and a dancer; then relatives and parents of exceptional infamy. He was the wild beast of the Apocalypse, the Emperor Nero. On the other hand, consider how many have borne testimony to the truth that a child trained in the way wherein he should go, will not depart from it; will not wholly, will not finally depart from it, at the worst will not so wholly and so finally depart from it as if he had not been rightly trained. "I bless God heartily," said Lord Russell on the scaffold, "that I had the advantage of a religious education; for even when I minded it least, it still hung about me and gave me checks."

2. Then, besides this vast importance of the effects he may produce, no wise and good teacher should ever forget the rapid intense impressions often, alas! unconscious, unintended impressions—which, for good or for evil, he will inevitably produce. Every biography is full of the little things, the apparently infinitesimal trifles, which have guided or moulded human careers. We all know the story of King Alfred and the illuminated missal. Sir W. Jones attributed his learning to his mother's invariable answer to his questions, "Read and you will know." The first impulse which swayed the genius of Vauban, the great engineer of his age, was being shut up in a room which had nothing in it but a clock. "That picture," said Turner, pointing to a mezzotint of Vandervelde, which he had seen as a boy, "made me a painter." Mr. Ruskin attributes his Art impulses, in no small measure, to his tracing out the patterns of the carpet, when, as a little boy, he had no toys to amuse him. Darwin tells us how the engraving of a tropic scene in one of his books, as a child, ultimately culminated in his accompanying, as a naturalist, the voyage of the Beagle. When we visit Rugby, they show us Arnold's table, with the inscription on it, written by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, "In hâc sellâ Arnoldus literas docebat. . . . Ad virtutis veritatisque amorem Domini Jesu invitationem, voce, fronte, moribus suos excitabat." I remember, years ago, when Dr. Benson, then a Rugby master, showed me the inscription, I told him that the word which struck me most was "fronte." Arnold's very look, the look of a good as well as of a strong and resolute man, was an education to his pupils. For this reason I am convinced that no bad man can ever be a good teacher. Boys catch the very tones of their Head-masters, and, in examining written answers, you may almost tell what school a Sixth Form boy comes from, if you know his master's handwriting. Teachers have a vaster power in their grasp than any which they can imagine. Humboldt, on the banks of the Orinoco, saw the naked copper-colored children of the Indians rubbing the shining seeds of the Negretia, and amusing themselves by attracting straws and feathers with them. How little did those Indian children guess, how little did even the wisest ancients know, when they observed the attractive powers of rubbed amber, and called it EKTOV, that the force which they were eliciting was the same force which crashes in the thunder, and flames in the lightning! and yet that

men should soon learn to seize it by its wing of fire, and bid it carry their messages in a moment round the girdled globe; or, with its wild spirit tamed to service of commodity, should make their nightly cities as bright as day! But what is the lightning to the spirit of man?

"How swift is the glance of the mind!

Compared with the speed of its flight,

The tempest itself lags behind,

And the swift-speeding arrows of light."

Understand it, train it, direct it rightly, and you shall send it flashing through the generations, flashing over all the world.

3. Now, in teaching and training, one of your first requisites will be the power of Discipline. It is a curious gift. You cannot by any means always predict who would, or who would not, be likely to possess it. I have known some teachers, very great and very eminent men, who were wholly without it. One of these was my dear friend and teacher, Frederic Denison Maurice. You could not meet a truer man, or look on a nobler face. I had the great advantage of being for three years his pupil at King's College. We all knew that he was a great man, an honored man, a deep thinker,-many of us longed to learn from him; yet, again and again, his lectures at King's College used to be interrupted by childish and brainless disturbances, which either would not have occurred at all, or could have been instantly suppressed by many a graduate of the most commonplace attainments. Another great man wholly devoid of powers of discipline, was my dear friend and fellow-undergraduate, James Clerk Maxwell. His lectures, when he did lecture to large promiscuous bodies of youths, were often a mere bear-garden, in which he was helpless-strong and great and good as he was either to control or to teach. The special gift of disciplinary power—such a gift as that possessed by Pestalozzi, who once reduced to order a turbulent throng of boys by simply lifting his finger -is very rare; the total absence of it is also very rare. It is a sort of knack which may be acquired. When authority is firmly, kindly, justly exercised-when the teacher is calm, and without nervousness, and means both to rule and to teach-when he shows from the first the "comitate condita gravitas," he does not often fail. Most men, after a little preliminary experience, become at least moderate disciplinarians. When I first went to Marlborough as an Assistant-master, in 1854, one so utterly inexperienced, and so exceptionally ignorant of boys, and of Public Schools, and indeed of the commonest facts of life, as I was, might well have thought the task very formidable. The school was in the detumescence of a most ruinous rebellion. The first sight which caught my eye was an inscription on the wall in chalk, in foot-long letters, "Bread or Blood." I was told a curious history of some of my boys:-how the temper of one was absolutely ungovernable; how another had recently bored a hole into a gas-pipe with a red-hot poker; how the windows of the common-room used, not long before, to be

