popular person is only spoken evil of behind his back, an unpopular small boy among boys is made to suffer in a more direct and very unpleasant way.

Most of us leave school with the impression that there was a good deal of bullying when we were little, but that the institution has died out. The truth is that we have grown too big to be bullied, and too good-natured to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought bullying was an extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was rediscovered by Mr. Richmond). But a distinguished writer, who was a small boy when I was a big one, has since revealed to me the most abominable cruelties which were being practised at the very moment when I supposed bullying to have had its day and ceased to be. Now, the small boy need only have mentioned the circumstances to any one of a score of big boys, and the tormentor would have been first thrashed, and then, probably, expelled. A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild and hilly region on the other side of the world, let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. In a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the society of the cook, a very use less young man, who astonished him by references to one of our universities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning. This youth (who was made cook, and a very bad cook too, because he could do nothing else) had been expelled from a large English school. And he was expelled because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and had expressed his readiness to do it again. Now, there was no doubt that this cook in the mountain inn was a very unserviceable young fellow. But I wish more boys who have suffered things literally unspeakable from bullies would try whether force (in the form of a paving-stone) is really no remedy. But perhaps this is a relapse into the "wild justice of revenge, as they call it when one man shoots another in Ireland because he owes him money.

not see why a boy should not be permit ted to complain, if he is roasted, like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, are never without surveillance of some sort." This is true of most French schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there) may read the recently published confessions of a pion-an usher, or "spy." A more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched pion, it is impossible to imagine. In an English private school, the system of espionage and tale-bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike what Mr. Anstey describes in "Vice Versâ." But in the Catholic schools spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he says, that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than a check. The religious question as between Catholics and Protestants has no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant school might, and Grimstone's did, have talebearers; possibly a Catholic school might exist without parental surveillance. That system is called by its foes a police, by its friends a paternal' system. But fathers don't exercise the paternal" system themselves in this country, and we may take it for granted that, while English society and religion are as they are, surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If any one regrets this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and school-days, in Balzac's Louis Lambert" in the Memoirs of M. Maxime du Camp, in any book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth. He will find spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into forbidden and shady quarters of the town. No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation. There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne's experience in "Vanity Fair") be much bullying in an open cricket field. Big boys, too, with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it, but make it their business to find out where it exists. Exist it will, more or less, de

64

spite all precautions, while boys are boys -that is, are passing through a modified form of the savage state.

There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is the true method. Before they go out into school life, many little fellows of nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost poetical. They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you can win their confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts and fancies which lie about them in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked to lie on the grass and to people the alleys and glades of that miniature forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he seemed actually to see in a kind of vision. But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian, interested in the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green meadow. He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and his imagination was in abeyance for a season. This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school. Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His "Primitia" were published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but eleven years of age. His indiscreet father launched this slender bark," as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809. Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, and at four read Greek with

an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him." At seven he composed an essay "On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but "his taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period.' His sermons, some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these "Primitia" were collected. He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecration. "I confess," observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury, dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the change." "The late Revolution in France, he adds, "has afforded us a remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a State, and that from a deficiency on that head arise the chief evils which can befall society." He then bids us "remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may destroy our Israel is near at hand," though it might be difficult to show how Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Israel. As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that " Edward VI. died in his minority, and disappointed his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy reign." Of this infant's thirtynine sermons (just as many as the Articles), it may be said that they are in no way inferior to other examples of this class of literature. But sermons are among the least scarce and rare of human essays, and many parents would rather have their boy patiently acquiring the art of wicket-keeping at school than moralizing on the uncertainty of life at home. Some one having presented to the young author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar subject of the Ploughboy," he replied with an ode on "the Potboy."

