describes in the way of its removal, tended to aggravate the evil. When first he entered on his post at Rugby, there was a general feeling in the country, that so long as a boy kept himself from offences sufficiently enormous to justify expulsion, he had a kind of right to remain in a public school; that the worse and more troublesome to parents were their sons, the more did a public school seem the precise remedy for them; that the great end of a public school, in short, was to flog their vices out of bad boys. Hence much indignation was excited when boys were sent away for lesser offences; an unfailing supply of vicious sons was secured, and scrupulous parents were naturally reluctant to expose their boys to the influence of such associates.

His own determination had been fixed long before he came to Rugby, and it was only after ascertaining that his power in this respect would be absolute, that he consented to become a candidate for the post. The retention of boys who were clearly incapable of deriving good from the system, or whose influence on others was decidedly and extensively pernicious, seemed to him not a necessary part of the trials of school, but an inexcusable and intolerable aggravation of them. "Till a man learns that the first, second, and third duty of a schoolmaster is to get rid of unpromising subjects, a great public school," he said, "will never be what it might be, and what it ought to be." The remonstrances which he encountered, both on public and private grounds, were vehement and numerous. But on these terms alone had he taken his office: and he solemnly and repeatedly declared, that on no other terms could he hold it, or justify the existence of the public school system in a Christian country.

The cases which fell under this rule included all shades of character from the hopelessly bad up to the really good, who yet from their peculiar circumstances might be receiving great injury from the system of a public school; grave moral offences frequently repeated; boys banded together in sets to the great harm of individuals or of the school at large; overgrown boys, whose age and size gave them influence over others, and made them unfit subjects for corporal punishment, whilst the low place which, either from idleness or dulness, they held in the school, encouraged all the childish and low habits to which they were naturally tempted. He would retain boys after offences, which considered in themselves, would seem to many almost deserving of expulsion; he would request the removal of others for of fences which to many would seem venial. In short, he was decided by the ultimate result on the whole character of the individual, or on the general state of the school.

2

1) See Letter to Dr. Hawkins, in 1827.

2) The admission of very young boys, e. g. under the age of ten, he earnestly deprecated, as considering them incapable of profiting by the discipline of the place.

It was on every account essential to the carrying out of his principle, that he should mark in every way the broad distinction between this kind of removal, and what in the strict sense of the word used to be called expulsion. The latter was intended by him as a punishment and lasting disgrace, was inflicted publicly and with extreme solemnity, was of very rare occurrence, and only for gross and overt offences. But he took pains to show that removal, such as is here spoken of, whether temporary or final, was not disgraceful or penal, but intended chiefly, if not solely, for a protection of the boy himself or his schoolfellows. Often it would be wholly unknown who were thus dismissed or why; latterly he allowed such cases to remain till the end of the half-year, that their removal might pass altogether unnoticed: the subjoined letters also to the head of a college and a private tutor, introducing such boys to their attention, are samples of the spirit in which he acted on these occasions."

This system was not pursued without difficulty: the inconvenience attendant upon such removals was occasionally very great; sometimes the character of the boy may have been mistaken, the difficulty of explaining the true nature of the transac

1) 1. To the Head of a college." With regard to if you had asked me about him half a year ago, I should have spoken of him in the highest terms in point of conduct and steady attention to his work; there has been nothing in all that has passed, beyond a great deal of party and schoolboy feeling, wrong, as I think, and exceedingly mischievous to a school, but from its peculiar character not likely to recur at college or in after life, and not reflecting permanently on a boy's principles or disposition. I think you will have in a steady and gentlemanly man, who will read fairly and give no disturbance, and one who would well repay any interest taken in him by his tutor to direct him either in his work or conduct. He was one of those who would do a great deal better at college than at school; and of this sort there are many as long as they are among boys, and with no closer personal intercourse with older persons than a public school affords, they are often wrong-headed and troublesome; but older society and the habits of more advanced life set them to rights again."

2.

