his master had often made him
a judge of the differences amongst his schoolfellows, and had one
day whipped him for giving a wrong sentence."--W.C.H.]

My pedant must make me a very learned oration, 'in genere demonstrativo',
before he can persuade me that his school is like unto that. They knew
how to go the readiest way to work; and seeing that science, when most
rightly applied and best understood, can do no more but teach us
prudence, moral honesty, and resolution, they thought fit, at first hand,
to initiate their children with the knowledge of effects, and to instruct
them, not by hearsay and rote, but by the experiment of action, in lively
forming and moulding them; not only by words and precepts, but chiefly by
works and examples; to the end it might not be a knowledge in the mind
only, but its complexion and habit: not an acquisition, but a natural
possession. One asking to this purpose, Agesilaus, what he thought most
proper for boys to learn? "What they ought to do when they come to be
men," said he.--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians. Rousseau
adopts the expression in his Diswuys sur tes Lettres.]--It is no wonder,
if such an institution produced so admirable effects.

They used to go, it is said, to the other cities of Greece, to inquire
out rhetoricians, painters, and musicians; but to Lacedaemon for
legislators, magistrates, and generals of armies; at Athens they learned
to speak well: here to do well; there to disengage themselves from a
sophistical argument, and to unravel the imposture of captious
syllogisms; here to evade the baits and allurements of pleasure, and with
a noble courage and resolution to conquer the menaces of fortune and
death; those cudgelled their brains about words, these made it their
business to inquire into things; there was an eternal babble of the
tongue, here a continual exercise of the soul. And therefore it is
nothing strange if, when Antipater demanded of them fifty children for
hostages, they made answer, quite contrary to what we should do, that
they would rather give him twice as many full-grown men, so much did they
value the loss of their country's education. When Agesilaus courted
Xenophon to send his children to Sparta to be bred, "it is not," said he,
"there to learn logic or rhetoric, but to be instructed in the noblest of
all sciences, namely, the science to obey and to command."--[Plutarch,
Life of Agesilaus, c. 7.]

It is very pleasant