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Bliss is not always join'd to wealth, Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof, For poverty is bliss with health,

in Paris in 1688. The learned Scioppius published works at sixteen, which deserved" (and perhaps obtained) "the admiration of dotards.' " M. Du Maurier asserts that, at the age of fifteen, Grotius pleaded causes at the Bar. At eleven Meursius made orations and harangues which were much admired. At fifteen Alexandre le Jeune wrote anacreontic verses, and (less excusably) a commentary on the Institutions of Cajus. Grevin published a tragedy and two comedies at the age of thirteen, and at fifteen Louis Stella was a professor of Greek. But no one reads Grevin now, nor Stella, nor Alexandre le Jeune, and perhaps their time might have been better occupied in being "soaring human boys than in composing tragedies and commentaries. Monsieur le Duc de Maine published, in 1678, his "Euvres Diverses d'un Autuer de Sept Ans, a royal example to be avoided by all boys. These and several score of other examples may perhaps reconcile us to the spectacle of puerile genius fading away in the existence of the common British schoolboy, who is nothing of a poet, and still less of a jurisconsult.

The British authors who understand boys best are not those who have written books exclusively about boys. There is Canon Farrar, for example, whose romances of boyish life appear to be very popular, but whose boys, somehow, are not real boys. They are too good when they are good, and when they are bad, they are not perhaps too bad (that is impossible), but they are bad in the wrong way. They are bad with a mannish and conscious vice, whereas even bad boys seem to sin less consciously and after a ferocious fashion of their own. Of the boys in "Tom Brown" it is difficult to speak, because the Rugby boy under Arnold seems to have been of a peculiar species. A contemporary pupil was asked, when an undergraduate, what he conceived to be the peculiar characteristic of Rugby boys. He said, after mature reflection, that the differentia of the Rugby boy was his moral thoughtfulness. Now the characteristic of the ordinary boy is his want of what is called moral thoughtfulness. He lives in simple obedience to school traditions. These may compel him, at one school, to speak in a peculiar language,

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXVII., No. 5

and to persecute and beat all boys who are slow at learning this language. At another school he may regard dislike of the manly game of football as the sin with which heaven heads the count of crimes.' On the whole, this notion seems a useful protest against the immaturely artistic beings who fill their studies with photographs of Greek fragments, casts, etchings by the newest etcher, bits of china, Oriental rugs, and very curious old brass candlesticks. The challenge cup" soon passes away from the keeping of any house in a public school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated character. But when we reach æsthetic boys, we pass out of the savage stage into hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools are often terribly "advanced," and when they are not worshipping the sunflower they are vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism, and all that kind of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking and sacrifice on the altar of the Beautiful. A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing virelais in playtime is doing himself no good, and is worse than useless to the society of which he is a member. The small boys, who are the most ardent of heroworshippers, either despise him or they allow him to address them in chansons royaux, and respond with trebles in triolets. At present a great many boys leave school, pass three years or four at the universities, and go back as masters to the place where some of their old schoolfellows are still pupils. It is through these very young masters, perhaps, that “advanced'' speculations and tastes get into schools, where, however excellent in themselves, they are rather out of place. Indeed, the very young master, though usually earnest in his work, must be a sage indeed if he can avoid talking to the elder boys about the problems that interest him, and so forcing their minds into precocious attitudes. The advantage of Eton boys used to be, perhaps is still, that they came up to college absolutely destitute of "ideas," and guiltless of reading anything more modern modern than Virgil.

40

Thus their intellects were quite fallow, and they made astonishing progress when they bent their fresh and unwearied minds to study. But too many boys now leave school with settled opinions derived from the very latest thing out, from the newest German pessimist or American socialist. It may, however, be argued that ideas of these sorts are like measles, and that it is better to take them early and be done with them for

ever.

While schools are reformed and Latin grammars of the utmost ingenuity and difficulty are published, boys on the whole change very little. They remain the beings whom Thackeray understood better than any other writer; Thackeray, who liked boys so much and was so little blind to their defects. I think he exaggerates their habit of lying to masters, or, if they lied in his day, their character has altered in that respect, and they are more truthful than many men find it expedient to be. And they have given up fighting; the old battles between Berry and Biggs, or Dobbin and Cuff (major) are things of the glorious past. Big boys don't fight, and there is a whisper that little boys kick each other's shins when in wrath. That practice can hardly be called an improvement, even if we do not care for fisticuffs. Perhaps the gloves are the best peacemakers at school.. When all the boys, by practice in boxing, know

