The Press.
London, England, 1858-05-08 00:00:00

THE PRESS, MAY 8, 1858.

"of these schools are now in existence. What is
" the use of them ? It would not be too much to
" say, that at least three-fourths of the number
" are useless. It is not easy to draw the line
" above which efficiency may be said to begin ;
" but it is assuredly under the mark to assume
" that if 500 were abolished to-morrow, not the
" slightest ill-effect would be produced on the
" education of the country." The fact is, Mr.
Day was not really " taking these schools as a
whole," but taking a few illustrious exceptions,
such as Eton and Winchester, as specimens of the
whole class. Ile is equally unfortunate when he
undertakes to e;:ploin why grammar-schools
gradually ceased to be founded after the Restora-
tion. The reasons he gives are—(l) that " the
" enormous number of previously existing schools
" rendered fresh foundations less absolutely ne-
" cessary ;" (2) that " the absorption of men's
" minds in ever-changing politics, and the apathy
" and religious indifference of the eighteenth
" century, kept the necessity of fresh educa-
" tional institutions in the background." These
two reasons merely disguise the true explanation,
which is, that the grammar-schools were felt to be
a failure. It is quite true that they ceased to be
founded, because there were already enough and
too many ; but it is not true that they had in any
considerable degree attained their object. Milton,
at the very time when this slackening of zeal
began to be perceived, declared that " the
" nation was perishing for want of education."
Bacon still earlier pronounced a censure upon
the grammar-schools, of which that of Mr.
Temple is but an echo. He went so far as to
declare that as they had been sown in ostenta-
tion, they had fitly borne fruit in corruption and
degeneracy ; and in the same paper, addressed
to King James, he adds :
Concerning the advancement of learning, I do subscribe
to the opinion of one of the wisest and greatest men of
your kingdom, that for grammar-schools there are already
too many, and therefi re no providence to add where there
is excess. For the great number of schools which
are in your highness' realm doth cause a want, and cloth
cause likewise an overflow—both of them inconvenient,
and one of them dangerous. For by means thereof they
find want in the country and towns both of servants for
husbandry and apprentices for trade, and, on the other
side, there being more scholars bred than the State can
prefer and employ, and the active part of that life not
bearing a proportion to the preparative, it must needs
fall out that many persons will be bred unfit for other
vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are
brought up, which fills the realm full of indigent, idle, and
wanton people, which are but materia return nrwarum.

It is because he has overlooked this plain account
of the matter that Mr. Day is driven to the
strange shift of representing that, from the Re-
storation onward, men's minds became gradually
absorbed with politics to the exclusion of social
questions. The Restoration, on the contrary,
was the beginning of a long era of domestic
repose, which was only for a short time disturbed
by the troubles of the reign of James 11. It gave
an admirable opportunity for continuing works of
peaceful improvement, such as Mr. Day supposes
the foundation of grammar-schools to have been ;
and nothing can account for the cessation of
such undertakings, except the fact that they
were not so favourably regarded by the men of
that time. That an unfavourable opinion of
them did really exist is proved by a tract pub-
lished in 1678 by Christopher Wase, in which
he struggles to evade Bacon's objections to
the free schools in a manner which
shows that those objections were at that time
very generally acknowledged to be just. Ii how-
ever, the disturbances of 1688 furnish Mr. Day
with an excuse for considering the whole period
between the Restoration and the end of the
seventeenth century as one of absorbing political
disquiet, there can be no excuse for regarding
the first half of the eighteenth century as such a
period. Accordingly, Mr. Day takes refuge in
the apathy and religious indifference of that age,
which he supposes to have thrown the necessity
"for fresh educational institutions into the back-
"ground." Now it so happens that the men of
that apathetic age, though they did not found
free schools, initiated an entirely new and very
extensive educational movement, and founded a
vast number of fresh educational establishments.
In the year 1701 the Society for the Promotion
of Christian Knowledge was founded, and in the
first few years of the same century the whole
country was covered with charity-schools.
It is not a mark of apathy and indifference in
the subjects of William and Anne that, deserting
precedent and considering only the wants of the

