Again, the love of home was too apt to
degenerate into indistinct ideas of a place
whence " pocket-money" and " prog" came;
while more tender and more soul-subduing
associations were forgotten, or scoffed at, as
childish. Coldness to those who ought to be
best loved, was a natural result of daily
suffering the tyrannous cruelty of one who
seemed paid by best friends to act as a
persecutor. Those, moreover, who had once lost
the power of loving, soon became clever in
cruelty; and when they saw their companions
wincing under the ingenious tortures
of the local Dionysius, grew proportionately
insensible to the sufferings of cats, birds, or
younger boys.

Cane was not the only enemy to whom
the Busbeian school might lay their grievances
or deficiencies. The plan of education
too often made a bad scholar of a good business
man, a casuistic parson out of an acute
lawyer, and an ignorant one out of a youth
who might, by steady perseverance, have
arrived at the post of managing partner in a
drysalter's or a mercer's. The stiff
uniformity, the chop-and-steak steak-and-chop
system of education, which rang the changes
on Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, in one
ever-recurring series of combinations, at once
served to curb and stifle originality, and to
force a class of study upon youths, suited
neither to their prospects in life, nor their
abilities.

Still worse was its effect on literature.
That a good knowledge of Latin and Greek
is highly conducive to chastening and heightening
an English style, especially where
the application of derivatives is concerned,
no one will deny. But, in the restricted
system of the last age of education, Latin
and Greek were too much held up as the
one and only standard, as the line of
demarcation that was to separate the educated
from the illiterate. Whatever might be the
general accomplishments or acquisitions of a
man, he was no scholar, and no company for
scholars, without a knowledge of languages
no longer spoken; and an Oxford man
despised learning French as much as a
man is now underrated who will not learn
German.

Besides this direct tendency to lower the
standard of original English literature, this
exaggerated estimate of the utility of the dead
languages went far to deteriorate the purity and
freshness of the English language. Terse and
forcible Saxon words gave place to elaborate,
but inexpressive, coinages of four syllables. We
know a man to this day who cannot call a
place " marshy," but speaks of its " paludosity."
Such an example is but one of infinite
thousands, which may be culled in handfuls from
many a " standard English divine's " best and
most instructive pages.

The retention of old phrases derived
from the Roman law, or clumsily modified
and modelled thereupon, has overloaded
our legal phraseology with redundancies
and tautologies, which have no other
purpose than increasing the waste of parchment,
and proportionately of costs, and
occasionally leaving room for a dangerous quibble.
Why we cannot have English law in the
English language, is a far greater puzzle than
the authorship of Junius.

But, although a taste for some preposterous
mediæval revivals has developed itself of late
years, few attempts have been made to restore
the cane to its original dignity, and wholesale
flogging is as little appreciated in our days as
the burning of heretics. Bodily punishment
(and that with considerable restriction) is for
the most part confined to acts of daring defiance
of authority, deliberate disobedience, or fraud.
In the latter case it may fairly be doubted
whether the expulsion or temporary suspension
of the " black sheep " is not a better
punishment for the delinquent, as well as a
more lasting and forcible lesson to his
comrades.

We have been led to these remarks and
remembrances on the subject of thrashing, by a
recent visit to an establishment where both
cane and birch would have found themselves in
a terra incognita, and where we found nothing
but contrast to the old system; and, better
still, no contrast that was not an improvement.

Whizzing through the tunnel just past
the Doric Square station, we found ourselves
running along, with flat country and slightly
distant hills on either side. Everything looked
very cheerful, fresh, and out-of-London-ish.
Not that we ever dislike London. We only
leave it, to nerve our senses with fresh air,
and return to appreciate its greatness, and
penetrate its secret sorrows, with awakened
imagination, and with hearts made kinder by
our brief converse with trees, fields, and the
sky above us.

At length we stopped at a little wooden
station, and, as we got out, marvelled at the
quarter-of-a-mile-long train of luggage-trucks
arriving from some out-of-town London in
the north. Away from the station, we turned
aside into a little lane, with lofty trees on
either side, where we could not even see the
line of railway. We forgot town, and thought
only of where we were going.

When we came in sight of the "Gable
College," as it is called—from some
grotesque peculiarities in the rough red brick
structure that forms the educational domicile
—we could not help being struck with the
cheerfulness of the whole appearance,
despite its solitary situation. The number of
narrow bedroom windows, opened for
ventilation, and with the pure white curtains
flapping to and fro, were suggestive of a healthy,
home-like comfort, strangely unlike the two-
in-a-bed, thirty-in-a-room, one-windowed,
curtainless '' ward," yelept a " dormitory," which
used to chill our blood and benumb our half-
clad limbs, as we crept to bed within the