ral. It was forced on them originally, and, when it was given to them, it was properly bestowed. But they have continued to hold the appointment and the profit; and really we cannot blame them, for no man willingly surrenders power, wealth, and influence. It is another question, whether we are to suffer them to retain their place for ever. If we do, the blame will be with us. Circumstances have changed, somewhat wonderfully, since that day; and if the objects of education ought to be changed with the mode, so it is fully time to change those by whom it is conducted. We ought to change them, at least unless they can prove that they are as fit for the office now as they were in days of yore; we ought to change them, unless we are determined to go on for ever in scanning and parsing; or till, at least, they prove that they can do somewhat more than parse and scan.

It is true that there are interlopers, and that they are increasing every day. It is fortunate that it is so; or we might now be a nation of monks and commentators, in place of what we are. Yet such is the force of usage, such the blindness of habit and acquiescence, that no sooner is a school, a foundation, or a college, talked of, than there rises to the eye, a dean, an archdeacon, a rector, or a curate. If there be a prince or a princess to be taught the art of governing, or of being quietly governed, we seek for a bishop as the preceptor, and a very, or less very, reverend, for the sub-preceptor. They may possibly execute their respective offices well; but it is not an inevitable consequence for every, or any, bishop of the twenty-four, to have studied the art of educating princes, or the knowledge in which princes ought to be educated. The choice, too, it is barely possible, may light on an elegant person, or a friend of royalty, or on him behind whom are arranged a long line of ancestry, or of Cornish boroughs. Thus may all the choice light, provided it be an office worth taking.

The wants of society now demand a civil education, not a monastic and a scholastic one; and unless we exert ourselves to change the system, it will be long yet before we shall rescue ourselves from the trammels and pedantry of centuries, it will be long before we shall acquire in youth what we are to want in age. And be the clergy what it may (and we are willing to grant much), we shall not be rescued from Greek and Latin, till we are rescued from the domination of the clergy in education. Men teach what they know we cannot blame them; and how, indeed, should they teach any thing else? The system and the directors of it are inseparably entwined; the system must teach two dead languages, and nothing else, because its conductors can teach those languages, and can teach nothing else.

But the clergy is, perhaps, prepared to prove that it is competent to teach politics, and law, and economy, and sciences, and arts, all that society wants and is about to demand. An ill-natured world says that it has not yet, at least, produced the proofs. That world has examined its printed works, for there the test lies, and

finds no proof. It would be extraordinary if it should; for the education of the clergy is not a secret. If the clergy does really understand Greek and Latin better than the lay order of society, let it teach Greek and Latin, when and where Greek and Latin are shown to be the proper objects of education. We are content that it should teach theology, because this is its trade, which it ought at least to understand. The question of religious instruction is somewhat intricate, as matters now exist in our country, and therefore we pass it by for the present. If there is any thing else which the clergy can teach better than the other parts of society, we have not the least objection to accept of them as teachers, for we bear them no ill-will.

But if there be any thing of which they are not the best teachers, if there be any knowledge which is better known by others than by them, we desire but the same right of choosing our preceptors among such persons. He who knows best, will, other circumstances being the same, form the best teacher, as experience shows every day, as common sense would have taught us without it. We choose our professors of medicine from physicians, and place our sons intended for law under special-pleaders; just as we bind an embryo Stultz apprentice to some hero of the needle. But we choose a clergyman to give our sons education, that abstract and unintelligible thing called education; and, knowing nothing, nothing, therefore, can he, or does he, teach. If we had sense enough to select as the tutor of our child, a lawyer, he might learn law; if a merchant, accounts; in any case he would be worth something to society; he would be so though his tutor were a carpenter. Now, he is taught Greek and Latin; and learns horseracing.