country, they could produce a new institution
which, whatever its faults, was at any rate a sin.
cere endeavour to grapple with a rampant and
growing evil. The reports of the fbundation of
new charity-schools put forth in the reign of
Queen Anne breathe a spirit of earnest, it rot
very energetic piety. At the principal churches
in London sermons were preached once a month
or once in three weeks in behalf of the schools,
and hymns were written in a soft, pleasing strain
to be sung by the children. It was an age when
religion and manners were slowly recovering
from a disease which had threatened both with
dissolution, under the assiduous nursing of a
Church which had been reconciled to the nation,
under the influential patronage of a decorous
Court, under the guardianship of Addison. A
retrogression did indeed follow this period of
modest and steady improvement. The Queen
died; the Court grew vicious and vulgar; litera-
ture, if it gained something in power, lost much
in decorum, and bright names became rarities
in the Church. The impulse which had called
the charity-schools into existence grew weaker,
and at last expired; but when a more vigo-
rous generation Succeeded to the task of edu-
cating the people, the good effects of that bold
and honest experiment were visible generally in
the deeper practical comprehension which men
had attained of the national want, and particu-
larly in the entire abandonment of the system of
free grammar-schools.

We have delayed longer upon this period in
the history of education in England because the
contributors to the volume before us, being much
more concerned with the present than the past,
have passed it over in almost total silence.
Charity-schools, like free grammar-schools, have
in their time done good; if we would know what
they are now, the critic quoted above will tell
us. " A vast number of these schools," says he,
" are now useless, and worse than useless, because
" they offer clothing to the scholars, and thus
" attract within their walls many who might
" learn something elsewhere and will learn no-
" thing there."
We have been speaking of things of the past,
of first essays, of crude uncertain experiments, of
which the relics may still be seen, like cast-off
skins of the serpent. Education in England be-
longs properly to this century. Before the
patient and,sustained energy with which for fifty
years, not a few individuals, but the whole mass
of the powerful classes, the whole multitude of
religious sects, united in nothing but the eager
desire to give education to the people, have ad-
dressed themselves to this problem, all the fitful
and ineffectual exertions of previous ages are
insignificant. Probably, there is no example in
history of a national effort so mighty, so perse-
vering, so calm. The issue of it is yet doubtful;
but if the sects will have a little more patience
and be a little less sectarian—if the Committee of
Privy Council will continue a little longer its
wise and firm abstinence from spiritual tyranny
on the one hand and resistance to spiritual
tyranny on the other—if statesmen, finally, can
manage to postpone their party engagements to
an interest so momentous, a measure may before
very long be carried which will deserve to be
called the greatest achievement of the century,
and which may, perhaps, bring in its train the
reconciliation of the religious sects. At any rate
the disgrace of England will be wiped away, her
people will be educated, and, to recur to our
former metaphor, the course of the serpent of
wisdom will be no longer

Prone on the ground as once, but on his rear
Circular base of rising folds, that towered
Fold above fold, a surging maze, his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes.

The glaring defect of these papers on Education
is, that they omit to consider, except in passing,
the religious difficulty. As, compared with this,
all other difficulties are insignificant, we cannot
but be reminded of " the play of Hamlet with
the part of Hamlet left out." The omission is
particularly glaring in Professor I'illan's paper on
" the present aspects of the educational question,
which, in fact, will convey no information what-
ever to any one to whom the subject is not entirely
new, and which is, besides, carelessly written.
It is strange that a man who has long taken an
interest in this subject should be capable of such
a blunder as the assertion that the Committee Of
Council, instituted in 1839, was instituted about,
thirty years ago. His contemptuous manner of

treating the religious difficulty, as if it were a
vexatious impediment wantonly raised by hypo-
crites, is a far more serious fault. Upon the
manner in which this difficulty, which appears to
the Professor 80 contemptible, is ultimately
solved, depends, in our opinion, more than upon
Any other single thing, the religious future of
England.

