nning to be developed: or,
if not, no discipline will better aid in their developement than the
bracing intercourse of a great English classical school. Even the
selfish are forced into accommodating themselves to a public standard of
generosity, and the effeminate into conforming to a rule of manliness. I
was myself at two public schools; and I think with gratitude of the
benefit which I reaped from both; as also I think with gratitude of the
upright guardian in whose quiet household I learned Latin so
effectually. But the small private schools which I witnessed for brief
periods, containing thirty to forty boys, were models of ignoble
manners as respected some part of the juniors, and of favouritism
amongst the masters. Nowhere is the sublimity of public justice so
broadly exemplified as in an English school. There is not in the
universe such an areopagus for fair play and abhorrence of all crooked
ways, as an English mob, or one of the English time-honoured public
schools. But my own first introduction to such an establishment was
under peculiar and contradictory circumstances. When my "rating," or
graduation in the school, was to be settled, naturally my altitude (to
speak astronomically) was taken by the proficiency in Greek. But I could
then barely construe books so easy as the Greek Testament and the Iliad.
This was considered quite well enough for my age; but still it caused me
to be placed three steps below the highest rank in the school. Within
one week, however, my talent for Latin verses, which had by this time
gathered strength and expansion, became known. I was honoured as never
was man or boy since Mordecai the Jew. Not properly belonging to the
flock of the head master, but to the leading section of the second, I
was now weekly paraded for distinction at the supreme tribunal of the
school; out of which at first grew nothing but a sunshine of approbation
delightful to my heart, still brooding upon solitude. Within six weeks
this had changed. The approbation indeed continued, and the public
testimony of it. Neither would there, in the ordinary course, have been
any painful reaction from jealousy or fretful resistance to the
soundness of my pretensions; since it was sufficiently known to some of
my schoolfellows, that I, who had no male relatives but military men,
and those in India, could not have benefited by any clandestine aid.
But, unhappily, the head master was at that time dissatisfied with some
point