Oxford and Cambridge are conducted by the clergy, because they are monastic establishments. Westminster and Eton, for reasons equally valid. By their fruits we have long known them. But we should be pleased to have it demonstrated, why the private tutorage of every boy who can afford a private tutor, should be consigned to a clergyman; why every clergyman who has nothing, or not enough, to do, who chances to have friends, and who has less money than he wants, should also maintain his little Westminster and little Eton, in some "genteel neighbourhood," where pupils are to be occupied, at three, or five hundred pounds a-year, in making themes and measuring prosody. We know these also by their fruits. We expect to reap, and forget that we ought to sow; we never ask ourselves, what are to be the future pursuits and duties of our son, but we have given him an "expensive education," and discharged our consciences. Expensive, indeed, it shall prove, in the future as in the past.

This, too, is one of the evil results of the system, and it is a part of the monopoly. We have already used the term monopoly, and we shall use it again: but we use it without any feelings of acrimony. The present clergy of England did not create it; they

found it established to their hands, and if they are content, or desirous, to keep and perpetuate it, we think them fully justified. The very basis of social prosperity is, that every man should pursue his own interests; and therefore, we, pursuing ours, shall do what in us lies to break up this monopoly. We do not expect that any efforts of the present generation will succeed in this, or will reduce our public institutions to a form of proceeding suited to the present state of society; but it is something if we can lop off all those roots and branches which have shot out, like excreseences, from the main trunk; if we can persuade our generation that there is something for youth to learn, and that there are persons who can teach it; if we can open their eyes to the just value of prosody, and clergymen, and clerical schools, and clerical tutors. Whatever is cut off from Westminster and its spawn, whatever interlopers we can introduce, thus much is clear gain. A day will come when the people will be educated, in spite of Westminster and Oxford; and it is by heresy and rebellion that we shall at last shame and reform, if we do not succeed in abolishing, the monopoly. While it remains, we shall never learn but what our fathers have learned; for the Greek, the system, the church, the monopoly, are but one.

Granting that Greek and Latin did really produce a literary education, and that a literary education was the best of educations, by what right do the clergy assume the exclusive power of forming a pupil in literature? This ought to be the work of literary men by profession. Because clergymen possess more idle time than most other classes, that is not a reason for selecting them; since leisure is not capacity. It may be very convenient for them to be enabled to add somewhat to a scanty income, which, whenever it occurs, we deeply regret, and would most gladly see improved; but the generation demands our regard, still more imperiously, and we would infinitely prefer seeing the English clergy farming lands like the Scotch, than starving, or condemned, for a paltry gain, to assume the instruction of our youth. If it is to be their property, let them at least acquire the means of executing these duties, and we shall object no longer. They belong to a stage of society fit to be trusted with this office, and their profession is one which ought to render them conscientious performers of perhaps the most important social duty which man has to perform: but their own education must first be changed; a change which will not occur till the total system is abolished, or essentially repaired. It is for their own interests that it should be so, if they could but see it. Let them learn to educate, and education will scarcely be taken out of their hands; if they persist in opposing the common sense of the world, the world will shortly leave them to educate each other; as it is fast doing.

We are not now professing to examine into the details of our schools and colleges, because a few words would not answer our purpose; and it really is painful to us to say any thing which may

seem to reflect on the bona fides of those by whom our classical education is conducted: but we must say (and let the blame fall on the founders of Oxford and Westminster, not on their present respectable members) that the system is contrived to support the monopoly, as the monopoly in turn defends the system. It is a profitable trade.

We are not here going to praise the Greeks and Romans, as some of our predecessors have done, at our own expense; for it is most certain that education was there, also, a valuable trade; and that the orators and philosophers were not one jot less ingenious in protracting it and rendering it a mystery. We do not feel any indignation that those possessed of the monopoly should desire to preserve it; for this is wisdom, the worldly wisdom of the dexterous steward. We cannot fairly, perhaps, be angry with the monopolists for not teaching something else than Greek or Latin; because it is not in their power to teach any thing better. But we have a right to be angry that the system does not teach what it professes; and we have a very just plea for indignation, when, instead of showing any anxiety to shorten the period of education, to do the work which it has undertaken, in the shortest possible time, its methods and its details are so contrived as to render the acquisition of the learning which it professes, as tedious as possible; that so the greater profits should accrue. That, at least, those profits do so accrue, is evident.

