observations upon the scene before him, was the thickness
and deadness of the air which those boys
were inhaling when they rushed out from their
lessons to their playground, and which passed
through their lungs during the long and important
hours of a schoolboy's night. The removal
of a school like this, and Westminster, is ten
thousand times more important than the making
of any change in Merchant Taylors' or St.
Paul's; because, whilst these last are merely
for day scholars, the others are for boarders
too.

There is a want, very urgently and widely
felt, of a high class public school within the
reach of persons of small or moderate means.
Can parents with small incomes send their boys
to Eton or Rugby? The thing is obviously
impossible. Now were a school with such a
reputation as Merchant Taylors' removed to
some desirable place in the country, and were
establishments in connexion with it set up,
where the boys might board, it is not too much
to predict that a highly useful and satisfactory
result would be a certainty. The parents of the
boys who now attend these schools as
day-scholars, would certainly send them to the
country establishment always supposing it to
be conducted with strict economy and the boys
would not be obliged to secure, as they do now,
the advantages of a Merchant Taylor's education,
at the expense of haying to put up with a
Journeyman Taylor's physique.

It is an extraordinary thing that people who
are ordinarily supposed to be so matter-of-fact as
we are, should in some things give way, and that
to a most injurious extent, to our sentimental
feelings. We find honourable members getting up
at the meetings which are occasionally held to
determine on the fate of Westminster, and
drivelling by the half-hour about their associations
with the old school, about the wonderful men
who were brought up within its walls, and
the sacred memories that attach to its stones.
Now this is all very well; but it is the
especial function of Progress to ride over
many such things. We must remember
that the world is not yet at an end, and
that it is our business to establish new
institutions, which, in their turn, will have
antiquarian claims on the men of future and distant
ages. To be content to dwell on the glories of
the past, and establish no new glories for after
generations to look back on, is to be like some
old proprietor of an estate who should fence
about and prop up his old and decayed timber
because of the memories that hung about it, and
should neglect the while to plant new trees for
the benefit of his heirs. Besides, are we
consistent? Do we let these claims of antiquity
influence us in other matters? Is there no
picturesque charm about the thought of the old
messenger, who was to travel "haste, post-haste"
a hundred miles, with a letter tied up with
silk and labelled, "These, for Master Thomas
Brown of London?" Does the telegraph
message spin along the wires less rapidly for such
memories? Or, to take more recent recollections,
is there no charm about what we
remember of the old stage-coaches? What great
men have been contented to travel by them?
Has not Johnson sat in a stage-coach, has
not Sheridan, and have not hundreds of others
of magnificent memory? Is the vehicle that
satisfied these men to be contemptuously
put aside? Indeed it is. The Age coach
still runs to Brighton in the summer months,
but it is as a curiosity, not as a means of
conveyance, and the passengers who use it,
do so that they may enjoy a drive, not
because they are wanting to get from London to
Brighton.

Why, then, is this wonderful amount of
sentiment to be indulged in only in scholastic
matters? Why are these memories that do not
keep us at the mercy of messengers and mail-
coaches, to hang about the limbs of the young
generation, like shackles, and bind and fetter
them at every turn? There are such shackles
provided for our Blue-coat boys. Their little
yellow legs are literally fettered by the heavy
close skirt that descends around them, and
the unhappy children in their play-hour are
compelled either to turn their skirts up and
gird them in a great hot wadge about their loins
to their immense inconvenience: or to abandon
the play project altogether, and hang about the
ground doing nothing, or stare like caged animals
through the bars that separate Christ's Hospital
from Newgate-street.

Here is a school that should go into the country
along with Westminster and the Charter House.
But think of the associations that attach to the
old Christ's Hospital and the memory of Edward
the Sixth. Are these to have no weight? Not
an ounce, against a similar measure of muscle
on the Blue-coat arm. Take the boy away
where he can play with energy and breathe fresh
air. Put him in a dress in which he can move
with activity and pleasure, and if it is still to be
a Blue-coat School – and why not? – and if
yellow stockings are to be de rigueur, clap him
into a blue knicker-bocker, and see how well his
yellow legs will look then. Let these improvements
be made, and we will talk about the
ancient memories afterwards. Get the
Westminster School, the Charter House, and Christ's
Hospital, away to some fair country place, and
it will surely be found that, in spite of the
absence of factories, of river-steamers, of grinding
traffic of eternal vans and omnibuses, in
spite of the absence of every unwholesome and
injurious element, moral and physical, that can
be assembled to clip and stunt the development
of the boy into the man, there will be some
compensating force in the pure air. Nay,
even the ancient memories so often spoken of,
may adhere all the better to the names of
the schools, and the associations which we
think in such mighty danger may not be
altogether blown away by the fresh breezes of the
country.

"It is a singular stroke of eloquence," says
the author of Tristram Shandy – " it is a singular
stroke of eloquence (at least it was so when