the

pretty well whom they can in a friendly way lick, they are less tempted to more crucial experiments "without gloves.' But even the ascertainment of one's relative merits with the gloves hurts a good deal, and one may thank heaven that the fountain of youth (as described by Pontus de Tyarde) is not a common beverage. By drinking this liquid, says the old Frenchman, one is insensibly brought back from old to middle-age, and to youth and boyhood. But one would prefer to stop drinking before actually being reduced to boy's estate, and passing once more through the tumultuous experiences of that period. And of these, not having enough to eat is by no means the least common. The evidence as to execrable dinners is rather dispiriting, and one may end by saying that if there is a worse fellow than a bully, it is a master who does not see that his boys are supplied with plenty of wholesome food. He, at least, could not venture, like a distinguished head master, to preach and publish sermons on "Boys' Life ; its Fulness." A schoolmaster who has boarders is a hotelkeeper, and thereby makes his income, but he need not keep a hotel which would be dispraised in guide books. Dinners are a branch of school economy which should not be left to the wives of schoolmasters. They have never been boys.-Cornhill Magazine.

I.

BESIDE a lovely little lake in Switzerland there is a small village of scattered vineclad chalets, and just beyond these the land curves round from a projecting point and forms a bay. On the side of the point nearest the chalets is a shallow creek, and from this goes up a long flight of steps; these are plainly not much used, grass grows between the stones, and on each side, among the dusky silver of the thistle-down, are blackberry bushes laden with fruit. No one has been there to take this. And, indeed,

when the end of the steps is reached, one only gets a view of the opposite shore about two miles away, and of the grand mountain range that ends the view on the left. The outlook on the right is blocked by the garden wall which ends the point; on the left are some tumbledown sheds filled with faggots, and what may possibly be the rubbish of generations.

An artist would stand wrapped in admiration of the light and shade concentrated on the strange medley within the sheds-bits of the roof have been blown away, and although the gloom is too

great to distinguish anything, there is sombre color within, and a mysterious suggestiveness in the forms that here and there stand out of the chaos

There is the tiniest strip of ground between the sheds and the lake, and from this gourds and vines have climbed up over the ruin. On this strip of ground, shading her eyes with her lean brown hand, André's mother has been standing this half-hour, watching the opposite shore. There is nothing special about her at first sight; she is like a score or so of the women of her canton. She wears a black, full skirt, more than half covered by a gray woollen apron; over this is a short, loose, black jacket, no cap or collar, only some white linen shows round her brown neck. Her gray hair is smoothly gathered into a knot behind, and is almost covered by a tanned straw hat bent down over her spare face; her nose is long and thin. The rest of her face looks like a shrivelled leaf, but the eyes are strangely young and bright, with a look in them that at once arrests attention.

As a

André's mother may be in other respects like her neighbors, but no other woman in the little village has such a weird story written in her eyes. rule, eyes that are expressive can tell many stories, sometimes revealing quite an unexpected chapter of events, but it rarely happens to one person in a lifetime to read the shocked horror that is fixed in the eyes of André's mother, or to see in one face so strange a mingling of age and youth. Strangely, too, this weird expression is out of place in the sweet pathetic face; the loving lips seem ready to protest against the terror which has got, as it were, embroidered on what may have once been a face of beaming joy.

There are times when this terror lurks out of sight, but any sudden emotion recalls it; and now voices sounding close beside her make the woman look up, with the weird horror fully shown.

Two gentlemen are standing smoking in the terraced garden at the top of the wall. One of them, the elder, nods in a friendly way, and says, "Good-evening, Madame Engemann.

His friend stands half hidden under a long, vine-covered pergola, that reaches from the charming house yonder to this

Monsieur Weissembourg smiles. Well, then, the spirits are good She is usually called André's mother,' but her name is Elisa Engemann.

ones.

But why does she look so scared?

Ah well, poor soul! she has cause. She was married fourteen years ago to a good husband, and they were very happy. She was a pretty young girl, and he was a fine handsome fellow, and had the reputation of being one of the best guides at Grindelwald; and he had saved money enough to buy a chalet here and to furnish it; and then, before André was born, he took his last journey -he was buried in a snowfall.' And the shock of his death that look?'

gave

her

It was more than that. He had left her, promising to be home before the baby was born. Three days after, between night and morning, she roused from sleep and. heard her husband's voice outside calling to her. She said the voice was loud at first, but it grew feebler, and at last died away. She rose up and opened the door, but she could not see any one; she came on to my house, and begged to see me. I believe