Every one knows how he learns English; and every knows by what means, when left to his own guidance in after-life, he acquires Italian or French. Thus, also, he who never heard of Latin and Greek till he was twenty or thirty, would master Greek and Latin. But he would not attempt it by means of nonsense-verses; and if he knows what he intends, he will scarcely attempt it by learning to repeat "Propria quæ maribus." In England, every thing is a trade, and every effort, every pursuit, is concentered in the art of making money, as money, for itself; since the sole desirable good on earth, on British earth, is wealth. The spirit of commerce pervades every thing, and it is the spirit which pervades and animates our system of school education. It is not considered how the pupil is to be best and most rapidly brought forward, how most effectually taught what he is to learn; but by what means the greatest sum of money can be obtained from his parents. Never, thought Locke long ago, and would have said if he had dared, was a better engine contrived for this end, than syntax; never, have said others, was there a more fortunate discovery for this purpose than nonsense-verses, themes, exercises, classes, every thing.

Never was a system better contrived not to teach a language. If Justus Lipsius composed a work in Latin at four years of age, it was not by means of prosody and parsing. The giants of that age were nursed on Latin and fed on Latin; on the language, not on its rules: on Latin authors and Latin matter, not on particles

and words. In our system, also, all the labour is on the side of the pupil; the master needs not even listen; it is enough if he appears to do so. To say that he teaches, is an abuse of words. Grammar, classes, scanning, flogging, the whole discipline might be administered by a steam-engine. If the master ever had any talents, he becomes stupified into a machine; nor is it any censure on him, for human nature must yield before such a mechanical routine. The pupil, on the other hand, sees no end, no object; acquires no ideas, and learns to suppose all learning and all study the same, and to hate study for the remainder of his life. Adult man, with half his energies exhausted, his period of excitability and muscular prurience past, could not endure, even the sedentary life which is imposed on a child or a boy, boiling with physical powers, and moving in every fibre. Receiving, not even ideas to occupy and expend his nervous energy, chained to a monotonous, purposeless, unintelligible routine, either his faculties are stupified, and that process which ought to have called forth his powers destroys them, or he imbibes a distaste to every thing which demands attention; to the sciences and the arts, as to languages and litera

ture.

In a moral view, it is a serious evil, that, at the very age in which the mind ought to be occupied with exciting and acceptable pursuits, to prevent the passions from expending themselves on vicious or dangerous pleasures, we leave it, not merely without occupation, without pursuits, but tie it down to that which it abhors, and of which the very nature is, to restrain the bow, that it may unbend, with double energy, on what it ought to be our great object to prevent. Hence, in a great measure, the vices of our public schools. It is not the sole cause, but it is a leading one. The unoccupied mind, the unoccupied body, must seek a vent, the check-spring must unbend; and finding nothing else, no object for its affections or actions, it must start to active idleness, or to mischief or vice: to boxing, drinking, rowing in boats, or driving coaches. If we ask, who the orderly boy is at a public school, it is he who has fortunately discovered some innocent, amusing, or useful pursuit, for himself; drawing, making fire-works, or building boats instead of rowing them.

This is an indirect moral evil. It is a direct one, that youth is not instructed in moral and political knowledge, in the moral and political virtues. The religion which he is taught, is a form and a routine. Among the Greeks and Romans, whose writings we pretend to teach, and by whom we might profit, if we taught them properly, the education of a citizen was relevant to his moral and civic duties. Our youth, on the contrary, quits his instructors, ignorant of every thing, and now to learn in what consist his duties, and his rights also; without principles of judgment or conduct, unacquainted with his country, its manners, customs, and usages, unacquainted with man or the world. Our public schools and colleges, indeed, are held forth as teaching this knowledge, in