straint and force; if I am to be here as a gaoler, I will resign my office at once." And few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than on one of these occasions, when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school, and said, "It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen."

The means of carrying out these principles were of course various; they may, however, for the sake of convenience, be viewed under the divisions of the general discipline of the school, the system of instruction, the chapel services, and his own personal intercourse and influence.

I. In considering his general management of the discipline of the school, it will only be possible to touch on its leading features.

a

1. He at once made a great alteration in the whole system of punishments in the higher part of the school, "keeping it as much as possible in the background, and by kindness and encouragement attracting the good and noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal." " As this appears more distinctly elsewhere, it is needless to enlarge upon it here; but a few words may be necessary to explain the view with which, for the younger part of the school, he made a point of maintaining, to a certain extent, the old discipline of public schools.

a Serm. vol. iv. p. 106. The whole sermon is a full exposition of his view.

"The beau ideal of school discipline with regard to young boys would seem to be this, that, whilst corporal punishment was retained on principle as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, and therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state, we should cherish and encourage to the utmost all attempts made by the several boys, as individuals, to escape from the natural punishment of their age by rising above its naturally low tone of principle."

Flogging, therefore, for the younger part, he retained, but it was confined to moral offences, such as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness, while his aversion to inflicting it rendered it still less frequent in practice than it would have been according to the rule he had laid down for it. But in answer to the argument used in a liberal journal, that it was even for these offences and for this age degrading, he replied with characteristic emphasis

"I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian-but essentially. barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism.

.. At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood?"a

2. But his object was of course far higher than to check particular vices. What I want to see in the school," he said, "and what I cannot find, is an ab

a Journ. Educ. vol. ix. pp. 281. 284.

6

horrence of evil: I always think of the Psalm, Neither doth he abhor any thing that is evil."" Amongst all the causes, which in his judgment contributed to the absence of this feeling, and to the moral childishness, which he considered the great curse of public schools, the chief seemed to him to lie in the spirit which was there encouraged of combination, of companionship, of excessive deference to the public opinion prevalent in the school. Peculiarly repugnant as this spirit was at once to his own reverence for lawful authority, and to his dislike of servile submission to unlawful authority; fatal as he deemed it to all approach to sympathy between himself and his scholars to all free and manly feeling in individual boys-to all real and permanent improvement of the institution itself-it gave him more pain when brought prominently before him, than any other evil in the school. At the very sight of a knot of vicious or careless boys gathered together round the great school-house fire, "It makes me think," he would say, "that I see the Devil in the midst of them." From first to last, it was the great subject to which all his anxiety converged. No half year ever passed without his preaching upon it-he turned it over and over in every possible point of view-he dwelt on it as the one master-fault of all. "If the spirit of Elijah were to stand in the midst of us, and we were to ask him, What shall we do then?' his answer would be, 'Fear not, nor heed one another's voices, but fear and heed the voice of God only.'" (MS. Serm. on Luke iii. 10. 1833.)

Against this evil he felt that no efforts of good

individual example, or of personal sympathy with individual masters, could act effectually, unless there were something to counteract it constantly amongst the boys themselves.

He, therefore, who wishes (to use his own words) "really to improve public education would do well to direct his attention to this point, and to consider how there can be infused into a society of boys such elements as, without being too dissimilar to coalesce thoroughly with the rest, shall yet be so superior as to raise the character of the whole. It would be absurd to say that any school has as yet fully solved this problem. I am convinced, however, that, in the peculiar relation of the highest form to the rest of the boys, such as it exists in our great public schools, there is to be found the best means of answering it. This relation requires in many respects to be improved in its character; some of its features should be softened, others elevated; but here, and here only, is the engine which can effect the end desired." (Journ. Ed. p. 292.)

In other words, he determined to use, and to improve to the utmost, the existing machinery of the Sixth Form, and of fagging; understanding, by the Sixth Form, the thirty boys who composed the highest class—“those who having risen to the highest form in the school, will probably be at once the oldest and the strongest, and the cleverest; and if the school be well ordered, the most respectable in application and general character:" and by fagging, "the power given by the supreme authorities of the school to the Sixth Form, to be exercised by them over the lower boys, for the sake of securing a regular government

amongst the boys themselves, and avoiding the evils of anarchy, in other words, of the lawless tyranny of physical strength." (Journ. Ed. p. 287, 286.)"

In many points he took the institution as he found it, and as he remembered it at Winchester. The responsibility of checking bad practices without the intervention of the masters, the occasional settlement of difficult cases of school-government, the subjection of brute force to some kind of order, involved in the maintenance of such an authority, had been more or less produced under the old system both at Rugby and elsewhere. But his zeal in its defence, and his confident reliance upon it as the keystone of his whole government, were eminently characteristic of himself. It was a point moreover on which the spirit of the age set strongly and increasingly against him, on which there was a general tendency to yield to the popular outcry, and on which the clamour, that at one time assailed him, was ready to fasten as a subject where all parties could concur in their condemnation. But he was immoveable: and though, on his first coming, he had felt himself called upon rather to restrain the authority of the Sixth Form from abuses, than to guard it from encroachments, yet now that the whole system was denounced as cruel and absurd, he delighted to stand forth as its champion. The power, which was most strongly

a It has not been thought necessary here to enter at length into his defence of the general system of fagging, especially as it may be seen by those who are interested in the subject in the article in the ninth volume of the Quarterly Journal of Education, from which the above extracts have been taken, and to which an answer was made by the Editor in the ensuing number.