state as that. With the system of tale-bearing all

self-respect and self-dependence vanishes, friendship is destroyed, and the great objects of school-life are at once defeated.

But parents should know all these thingsknow them, not to take notice of them, not to act as out-of-door spies, but to be able to encourage and guide their children into the narrow path of purity and integrity, and to be in a position to close up the broad gate leading to destruction of

moral character.

One word more ere the page is turned, and my life assumes a happier aspect, and my experience takes a brighter hue. I need scarcely say I have written from the life. I hope it bears the stamp of actuality; but I must add that it is not a sketch of any individual career, nor a picture of any one school.

The persecution and the tyranny I suffered, are here described, in order to protest against the unprotected position of a fag of a private school. Would I were able to enter a much more forcible protest; but in this age I can only hint at the worst evils of a system which affects super

vision, but fails to carry it out; which pretends to absolute paternal rule, and yet is itself governed by its worst subjects.

"And these boy-tyrants will their slaves distress,

And do the wrongs no master can redress;

The mind they load with fear: it feels disdain
For its own baseness; yet it tries in vain

To shake the admitted power;-the coward comes again.
'Tis more than present pain these tyrants give,
Long as our life some strong impressions live;
And these young ruffians in the soil will sow
Seeds of all vices that on weakness grow."

END OF PART I.

CRABBE.

"Ma fortune va prendre une face nouvelle."-RACINE.

"Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Oh, fields beloved in vain,

Where once my careless childhood strayed,

A stranger yet to pain!

I feel the gales that from ye blow

A momentary bliss bestow,

And redolent of joy and youth,

To breathe a second spring."

GRAY.

I REMAINED at home about six months recruiting my strength, which had been sorely tried by the treatment I had experienced at Weston, and by the excitement of my hurried exit from that (to me)

dreadful prison. My parents took a great deal of pains and trouble in the selection of the next school I was to go to.

My father went to one which had then a very considerable reputation, and was spoken well of on all hands; and, by talking not only with the masters, but with the leaders of the school, he did all in his power to obtain an insight into the working of the system of fagging which was prevalent there, as well as to discover the morale of the school itself. He did not make such particular inquiries about the learning, for he well knew that if a schoolboy wished to get on and do himself credit, he might do so at any school; and if he chose to neglect his lessons and to waste his time, no schoolmaster and no school rules would effectually make a well-informed man of him.

But even after he had fixed that he would send his son to the great public school of Harby-onthe-Thames, he had also to select a house to which to send him. At Harby, as at most of the public schools, the school itself is a college, and the masters of this college receive boys into the houses where they live, from whence they attend

lessons daily at the schools. The houses are entirely under the control of the masters to whom they belong; and it was no easy matter to decide which house was the best. In theory, the masters told him, the merits of a house depended entirely upon what boys were at that time at the head of it, and that the houses went up and down in their moral positions according as the elder boys left for Cambridge or Oxford, or remained at Harby. In practice, the boys he questioned, one and all, informed him that their house was far the best; demonstrating it past all contradiction by various little anecdotes, showing the immorality of all other houses and the perfect propriety of their own.

So my father, having collected as many suffrages as he could, fixed on Mr. Oswell's house as being the one which most of his informants considered the best after their own, and about which he had heard the fewest anecdotes-though when he related one or two of them to me they made my hair stand on end.

But even now that the school and the house were fixed upon, we found that no vacancy would occur till the end of the summer vacation, now