broken with stones; how, in one master's form, the boys used to catch mice and let them loose. Moreover, I was put to teach, as none of you will be, in a huge schoolroom, in which some six other large forms were being simultaneously taught. The circumstances were so distracting that, in one of my first letters to a Cambridge friend, I said, that to be a teacher one needed the voice of a Stentor, the hands of a Briareus, and the eyes of an Argus. But I soon found that, if a teacher have but the most moderate powers, he is effectually supported, not only by the natural and inherent good sense and right feeling of his scholars, but also by the routine, the discipline, and the traditions of a great school. I discovered in later days, that when, in a great English Public School, a Head-master turned his head, it was enough to reduce a noisy room to silence. The other day, the schoolroom of a certain great school, on a wintry morning, was a tempest of contagious coughs. Now, nothing is more difficult than to keep down coughing. The Head-master got disturbed; he simply said, in the quietest possible voice, "Less noise if you please; repress your coughing, "-and lo! not one cough was heard again till prayers were over. At Marlborough, as a very young Assistant-master, I had the quite inestimable blessing of a beautiful example. Surrounded by difficulties, in a school just out of rebellion, at that time badly fed, and not long before inadequately officered, so crushed with debt that almost the first thing Bishop Cotton said to me was, "You know this school may disappear any day in blue smoke," I saw how, by patience, by humor, by tact, by wisdom, by goodness, by fearless courage, by firm inflexible justice, he became to that school a second founder, and a name and tradition of good for ever. In a moral and intellectual, if not in a physical sense, “Lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit." It is needless to say that he was a good disciplinarian.

If, after a year's experience, a man cannot keep boys in perfect order, he will save himself much misery and much obstructiveness, if, as I have advised many a young graduate to do,-for his own sake, and still more for the sake of others-he will choose another career.

4. But I should give this advice, even more strongly, if a master can indeed keep discipline, but it is only the discipline of death; only a discipline maintained by constant punishments. Who can estimate the evil which has been done by centuries of flogging? I quite admit that many a rough nature, trained upon it, has not been much the worse for it. But, if you want to estimate the harm it has done, read De Quincey's Autobiography. As a young boy, I was trained under that system. I was certainly diligent, I was not exceptionally stupid; but yet I was for some time among the victims of Orbilius. For every mistake in the multiplication table-for every slip in an "Arnold's Exercise "-for every bad piece of construing, the formula used to be, "Hold out your hand"; and there followed an excruciating blow across the tender part of the palm. In my early school days, I have, as an every-day

matter, seen backs scored with red and blue weals, which, in these days, would secure, in favor of the most mischievous street Arab, a verdict in any police court. Down to times so recent has the pestilent practice of the plagosus Orbilius reigned supreme. They still show at Rome the birch of the saintly Gregory. I should like every schoolmaster to read the wise advice and reproof of St. Anselm to the Abbot who complained that he never ceased beating the boys at his school day or night, and that they grew up dull and brutal. But the Saint's advice was not remembered. Longchamps, Bishop of Ely, in Richard I.'s time, used to prick his pages with an ox-goad. English literature, from Skelton, who tells us how his back was "scooryd" at school, and Piers Plowman, who says, "You maked the boye so sore with beatyng that he coulde not speake a worde,"-down to Pope, who talks of the birch blushing with patrician blood, and Coleridge, who describes the flaggellations habitually inflicted by the Rev. J. Bowyer, and De Quincey, who tells how a brutal flogging drove forth his beautiful brother 66 Pink a wanderer in the world,-English literature is full of this gross cruelty. Agnes Paston, in 1457, writes to Greenfield a request that, if her boy at Eton has not done well, “he will truly belash him.” She beat her daughter once or twice a week, sometimes twice a day, and broke her head in two or three places. It is said that Lady Russell, daughter of Sir Antony Cook, beat her little son by a former marriage to death, for a blot on his copy-book.

