have the less
to live upon for every word we speak.

Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are
the instruments of acting it: and God by all the variety of his
Providence makes us see death every where, in all variety of
circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the
expectation of every single person.

Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but death hath two: and
the spring and the autumn sends throngs of men and women to
charnel-houses; and all the summer long men are recovering from
their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the
Syrian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are
laid up for all the year’s provision, and the man that gathers them
eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid
up for eternity; and he that escapes till the winter only stays for
another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister
to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of
our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and
the winter’s cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring
brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf
and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold
and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to
death; and you can go no whither but you tread upon a dead man’s
bones.

DEATH BEFORE ADAM.

Two hundred years ago, long before the science of Geology called for the belief that mortality had been stamped on creation, and had manifested its proofs in the animal races previously to Adam’s appearance, Jeremy Taylor could write as follows regarding Adam himself before the Fall. He considers him to have been created mortal; not merely liable to become mortal, but actually mortal.

“For ‘flesh and blood,’ that is, whatsoever is born of Adam, ‘cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’ And they are injurious to Christ who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; ‘he brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.’”

Again: “For that Adam was made mortal in his nature is infinitely certain, and proved by his very eating and drinking, his sleep and recreation, &c.”

And in another passage, quoted by Professor Hitchcock: “That death which God threatened to Adam, and which passed upon his posterity, is not the going out of this world, but the manner of going. If he had stayed in innocence, he should have gone placidly and fairly, without vexatious and affective circumstances; he should not have died by sickness, defect, misfortune, or unwillingness.” These sentiments Archdeacon Pratt[68] quotes, not as necessarily approving them, but to show that so good and learned a man as Jeremy Taylor had a view regarding death and mortality no less unusual than that which Geology demands.

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Footnote 68:

_Science and Scripture not at Variance_, 2d ed. 1858.

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FUTURE EARTHLY EXISTENCE OF THE HUMAN RACE.

Regarding Man, independently of any revealed knowledge of his future destiny, but simply with reference to his relations with the physical world about him, Mr. Hopkins, the able geologist, asks: “Do we see in his character and position here any indication that this earth is his destined abiding place for indefinite periods of time? We conceive that a negative answer to the question is suggested at least by the fact that the extent of the earth’s surface and its powers of production are _finite_, whereas the tendency in human population to increase is unlimited. It is undoubtedly easy to conceive this tendency to be arrested, but not probably by causes consistent with the moral and physical well-being of the race. Whether human population may have increased or not during the last two thousand years, is a matter of little import, we conceive, to the question before us. We know that it is now spreading itself over many parts of the globe, under influences far different from those under which it has heretofore extended,—the influence of Christianity, and of that higher civilisation which must attend the pure doctrines of our religion. We believe that this extension and increase of the civilised races of mankind will continue; and, however it may be temporarily checked by the hardships and evils to which man is subject, we can hardly understand how this tendency can be effectively and finally arrested before the population of the globe shall have approximated to that limit which must be necessarily imposed upon it by the finite dimensions of man’s dwelling-place. We know not what might be the views of political economists on this ultimate condition of human population; but we feel it difficult to conceive its existence, under merely human influences, independently of physical want, and possibly of that moral debasement which so frequently attends it. In fact, those who regard man simply in his human character and in his relations to _nature_, and not in his relations to God, must find in his earthly future the most insoluble problem which can offer itself to the speculative philosopher. It would seem equally difficult to assign to the human race an indefinite term of existence, or to sweep it away by natural causes from the face of the earth. But it is in such questions as this that a steady faith in man’s Creator and Redeemer affords to the embarrassed mind a calm and welcome resting-place. Those who believe man’s introduction on the earth to have been a direct act of his Almighty Creator, will not think it necessary to look for his final earthly destiny in the operation of merely secondary causes, but will refer it to the same Divine Agency as that to which he refers the origin of the race.”[69]

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Footnote 69:

_Geology_, by William Hopkins, M.A., F.R.S.; _Cambridge Essays_, 1857.

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The School of Life.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

BISHOP BURNET seems to have given the reply in the fewest words when he observes: “The education of youth is the foundation of all that can be performed for bettering the next age.”

