most repeat it. And he was not
quite 4 years old. He is still alive, and has not become a poet, which
was what I expected in those early days. He could repeat great screeds
of Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin," which was his especial
favourite. Music has often cheated me of what is to me the keenest
pleasure in life. Like Samuel Johnson, I enjoy greatly "good talk,"
though I never took such a dominant part in it. There are two kinds of
people who reduce me to something like silence--those who know too
little and those who know too much. My brother-in-law's friend, Mr.
Cowan, was a great talker, and a good one, but he scarcely allowed me a
fair share. He was also an admirable correspondent.

One predominant talker I met at Mr. Edwin Hill's--William Ellis, a
special friend of the Hills, and a noteworthy man. One needs to look
back 60 years to become conscious of how much English education was in
the hands of the church. Not only the public schools and the university
were overshadowed by the Established Church, but what schools were
accessible to the poor were a sort of appanage to the rectory, and the
teachers were bound to work for the good of the church and the
convenience of the incumbent. The commercial schools, which were
independent of the church, to which Non-conformists sent their boys,
were satirised by Dickens, and they deserved the satire. The masters
were generally incompetent, and the assistant teachers or ushers were
the most miserable in regard to payment and status. William Ellis
expended large sums of money, and almost all his leisure, in
establishing secular schools that were good for something. He called
them Birkbeck schools, thus doing honour to the founder of mechanics'
institutes, and perhaps the founder of the first of these schools; and
he taught what he called social science in them himself. He was the
Senor Ferrer of England; and, though he escaped martyrdom in the more
enlightened country he was looked on suspiciously by those who
considered education that was not founded on revealed religion and
permeated by its doctrines as dangerous and revolutionary.

But there was one great personage who saw the value of those teachings
on things that make for human happiness and intellectual freedom, and
that was the Prince Consort. He asked William Ellis to give some
lessons to the eldest of the Royal children--the Princess Victoria,
Prince Edward (our present King), and Prince Alfred, afterwards Duke