branches of knowledge; or else mere official functionaries from England, whose hearts and minds have been always half at home, and who have never identified themselves with the land in which they were working. But if you and your sisters were to go out, with half Southborough after you,-apothecary, lawyers, butchers, bakers, tailors, carpenters, and labourers,—and if we were to join with a similar draught from Rugby and Laleham, I think we should deserve to be ἀναγραπτοὶ εὐεργεται both here and in Swan River. Such are my notions about it; and I am not clear that I shall not devote my first £1000 that I make here to the purchase of land in Swan River, that I may have my estate and the school buildings got into due order, before I shut up shop at Rugby. Meantime, I hope you will not think I ought to shut up shop forthwith, and adjourn to the next asylum for daft people, because I am thus wildly dreaming about Swan River, instead of talking soberly about Rugby. But Rugby is a very nice place all the same, and I wish you would come and form your own judgment of it, or that some of your sisters would, if you cannot or will not.

XII. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.

Rugby, November 4, 1829.

What a time it is since I wrote to you! And how much has occurred and is continually occurring, on which I should like to write to you. You have heard perhaps of Mr. Penrose's death in September last, when, from the enjoyment of full health and vigour of mind and body, he was called away in three days with no intermediate pain or struggle, but by a gentle lethargic sleep, which lasted uninterrupted to his very last moment. Coupled with his holy and Christian life, which made him require no long time to go and renew his exhausted oil, his end was a most complete bavaria, so rare a blessing, that one dares not hope or pray for a similar mercy in one's own case. . .

We are going on comfortably, and I trust, thrivingly, with the school. We are above 200, and still looking upwards; but I neither expect, and much less desire, any great addition to our numbers. The school cannot, I think, regularly expect more than 200 or 250; it may ascend higher with a strong flood, but there will be surely a corresponding ebb after it. You may imagine that I pon

der over, often enough, the various discussions that I have had with you about education, and verse making, and reading the Poets. I find the natural leaning of a schoolmaster is so much to your view of the question, that my reason is more than ever led to think my own notions strongly required in the present state of classical education, if it were only on the principle of the bent stick. There is something so beautiful in good Latin verses, and in hearing fine. poetry well construed, and something so attractive altogether in good scholarship, that I do not wonder at masters directing an undue portion of their attention to a crop so brilliant. I feel it growing in myself daily; and, if I feel it, with prejudices all on the other side, I do not wonder at its being felt generally. But my deliberate conviction is stronger and stronger, that all this system is wholly wrong for the greater number of boys. Those who have talents and natural taste, and fondness for poetry, find the poetry lessons very useful; the mass do not feel one tittle about the matter, and, I speak advisedly, do not, in my belief, benefit from them one grain. I am not sure that other things would answer better, though I have very little doubt of it; but at any rate, the present plan is so entire a failure, that nothing can be risked by changing it. . . . . . More than half my boys never saw the sea, and never were in London, and it is surprising how the first of these disadvantages interferes with their understanding much of the ancient poetry, while the other keeps the range of their ideas in an exceedingly narrow compass. Brought up myself in the Isle of Wight, amidst the bustle of soldiers and sailors, and familiar from a child with boats and ships, and the flags of half Europe, which gave me an instinctive acquaintance with geography, I quite marvel to find in what a state of ignorance boys are at seventeen or eighteen, who have lived all their days in inland country parishes, or small country towns. For your comfort, I think I am succeeding in making them write very fair Latin prose, and to observe and understand some of the differences between the Latin and English idioms. On the other hand, what our boys want in one way they get in another; from the very circumstance of their being the sons of quieter parents, they have far less 3 and more nua, than the boys of any other school I ever knew. Thus, to say the least, they have less of a most odious and unchristian quality, and are thus more open to instruction, and have less repugnance to be good, because their master wishes them to be so. .

I have almost

- you

filled my paper, and can only add that Thucydides slowly, but I think that it will be a much less defec it was likely to have been had I remained at Laleha I have still an enormous deal to learn, yet my s mended considerably within the last year at Rugby. will think at any rate that it will be better to publish Thucydides, however imperfectly, than to write another pamphlet. Poor dear pamphlet! I seem to feel the greater tenderness for it, because it has excited so much odium; and now I hear that it is reported at Oxford that I wish to suppress it; which is wholly untrue. I would not print a second edition, because the question was settled, and controversy about it was become absurd; but I never have repented of it in any degree, or wished it unwritten, "pace tuâ dixerim," and I only regret that I did not print a larger impression.