“Education,” says Paley, “in the most extensive sense of the word, may comprehend every preparation that is madef in our youth for the sequel of our lives; and in this sense I use it. Some such preparation is necessary for all conditions, because without it they must be miserable, and probably will be vicious, when they grow up, either from the want of the means of subsistence, or from want of rational and inoffensive occupation. In civilised life, every thing is affected by art and skill. Whence a person who is provided with neither (and neither can be acquired without exercise and instruction) will be useless, and he that is useless will generally be at the same time mischievous, to the community. So that to send an uneducated child into the world is injurious to the rest of mankind; it is little better than to turn out a mad dog or a wild-beast into the streets.”

Who are the uneducated? is a question not easily to be answered in a time when books have come to be household furniture in every habitation of the civilised world. All that men have contrived, discovered, done, felt, or imagined, is recorded in books; wherein whoso has learned to spell printed letters may find such knowledge, and turn it to advantageous account.

D’Israeli the younger, in one of his politico-economic speeches, remarks: “As civilisation has gradually progressed, it has equalised the physical qualities of man. Instead of the strong arm, it is now the strong head that is the moving principle of society. You have disenthroned Force, and placed on her high seat Intelligence; and the necessary consequence of this great revolution is, that it has become the duty and the delight equally of every citizen to cultivate his faculties.”

TEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN.

Coleridge relates that Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. “I showed him my garden,” says Coleridge, “and told him it was my botanical garden.” “How so?” said he; “it is covered with weeds.” “Oh!” I replied, “that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds you see have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries.”

Madame de Lambert, in her work _Sur l’Education d’une jeune Demoiselle_, says: “The greatest enemy that we have to combat in the education of children is self-love; and to this enemy we cannot give attention too early. Our business is to weaken it, and we must be careful not to strengthen it by indiscriminate praise. Frequent praise encourages pride, induces a child to value herself as superior to her companions, and renders her unable to bear any reproach or objection however mild. We should be cautious, even in the expression of affection, not to lead children to suppose that we are constantly occupied with them. Timid children may be encouraged by praise; but it must be judiciously bestowed, and for their good conduct, not for personal graces. Above all things, it is necessary to inspire them with a love of truth; to teach them to practise it at their own expense; and to impress it upon their minds that there is nothing so truly great as the frank acknowledgment, ‘I am wrong.’”

Harriet Martineau observes: “It is a matter of course that no mother will allow any ignorant person to have access to her child who will frighten it with goblin stories or threats of the old black man. She might as well throw up her charge at once, and leave off thinking of household education altogether, as permit her child to be exposed to such maddening inhumanity as this. The instances are not few of idiotcy or death from terror so caused.”

Children should not be hedged-in with any great number of rules and regulations. Such as are necessary to be established, they should be required implicitly to observe. But there should be none that are superfluous. It is only in rich families, where there is a plentiful attendance of governors and nurses, that many rules can be enforced; and it is believed that the constant attention of governors and nurses is one of the greatest moral disadvantages to which the children of the rich are exposed.

Coleridge has well said: “The most graceful objects in nature are little children—before they have learned to dance.”

“Grace,” says Archbishop Whately, “is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation, or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them ‘elegant’ animals would be absurd. Lastly, ‘elegant’ may be applied to mental qualifications, which ‘graceful’ never can. Elegance must always imply something that is made or invented by man. An imitation of nature is not so; therefore we do not speak of an ‘elegant picture,’ though we do of an elegant pattern for a gown, an elegant piece of work. The general rule is, that elegance is the characteristic of art, and grace of nature.”

EDUCATION AT HOME.

Education at Home has been thus aptly illustrated: History and Geography should begin at home. If we want a boy to know some day the families of the Herods and the Cæsars, let him start by learning who was his own grandfather. The Church Catechism rightly commences by making the child tell his own name; it would be in many cases almost puzzling, but in all cases and senses a most proper question, to ask him, further, the names of his godfathers and godmothers; and so carrying him gradually onward, he would know, what seldom happens, the kings of England before he attempts those of Israel and Judah. This principle holds as true of places as of persons. The things that touch us nearest interest us most. Geography should begin from the school-walls: “Which side of this room does the sun rise on?” “Does Church-lane run west or north?” “Whither does the brook flow that rises on Squash-hill?” In this way the young scholar would in time be brought to comprehend the round world and his own position on it, and probably with some clearer perception of the truth and relation of things than if he had begun by rote: “The earth is a terraqueous globe, depressed at the poles, consisting of,” &c. But we are all taught on the contrary plan. We begin at the wrong end; for, in the ladder of learning, _Ego_, not Adam, is the true No. 1. We start from the equator instead of High-street, and the result is the lamentable fact, that even educated men are strangers in their own country, and thousands die within the sound of Bow-bells who have never seen the inside of St. Paul’s. Topography, then, should precede geography. Yet perhaps there is not a schoolroom in England where a county map is to be found hung up on the wall. Frightened by the remembrance of having been once the deluded subscriber to a Topographical Dictionary, even students have a horror of the word; and the subject is consigned, in expensive folios, to a few professed antiquaries, or to some eccentric member of a county family, who emerges every third or fourth generation to preserve a provincial dignity which he would not willingly let die.[70]