"Their conduct till they went away was as good as possible, and I feel bound to speak strongly in their favour with regard to their prospects at college; for there was more of foolishness than of vice in the whole matter, and it was their peculiar situation in the school, and the peculiar danger of their fault among us, that made us wish them to be removed. was very much improved in his work, and did some of his business very well: since he has left us he has been with a private tutor, and I shall be disappointed if he has not behaved there so as to obtain from him a very favourable character."

3.

was not a bad fellow at all, but had overgrown school in his body before he had outgrown it in wit; he was therefore the hero of the younger boys for his strength and prowess; and this sort of distinction was doing him harm, so that I advised his father to take him away, and to get him entered at the University as soon as possible."

4. To a private tutor." I am glad that you continue to like , nor am I surprised at it, for I always thought that school brought out the bad in his character, and repressed the good. There are some others in the same way whom you would find, I think, very satisfactory pupils, but who are not improving here." 5. "It is a good thing, I have no doubt, that has left us; his is just one of those characters which cannot bear a public school, and may be saved and turned to great good by the humanities of private tuition."

"Ah!" he would say of a case of this kind, "if the Peninsular war were going on now, one would know what to do with him-a few years' hardship would bring a very nice fellow out of him "

tion to parents was considerable; an exaggerated notion was entertained of the extent to which this view was carried.

To administer such a system required higher qualifications in a head-master than mere scholarship or mere zeal. What enabled him to do so successfully was, the force of his character, his determination to carry out his principles through a host of particular obstacles; his largeness of view, which endeavoured to catch the distinctive features of every case; the consciousness which he felt, and made others feel, of the uprightness and purity of his intentions. The predictions that boys who failed at school would turn out well with private tutors, were often acknowledged to be verified in cases where the removal had been most complained of; the diminution of corporal punishment in the school was necessarily much facilitated; a salutary effect was produced on the boys by impressing upon them, that even slight offences, which came under the head-master's eye, were swelling the sum of misconduct which might end in removal; whilst many parents were displeased by the system, others were induced to send "as many boys," he said, "and more than he sent away;" lastly, he succeeded in shaking the old notion of the conditions under which boys must be allowed to remain at school, and in impressing on others the standard of moral progress which he endeavoured himself to enforce.

The following letter to one of the assistant-masters expresses his mode of meeting the attacks to which he was exposed on the two subjects last mentioned.

I do not choose to discuss the thickness of Præpostors' sticks, or the greater or less blackness of a boy's bruises, for the amusement of all the readers of the newspapers; nor do I care in the slightest degree ahout the attacks, if the masters themselves treat them with indifference. If they appear to mind them, or to fear their effect on the school, the apprehension in this, as in many other instances, will be likely to verify itself. For my own part, I confess, that I will not condescend to justify the school against attacks, when I believe that it is going on not only not ill, but positively well. Were it really otherwise, I think I should be as sensitive as any one, and very soon give up the concern. But these attacks are merely what I bargained for, so far as they relate to my conduct in the school, because they are directed against points on which my ideas' were fixed before I came to Rugby, and are only more fixed now: e. g. that the authority of the Sixth Form is essential to the good of the school, and is to be upheld through all obstacles from within and from without, and that sending away boys is a necessary and regular part of a good system, not as a punishment to one, but as a protection to others Undoubtedly it would be a better system if there was no evil; but evil being unavoidable we are not a jail to keep it in, but a place of education where we must cast it out, to prevent its taint from spreading. Meanwhile let us mind our own work, and try to perfect the execution of our own ideas,' and we shall have enough to do, and enough always to hinder us from being satisfied with ourselves; but when we are attacked

we have some right to answer with Scipio, who, scorning to reply to a charge of corruption, said, 'Hoc die cum Hannibale benè et feliciter pugnavi-we have done enough good and undone enough evil, to allow us to hold our assailants cheap."