The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. By Thomas
Jefferson Hogg. In Four Vols. London :
Idoxon.

(Second Notice.)

WitATEvEn may be the opinion formed about
the literary style of Mr. Hogg, there can be no
doubt but that his Life of Shelley contains much
most interesting matter. As far as he has yet
gone, the contents of his narrative corroborate
all that we have heard of Shelley, and assist in
creating such a picture of the man as we might
have formed from his poems and what has
reached us from observers. The account of
Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, is par-
ticularly fall, and we get a very close insight
into the poet's earlier married life; and, recol-
lecting the dark shadow thrown over it by the
suicide of the first Mrs. Shelley, we cannot help
perusing the anecdotes of her related here with
much interest of a painful kind. The life that
Shelley led would have been to any ordinary
person intensely " uncomfortable." He was
unsettled in opinions, in residence, in circum-
stances, and even in literary aims. He was
groping after a standard by which to test the
worth of life, and to adjust the balance between
theory and practice, and he had not attained it.
On reading many of the passages in his corre-
spondence, we cannot help thinking of Rousseau,
of Werter, and also of Godwin's works. The
lofty aims, the aspiring hopes, and the frigid
unreality of the metaphysical minds that came
before the reading public towards the end of the
last century are constantly brought before us.

Godwin is an author of whom not much is
known in his personal character. his celebrity
has greatly gone down, and his works were in
many respects alien from the national taste. We
think that he appears in rather an attractive
light in much of his correspondence with Shel-
ley. The visit of Shelley to Ireland, with a pur-
pose of regenerating the people of that country,
is described in the second volume at much
. length, and was one of the most curious incidents
in Shelley's personal career. His residence in
Wales is also recounted, and we get some odd
reminiscences of Dr. Parr and of John Horne
Tooke. Of positively new matter about the
poet, the best part is that relative to Harriet
Westbrook (his first wife); and every future
recorder of Shelley's life must consult Mr. Hogg's
pages for any delineation of the poet's wedded
history.
Of llarriet Shelley's suicide we have heard
much ourselves, and the subject was involved in
much mystery at the time. We may possibly
have to refer to the subject again when the
future volumes of this work shall be published.
Mr. Hogg states :
She often discoursed of her purpose of killing herself
some day or other, and at great length, in a calm, resolute
manner. She told me that at school, where she was very
unhappy, as she said, but I could never discover why she
was so, fur she was tiested with much kindness and ex-
ceedingly well instructed, she had conceived and contrived
sundry attempts and purposes of destroying herself. . . . .
She spoke of self-murder serenely before strangers ; and
at a dinner party I have heard her describe her feelings,
opinions, and intentions w.th respect to suicide with prolix
earnestness; and she looked so calm, so tranquil, so
blooming. and so handsome, that the astonished guests
smiled. She once, in particular—l well remember the
strange scene and the a:.t•mishmeut of the harmless corn-
lanY—st a P%thagorean dinner in tl-e house of a medical
philosopher, scattered dismay amongst a quiet party of
vegetable-eaters, persons who would not slay a shrimp, or
extinguish animal life in embryo by eating an egg, by
eking, whether they did not feel sometimes strongly in-
clined to kill themselves.
The poor girl's monomania of self-destruction, which we
long looked upon as a vain fancy, a baseless delusion, an
inconsequent hallucination of the mind, amused us occa-
sionally for acme years; eventually it premed a sad zeality,
and drew ford► many bitter tears.
This statement of Mr. Hogg would seem to show
that Mrs. Harriet Shelley had been predeter-
mined to suicide ; but that whole subject will
come before us again. Of the poet's visit to
Ireland we find many amusing traces. In his
Printed address to Irishmen, Shelley said :