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Footnote 70:

_Quarterly Review._

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TENDERNESS OF YOUTH.

Leaving home the first time, for school, has been thus pathetically described by Southey: “The pain which is felt when we are first transplanted from our native soil, when the living branch is cut from the parent tree, is one of the most poignant griefs which we have to endure through life. There are after-griefs which wound more deeply, which leave behind them scars never to be effaced, which bruise the spirit, and sometimes break the heart: but never do we feel so keenly the want of love, the necessity of being loved, and the utter sense of desertion, as when we first leave the haven of home, and are, as it were, pushed off upon the stream of life.” Nelson, when he was sent a boy first to rough it out at sea, felt this loneliness most acutely: he paced the deck most of the day without being noticed by any one; and it was not till the second day that somebody, as he expresses it, “took compassion on him.” Nelson had a feeble body and an affectionate heart, and he remembered through life his first days of wretchedness in the service.

Humanity to animals has been thus eloquently enjoined upon children by Dr. Parr: “He that can look with rapture upon the agonies of an unoffending and unresisting animal, will soon learn to view the sufferings of a fellow-creature with indifference: and in time he will acquire the power of viewing them with triumph, if that fellow-creature should become the victim of his resentment, be it just or unjust. But the minds of children are open to impressions of every sort, and indeed wonderful is the facility with which a judicious instructor may habituate them to tender emotions. I have therefore always considered mercy to beings of an inferior species as a virtue which children are very capable of learning, but which is most difficult to be taught if the heart has been once familiarised to spectacles of distress, and has been permitted either to behold the pangs of any living creature with cold insensibility, or to inflict them with wanton barbarity.”

BUSINESS OF EDUCATION.

Among the many recommendations which will always attach to a public system of education, the value of early emulation, the force of example, the abandonment of sulky and selfish habits, and the acquirement of generous, manly dispositions, are not to be overlooked. To begin at the beginning is the only royal road to learning; and this is only to be reached by attention to elementary truths. Yet this is difficult, even for cultivated men. “In reality,” says Dr. Temple, “elementary truths are the hardest of all to learn, unless we pass our childhood in an atmosphere thoroughly impregnated with them; and then we imbibe them unconsciously, and find it difficult to perceive their difficulty.”[71] Yet how few children have this advantage: so many false impressions are received in childhood, that the first business of education proper is to _unlearn_.

The superior influence of example over precept is thus eloquently illustrated by Carlyle: “Is not love, from of old, known to be the beginning of all things? And what is admiration of the great but love of the truly lovable? The first product of love is imitation, that all-important peculiar gift of man, whereby mankind is not only held socially together in the present time, but connected in like union with the past and future; so that the attainment of the innumerable departed can be conveyed down to the living, and transmitted with increase to the unborn. Now, great men, in particular spiritually great men (for all men have a spirit to guide, though all have not kingdoms to govern and battles to fight), are the men universally imitated and learned of, the glass in which whole generations survey and shape themselves.”

Lord Jeffrey has remarked upon the necessity of early restraint, that

Young people who have been habitually gratified in all their desires
will not only more indulge in capricious desires, but will
infallibly take it more amiss when the feelings or happiness of
others require that they should be thwarted, than those who have
been practically trained to the habit of subduing and restraining
them; and consequently will in general sacrifice the happiness of
others to their own selfish indulgence. To what else is the
selfishness of princes and other great people to be attributed? It
is in vain to think of cultivating principles of generosity and
beneficence by mere exhortation and reasoning. Nothing but the
_practical habit_ of overcoming our own selfishness, and of
familiarly encountering privations and discomfort on account of
others, will ever enable us to do it when required. And therefore I
am firmly persuaded that indulgence infallibly produces selfishness
and hardness of heart, and that nothing but a pretty severe
discipline and control can lay the foundation of a magnanimous
character.