XIII. TO REV. H. JENKYNS.

Rugby, November 11, 1829.

I thank you heartily for two very kind letters, and am very anxious to be favoured with some more of your friend's comments [on Thucydides]. . . . . . . I hope I am not too old or too lazy or too obstinate to be taught better. . . . I do thank you very much for your kindness in taking so much trouble in my behalf; and I earnestly beg of you to send me more. .. And can you tell me, or, if not, will you ask Amicus Doct.,-where is to be found a summary of the opinions of English Scholars about ös and own, and the moods which they require: and further, do you or he hold their doctrine good for anything? Dawes, and all men who endeavour to establish general rules, are of great use in directing one's attention to points, which one might otherwise have neglected; and labour and acutenesss often discover a rule, where indolence and carelessness fancied it was all hap-hazard. But larger induction and sounder judgment (which I think exist in Hermann in an infinite degree beyond any of our English scholars) teach us to distinguish again between a principle and an usage; the latter may be general, but if it be merely usage, grounded on no intelligible principle, it seems to me foolish to insist on its being universal, and to alter texts right and left, to make them all conformable to the Canon. Equidem,-both in Greek and in other matters,—

I think liberty a far better thing than uniformity of form merely, where no principle is concerned. Voilà the cloven foot.

INT. TO J. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ.

(In allusion to a libel in the John Bull.)

Rugby, May 11, 1830.

I thank you for another very kind letter. In a matter of this sort. I willingly resign my own opinion to that of a man like yourself, at once my friend and legal adviser. I think, too, that I am almost bound to attend to the opinion of the Bishop of London; for his judgment of the inexpediency of prosecuting must rest on the scandal which he thinks it will bring upon religion and the Church, and of this he is a far better judge than I am; nor, to say the truth, should I much like to act in a doubtful matter in opposition to the decided advice of a Bishop in a case that concerned the Church. I say this in sober earnest, in spite of what you call my Whiggery and Radicalism. . . .

XV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS.

Rugby, May 12, 1830.

The authorities which are arrayed against proceeding are quite decisive, and I heartily agree with you that clergymen must not go to law, when lawyers say they should not. Still, as I had no thought of gain or of vengeance, but simply of procuring a public justification of my character-not my opinions—I feel that it would have been no lack of charity to proceed, though I am heartily glad to be spared the necessity of doing so by so many and such powerful representations. But I trust that you and all my friends will give me credit for being perfectly tolerant of all attacks upon my writings or general abuse of my opinions. . . . . . Believe me, I am heartily glad of the final result of this discussion, for I had no wish to go to law; but I thought that my known, or rather my misrepresented opinions on politics, ought to make me particularly anxious to deny any charge respecting religious matters. But I am perfectly willing to take the judgment of my friends and of impartial persons in what rests wholly on opinion, and besides, if the attack or loss to my own character were ever so great, I should

quite agree with you that it was better to bear it, than to bring sacred things into discussion in places, and through disputants wholly unfitted for them. But this I at first did not contemplate as the likely result.

XVI. TO F. HARTWELL, ESQ.

Rugby, June 28, 1830.

I have just published one volume of Thucydides; when the others will follow, it is hard to say, for the work here is more and more engrossing continually; but I like it better and better; it has all the interest of a great game of chess, with living creatures for pawns and pieces, and your adversary, in plain English, the Devil: truly he plays a very tough game, and is very hard to beat, if I ever do beat him. It is quite surprising to see the wickedness of young boys; or would be surprising, if I had not had my own school experience and a good deal since to enlighten me.

[The following letters, which have been inserted as exhibiting the earlier stages of his views of ancient history, were occasioned by his revision of the "Outlines of General History," and the first numbers of "The History of Rome," for the Useful Knowledge Society.]

XVII. TO T. F. ELLIS, ESQ.

June 26, 1830.

In the Roman History, I have been inclined to doubt Niebuhr's notion of the Alpine origin of the Tuscans. Do not all existing accounts concur in stating that the Metropolis of the race in Italy was south, not north, of the Apennines? and does not the Tuscan notion of the Gods dwelling to the north, on the Alps, and from thence looking down on the world, rather imply that the Alps were to the Tuscans in Italy the barrier of their world, the limit of their knowledge, rather than the earliest home of their nation. But this is happily not of any great consequence. Further, I believe that the great falsehood of the Roman history begins with the Commonwealth; the reigns of the kings I cannot but think contain more truth than Niebuhr allows. The story of the elder Tarquin in particular seems to me thoroughly probable, and to be confirmed by the authority of the Emperor Claudius, in his speech preserved on the