Every one knows how Lady Jane Grey describes the treatment which she received from her own parents, unless she did everything "so perfitely as God made the world." "I am so sharply taunted," she says, "“so cruellie threatened, yea, presentlie sometimes with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name,-so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell." Every one knows how a brutal pedagogue showed off his discipline to Erasmus, by calling up a boy, and shamefully beating him for nothing at all, and simply "pour encourager les autres." One is reminded by these quotations, of what Plautus wrote not far from two millenniums earlier:

66

Quum librum legeres si una peccavisses sullaba,

Fieret corium tam maculosum quam'st nutricis pallium."

It is literally only in this generation that this reign of terror has wholly ceased. Even in Mr. Bosworth Smith's Life of Lord Lawrence, we read that he, when asked whether he had ever been flogged as a boy, replied with grim satisfaction and Spartan brevity, "I was flogged every day of my life at school except one, and then I was flogged twice.” If the Teachers' Syndicate had existed in old days, one hopes that such a system would long ago have received its death-blow. And here let me give my deliberate testimony, from six years' experience as Headmaster of a school of more than 580 boys, that well-trained English boys may be guided by a thread; and that, in a good English school, corporal punishment may be so much minimized as to be wholly exceptional, and in some of the best schools almost entirely unknown.

5. But I would apply the spirit of the remark much more widely. I would say, that in ordinary teaching, the more you punish in any way, the worse master you are; that he is the best master who needs to punish least; and that, if such a thing should exist as a perfect master, it is probable that, so far as mere teaching is concerned, he would never have to punish at all. "Impositions, ""lessons to write out," "lines," "abstracts," whatever they are called, are, in the essence of them, confessions of weakness. They are in many respects injurious, and there is very little to be said for them. "Write me out five hundred lines of Homer, with all the accents." I have known masters say that, perhaps in a moment of anger, perhaps for no moral fault; but, what a bad punishment! Scarcely ever will the good master have to resort to such a method. When a form sees that he is in earnest; that lessons must be learnt; that if they are neglected from idleness, they will have to be said again; where the master is endowed with such gifts, that he can encourage, help, sympathize, inspire, -he will either find punishments all but extinct, or he will measure by their frequency his own incapacity, and his own failure.

6. And I would still further apply the remark to abuse, taunts, sarcasm. I have known masters who habitually shout at their boys, "little fool," "little idiot," "little ass," and so on. A master is very ill-advised to use such language; he cannot do it without great and serious loss of dignity. I have known a master upbraid a boy with stupidity. Now there is a moral anaesthesia-a dementation preceding doom-which may sometimes deserve such an epithet; although "hebetes et indociles pauci admodum; in pueris elucet spes plurimorum." But, if a boy be really and congenitally dull-dull, that is, in certain subjects, for a boy dull in all subjects is very rare-“falsa enim est querela paucissimis hominibus vim percipiendi quæ tradantur esse concessam, "-it is as shameful and useless a cruelty to taunt him with being stupid, as to taunt him, as Lord Byron's mother used her son, with a personal defect. A clever and quick master, worried by a heavy, obstinate boy, may be tempted to keen sarcasm. I hold that, except to suppress insolent vice-in which case sarcasm may be used as keen as a razor's edge-such sarcasm is an inexcusable tyranny. I once knew a boy, now in an important position, and an honored and useful member of society, who somehow seemed to invite ridicule, partly by his absence of humor, partly by his peculiarities. Now Bishop Cotton had a singular fund of dry but inimitable humor, and one day he made the whole class laugh by his satirical criticisms of this boy. When the lesson was over, the boy waited, went up to the master, and said with quiet dignity," Sir, I am not clever; I dare say my work is very poor; but it is not my fault. I do my best, and I do not think it just that you should make me your laughing-stock." Cotton listened to him with kind sympathy, and-such is the characteristic mark of a good man-he was never once known to use his powers of sarcasm in the