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Footnote 71:

_Education of the World._

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THE CLASSICS.

Especially was Dr. Arnold an orthodox Oxonian in his belief of the indispensable usefulness of Classical Learning, not only as an important branch of knowledge, but as the substantial basis of education itself, the importance of which he thus forcibly illustrates: “The study of Greek and Latin, considered as mere languages, is of importance mainly as it enables us to understand and employ well that language in which we commonly think and speak and write. It does this because Greek and Latin are specimens of language at once highly perfect and incapable of being understood without long and minute attention: the study of them, therefore, naturally involves that of the general principles of grammar; while their peculiar excellences illustrate the points which render language clear and forcible and beautiful. But our _application_ of this general knowledge must naturally be to our own language: to show us what are its peculiarities, what its beauties, what its defects; to teach us, by the patterns or the analogies offered by other languages, how the effect we admire in them may be produced with a somewhat different instrument. Every lesson in Greek or Latin may and ought to be made a lesson in English; the translation of every sentence in Demosthenes or Tacitus is properly an extemporaneous English composition; a problem, how to express with equal brevity, clearness, and force, in our own language, the thought which the original author has so admirably expressed in his.”

In other words, Dr. Arnold was the first English commentator who gave life to the study of the Classics, by bringing the facts and manners which they disclose to the test of real life.

Mr. Buckle, siding with the anti-classicists, remarks that, “With the single exception of Porson, not one of the great English scholars has shown an appreciation of the beauties of his native language; and many of them, such as Parr (in all his works) and Bentley (in his mad edition of Milton) have done every thing in their power to corrupt it. And there can be little doubt that the principal reason why well-educated women write and converse in a purer style than well-educated men, is because they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be introduced into a state of society unfitted for them. To this may be added, that Cobbett, the most racy and idiomatic of all our writers, and Erskine, by far the greatest of our forensic orators, knew little or nothing of any ancient language; and the same observation applies to Shakspeare.”[72]

Our author has been just to Porson, to whom chiefly English scholarship owes its accuracy and its certainty; and this as a branch of education—as a substratum on which to rest other branches of knowledge often infinitely more useful in themselves—really takes as high a rank as any of those studies which can contribute to form the character of a well-educated English gentleman.

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Footnote 72:

_History of Civilisation in England._

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LIBERAL EDUCATION.

Dean Hook has written the following able defence of a Liberal Education, as distinguished from the special training for a profession:

A Liberal Education is to the present time the characteristic of
what is called a University Education. By a liberal education is
meant a non-professional education. By a non-professional education
is meant an education conducted without reference to the future
profession, or calling, or special pursuit for which the person
under education is designed. It is an education which is regarded
not merely as a means, but as something which is in itself an end.
The end proposed is not the formation of the divine, or the
physician, or the lawyer, or the statesman, or the soldier, or the
man of business, or the botanist, or the chemist, or the man of
science, or even the scholar; but simply of the thinker.

It is admitted that the highest eminence can only be attained by the
concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness
of view, upon one field of action. In order to excel, each mind must
have its specific end. A man may know many things well, but there is
only one thing upon which he will be preëminently learned, and
become an authority. The professional man may be compared to one
whose eye is fixed upon a microscope. The rest of the world is
abstracted from his field of vision, and the eye, though narrowed to
a scarcely perceptible hole, is able to see what is indiscernible by
others. When he observes accurately, he becomes, in his department,
a learned man; and when he reveals his observations, he is a
benefactor of his kind. All that the university system does is to
delay the professional education as long as possible; it would apply
to the training of the mind a discipline analogous to that which
common sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise. A father,
ambitious for his son that he might win the prize at the Olympian
games or in the Pythian fields, devoted his first attention not to
the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and
morals of the youth. The success of the athlete depended upon his
first becoming a healthy man. So the university system trains the
man, and defers the professional education as long as circumstances
will permit. It makes provision, before the eye is narrowed to the
microscope, that the eye itself shall be in a healthy condition; it
expands the mind before contracting it; it would educate mind as
such before bending it down to the professional point; it does not
regard the mind as an animal to be fattened for the market, by
cramming it with food before it has acquired the power of digestion,
but treats it rather as an instrument to be tuned, as a metal to be
refined, as a weapon to be sharpened.