II. The spirit in which he entered on the instruction of the school, constituting as it did the main business of the place, may perhaps best be understood from a particular exemplification of it in the circumstances under which he introduced a prayer before the first lesson in the Sixth Form, over and above the general prayers read before the whole school. On the morning on which he first used it he said, that he had been much troubled to find that the change from attendance on the death-bed of one of the boys in his house to his school-work had been very great: he thought that there ought not to be such a contrast, and that it was probably owing to the schoolwork not being sufficiently sanctified to God's glory; that if it was made really a religious work, the transition to it from a death-bed would be slight: he therefore intended for the future to offer a prayer before the first lesson, that the day's work might be undertaken and carried on solely to the glory of God and their improvement,-that he might be the better enabled to do his work.

Under this feeling, all the lessons, in his eyes, and not only those which were more directly religious, were invested with a moral character; and his desire to raise the general standard of knowledge and application in the school was as great as if it had been his sole object.

He introduced, with this view, a variety of new regulations; contributed liberally himself to the foundation of prizes and scholarships, as incentives to study, and gave up much of his leisure to the extra labour of new examinations for the various forms, and of a yearly examination for the whole school. The spirit of industry which his method excited in his better scholars, and more or less in the school at large, was considerable; and it was often complained that their minds and constitutions were overworked by premature exertion. Whether this was the case more at Rugby than in other schools, since the greater exertions generally required in all parts of education, it is difficult to determine. He himself would never allow the truth of it, though maintaining that it would be a very great evil if it were so. The Greek union of the ἀρετὴ γυμναστικὴ with the ἀρετὴ μουσικὴ, he thought invaluable in education, and he held that the freedom of the sports of public schools was particularly favourable to it; and whenever he saw that boys were reading too much, he always remonstrated with them, relaxed their work, and if they were in the upper part of the school, would invite them to his house in the half year or the holidays to refresh them.

1) See Appendix A.

He had a strong belief in the general union of moral and intellectual excellence. And in the case of boys his experience led him, he said, “more and more to believe in their connexion, for which divers reasons may be given. One, and a very important one, is, that ability puts a boy in sympathy with his teachers in the matter of his work, and in their delight in the works of great minds; whereas a dull boy has much more sympathy with the uneducated, and others to whom animal enjoyments are all in all." "I am sure," he used to say, "that in the case of boys the temptations of intellect are not comparable to the temptations of dulness;" and he often dwelt on "the fruit which I above all things long for,-moral thoughtfulness, the inquiring love of truth going along with the devoted love of goodness."

But for mere cleverness, whether in boys or men, he had no regard. "Mere intellectual acuteness," he used to say, in speaking (for example) of lawyers, "divested as it is, in too many cases, of all that is comprehensive and great and good, is to me more revolting than the most helpless imbecility, seeming to be almost like the spirit of Mephistophiles." Often when seen in union with moral depravity, he would be inclined to deny its existence altogether; the generation of his scholars, to which he looked back with the greatest pleasure, was not that which contained most instances of individual talent, but that which had altogether worked steadily and industriously. The university honours which his pupils obtained were very considerable, and at one time unrivalled by any school in England, and he was unfeignedly delighted whenever they occurred. But he never laid any stress upon them, and strongly deprecated any system which would encourage the notion of their being the chief end to be answered by school education. He would often dwell on the curious alternations of cleverness or dulness in school generations, which seemed to baffle all human calculation or exertion. "What we ought to do is to send up boys who will not be plucked." A mere plodding boy was above all others encouraged by him. At Laleham he had once got out of patience, and spoken sharply to a pupil of this kind, when the pupil looked up in his face and said, "Why do you speak angrily, sir?-indeed I am doing the best that I can." Years afterwards he used to tell the story to his children, and said, "I never felt so much ashamed in my life-that look and that speech I have never forgotten." And though it would of course happen that clever boys, from a greater sympathy with his understanding, would be brought into closer intercourse with him, this did not affect his feeling, not only of respect, but of reverence to those who, without ability, were distinguished for high principle and industry. "If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an infe