This is the system which the old universities of Europe have
inherited.

Philology, logic, and mathematics are still the instruments employed
for the discipline of the mind, which is the end and object of a
Liberal Education.[73]

The best education has been thus bodied forth: “Let a man’s pride be to be a gentleman: furnish him with elegant and refined pleasures, imbue him with the love of intellectual pursuits, and you have a better security for his turning out a good citizen and a good Christian, than if you have confined him by the strictest moral and religious discipline, kept him in innocent and unsuspecting ignorance of all the vices of youth, and in the mechanical and orderly routine of the severest system of education.”[74]

---------------------
Footnote 73:

_Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury._

Footnote 74:

_Quarterly Review_, No. 103.

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DR. ARNOLD’S SCHOOL REFORM.

Dr. Arnold, from his entering upon the head-mastership of Rugby, threw himself into the great work of school reform, based upon the associations of his boyhood, and the convictions of his more mature experience. “To do his duty was the height of his ambition,—those truly English sentiments by which Nelson and Wellington were inspired; and, like them, he was crowned with victory; for soon were verified the predictions of the Provost of Oriel, that _he would change the face of education through the public schools of England_. He was minded, _virtute officii_, to combine the care of souls with that of the intellects of the rising generation, and to realise the Scripture in principle and practice, without making an English school a college of Jesuits. His principles were few: the fear of God was the beginning of his wisdom; and his object was not so much to teach knowledge, as the means of acquiring it; to furnish, in a word, the key to the temple. He desired to awaken the intellect of each individual boy, and contended that the main movement must come from within and not from without the pupil; and that all that could be, should be _done by_ him and not _for_ him. In a word, his scheme was to call forth in the little world of school those capabilities which best befitted the boy for his career in the great one.”[75]

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Footnote 75:

_Quarterly Review_, No. 204. In the latter sentence is conveyed the
advantage which education in a large school has over education at
home.

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SCHOOL INDULGENCE.

Nothing is more prejudicial to after-success in life than indulgence to youth when at school. Sir James Mackintosh felt and acknowledged this error. He tells us that when he left school he could only imperfectly construe a small part of Virgil, Horace, and Sallust: he adds, “Whatever I have done beyond, has been since added by my own irregular reading. But no subsequent circumstance could make up for that invaluable habit of vigorous and methodical industry which the indulgence and irregularity of my school-life prevented me from acquiring, and of which I have painfully felt the want in every part of my life.”

Another mistake is a profuse allowance of Pocket-money at School: we once heard an old Westminster declare that to his unlimited supply of money when at the college he attributed over-indulgence in luxuries which had injured his health, and often rendered him the dupe of mean and designing persons—full-grown parasites—mischievous as the plants of that name, which bear down the trees they attack, and rob them of the food intended for their own leaves and fruit.

UNSOUND TEACHING.

The general unsoundness of what is termed an English education is, to a great extent, accounted for by the little attention paid in the Universities, Colleges, and Schools to teaching our native language, and especially to the proper teaching of English in schools for the people. The results of this neglect of the mother-tongue are multitudinous. “The mass of our population, in spite of all that has been done, must be considered densely ignorant. Millions never open a book. Nearly fifteen millions never enter church or chapel. Other causes may operate, but the want of a knowledge of language is a potent one. People whose vocabulary is limited to about three hundred words cannot follow a sermon, and clergymen who have never been taught the value of plain Saxon English cannot preach one. Then, amongst the middle and upper classes, how superficial is the knowledge of English. How few can write a common letter without faults in grammar, choice of words, or spelling. Punctuation is absolutely ignored by many. What are the speeches at public meetings, or rather, how would they appear in print but for the talent of the reporters, who bring order out of chaos? The results of the Civil-Service Examinations abundantly prove the justice of these strictures; and the fruits of University training, or rather non-training, are too patent to require illustration. Our clergy often carry into the prayer-desk and pulpit all the defects of early life,—the provincial accent, the sing-song tone, the nasal twang, the lisp, or burr, or stammer; indistinct utterance, inaudible reading and vociferation, wrong emphasis, undue stress on enclitics, and many other faults. Good sermons are the exception rather than the rule; for if sound in doctrine and full of zeal, the style is often obscure or pedantic or inflated, and the delivery monotonous and soporific. In the Senate, though most of the Members are University men, there are but few really effective speakers. Were our senators trained to speak well—that is, to the point—much time would be saved, and public business despatched more rapidly.”

The remedies suggested by the Rev. Dr. D’Orsey are:

1. Training-schools for nursery governesses, who, without knowing or
pretending to know French and Italian, should speak English without
vulgarisms. 2. Greater attention in our present training colleges
for schoolmasters to due instruction in English, especially in
correct and fluent speaking. 3. More encouragement to men of talent
and education to become and to remain schoolmasters, by holding out
the prospect of honourable offices to distinguished teachers. Why
should Inspectorships of Schools be always given to clergymen and
barristers, to the exclusion of the schoolmaster? 4. The appointment
of a thoroughly accomplished scholar as English Master in every
great public school, of equal rank with the other masters. 5. The
endowment of at least one Professorship in every University. 6. The
recognition of English as a subject in every examination not
strictly scientific, and rewarding distinction in composition or
oratory in the same substantial manner as eminence in classics or
mathematics.

Sir John Coleridge relates the following inefficient examples of school-teaching which have come under his observation: “An Examiner was about, and he had a class before him—the first class in arithmetic. They were able to answer questions; they had gone through all the higher branches of arithmetic, and were prepared to answer any thing. But he said, ‘I will give you a sum in simple addition.’ He accordingly dictated a sum, and cautiously interspersed a good many ciphers. Suppose, for instance, he said, ‘a thousand and forty-nine.’ He found there was not one in the class who was able to put down that sum in simple addition; they could not make count of the ciphers. That showed him the boys had been suffered to pass over far too quickly the elementary parts of arithmetic. The examiner took them in grammar, and quoted a few lines from Cowper—

I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute.

‘What governs right?’ There was not a boy could say, till it was put to them, ‘none to dispute my right.’

“Let me impress upon you that the best motto you can take for yourselves in this respect is that which was taken by a most eminent man who made his way from a hair-dresser’s shop to be Chief Justice Tenterden. What was his motto? When a man is made a judge, he is made a serjeant; and as serjeant he gives rings to some of the great officers of State, with a motto upon each. His motto was ‘Labore.’ He did not refer to his own talents. It was not ‘Invita Minerva.’ To his immortal honour be it said—from the hair-dresser’s shop in Canterbury to the Free School in Canterbury; from the Free School in Canterbury to Corpus Christi College; from Corpus Christi College to the bar; from the bar to the bench; from the bench to the peerage—he achieved all with unimpeachable honour, and always practising that which was his motto at last. One of the most gratifying scenes I have ever witnessed was when that man went up to the House of Peers in his robes for the first time, attended by the whole bar of England.”

SELF-FORMATION.

The one great object—the finality—of rational Education is Self-instruction. In mind as well as body we are children at first, only that we may afterwards become men; dependent upon others, in order that we may learn from them such lessons as may tend eventually to our edification on an independent basis of our own. The knowledge of facts, or what is generally called learning, however much we may possess of it, is useful so far only as we erect its materials into a mental framework; but useless, utterly, as long as we suffer it to lie in a heap, inert and without form. The instruction of others, compared with self-instruction, is like the law compared with faith; a discipline of preparation, beggarly elements, a schoolmaster to lead us on to a state of greater worthiness, and there give up the charge of us.

“Every man,” says Gibbon, “who rises above the common level, receives two educations—the first from his instructors; the second, the most personal and important, from himself.” Almost all Lord Eldon’s legal education was from himself, without even the ordinary helps, which he disdainfully flung from him; and of no one could it be more truly predicated, that he was not “rocked and dandled” into a lawyer.

The Rev. Sydney Smith has thus sketched a scheme, in which he deems it of the highest importance that the education of a British youth were directed to the true principles of legislation: what effect laws can produce upon opinions, and opinions upon laws; what subjects are fit for legislative interference, and when men may be left to the management of their own interests. The mischief occasioned by bad laws, and the perplexity which arises from a multiplicity of laws; the causes of national wealth; the relations of foreign trade; the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures; the fictitious wealth occasioned by paper-credit; the use and abuse of monopoly; the theory of taxation; the consequences of the public debt: these are some of the subjects and some of the branches of civil education, to which we would turn the minds of future judges, future senators, and future noblemen. After the first period of life had been given up to the cultivation of the classics, and the remaining powers were beginning to evolve themselves, these are some of the propensities in study which we would endeavour to inspire.

PRACTICAL DISCIPLINE.

The want of Practical Discipline has been thus put by a writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_: “What is the use of battering a man’s brains full of Greek and Latin pothooks, that he forgets before he doffs his last round-jacket or puts on his first long-tailed blue, if ye don’t teach him the old Spartan virtue of obedience, hard living, early rising, and them sort of classics? Where’s the use of instructing him in hexameters or pentameters, if you would leave him in ignorance of the value of a pennypiece? What height of stupidity it is to be fillin’ a boy’s brains with the wisdom of the ancients, and then turn him out like an _omadhaum_, to pick up his victuals among the moderns!”

With equal truth, but finer humour, has Sydney Smith, at his own expense, exposed this neglect of the practical as a fair indication of the mode of English education. He is writing to his publisher, whom he tells: “I have twice endeavoured to write the word _skipping_—‘_skipping spirit_.’ Your printer first printed it ’stripling,’ and then altered it into _stripping_. The fault is entirely mine. I was fifteen years at school and college—I know something about the Romans and the Athenians, and have read a good deal about the præter-perfect tense—but I cannot do a sum in simple addition, or _write a handwriting which any body can read_.”

“CRAMMING.”

Cramming, which in our time was a cant term in the Universities for the art of preparing a student to pass an examination by furnishing him beforehand with the requisite answers, has travelled far beyond the tether of Oxford or Cambridge. Its abuse is well described by Watts: “As a man may be eating all day, and for want of digestion is never nourished, so these endless readers may cram themselves in vain with intellectual food.” It reminds one also of the Baconian saw—of those who can pack the cards, yet know not how to play them.

A president Examiner of articled clerks at the Law Institution has observed upon this forcing system:

I for one, and I am glad of the opportunity of expressing it, abhor
all Cramming; and I hold very cheaply the system of Competitive
Examination, which is nowadays begun almost in the nursery, and
thought so highly of in some quarters as a test. It is not to be
expected, without inverting the natural order of things, that a
youth of twenty or twenty-one should have exhausted those stores of
learning which Coke speaks of as requiring not less than the
_lucubrationes viginti annorum_; and remember that those twenty
years would begin at that period of life on which most of you are
now but entering. In this view the papers before you have been
prepared, and our aim as examiners has been to set such questions as
will prove you to possess the elements of a liberal education; and
that you have so far acquired the principles of common law, equity,
conveyancing, criminal law, and bankruptcy, that you are entitled to
enter upon the practice of your profession, leaving its complete
mastery to that experience which time alone can supply. I need not
remind you of the men who, beginning as attorneys, have attained to
high positions in the State. The portrait of Lord Chancellor Truro
hangs before you on these walls. I had the privilege of knowing him
personally; his example may well stimulate your ambition, and
animate your exertions, for never man won high place with more
unremitting labour than he did; not, however, at the expense of his
childhood or of his youth, not by the sacrifice of all else for mere
mental culture, but by the full-grown energies, by the well-directed
vigour and power of the man, for he was between thirty and forty
years of age before he was called to the bar.

MATHEMATICS.

Mathematics drew from Edmund Gurney the odd definition, that “a mathematician is like one that goes to market to buy an axe to break an egg.”

Bacon complains that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye, and a body ready to put itself into any postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended. And as for the Mixed Mathematics, I only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed;” thus foretelling the advance of Natural Philosophy.

However, the understanding of Applied Mathematics is not unattainable under ordinary circumstances. Lord Rosse has observed that, without any special mathematical knowledge, a well-informed man may often, in the results announced, and from the observations elicited, obtain very interesting glimpses of the nature of mathematical processes, and some general idea as to the progress making in that direction. In applied mathematics there is much more of general interest, and the results are often perfectly intelligible without special education. In proof of this Lord Rosse adduces, that “at the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, the general results of a very abstruse investigation in applied mathematics in physical astronomy were made very interesting. The subject was so brought forward as to rivet the attention of the whole section, and there were many ladies present. The paper was given in by M. Leverrier, and the subject was the identification of a comet. How wonderful from its origin has been the progress of mathematical science! Beginning perhaps three thousand years ago almost from nothing—one simple relation of magnitude suggesting another, and those relations gradually becoming more complicated, more interesting, I may add more important, till at length in our day it has expanded into a science which enables us to _weigh the planets_, and, more wonderful still, to calculate the course they will take when acted continually upon by forces varying in magnitude and direction.”