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Moore, by the way, tells us of himself, when at college, that after some unavailing efforts (solely to please his anxious mother), and some mortification on finding himself vanquished by competitors whom he knew to be dull fellows, intus et in cute, and who, indeed, proved themselves such through life, he resolved in the second year of his course to give up the struggle for honours, and confine his reading to such books as he had a taste for, otherwise learning only just enough to bring him through without disgrace.

Mistress Elizabeth Delap, the Irish school dame, of hornbook associations, made it the pride and boast of her declining days, when nearly ninety years old for she flourished in the capacity of hornbook dame fifty years and more-that she was the first that had put a book into the hand of Oliver Goldsmith. Apparently he did not much profit by it, observes one of his biographers, "for she confessed that he was one of the dullest boys she had ever dealt with, insomuch that she had sometimes doubted whether it was possible to make anything of him: a common case with imaginative children, who are apt to be beguiled from the dry abstractions of elementary study by the picturings of the fancy."

The enthusiast Fancy was a truant ever.

* "Gray and Collins were among the instances of this wayward disposition. Such persons do not think so highly of the advantages, nor can they submit their imaginations so servilely to the trammels, of strict scholastic discipline. There is a

In preparing for the university, Goldsmith was at school first at Athlone, and afterwards at Edgeworthstown; and at neither does his proficiency ap'pear to have been brilliant. "He was indolent and careless, however, rather than dull, and, on the whole, appears to have been well thought of by his teachers." So much depends on the teachers, and on the mode of teaching. In accounting for his brother Dr. Andrew Combe's backwardness at the High School, the late George Combe-of course with special reference to his pet doctrine-remarked on the importance of attending to the predominance, respectively, of the observing and the reflecting organs; the consequence of neglecting which distinction was, that "some boys of profound intellects and fine moral dispositions sat on the benches dreary and desolate, without acquiring ideas or gratification. They were considered as irretrievably dull, and left the school stupefied and demoralized rather than improved." The correctness of this representation is not, Mr. Combe maintains, contradicted by the fact, that of the recorded "duxes" at the High School, some "stand registered in the country's history as men of superior powers; for these will be found to have had an ample development of certain observing organs which in Andrew were deficient, and also to have enjoyed the aid of private tutors, an advantage which to him was denied." Lord Cock

certain kind and degree of intellect in which words take root, but into which things have not power to penetrate."-Hazlitt, Table-talk Essays, vol. i. No. v.

burn, in his autobiography, treating also of this High School, observes, that the same powers which raise a boy high in a good school make it probable that he will rise high in life; but that in bad schools it is nearly the very reverse: even in the most rationally conducted, however, superiority affords only a gleam of hope for the future. "Men change, and still more boys. The High School distinctions very speedily vanished; and fully as much by the sinking of the luminaries who had shone in the zenith, as by the rising of those who had been lying on the horizon. I have ever since had a distrust of duxes, and thought boobies rather hopeful." As for himself, "Harry" Cockburn doubts whether he ever read fifty pages voluntarily, while at the High School; and he tells us that out of the whole four years of his attendance there were probably not ten days in which he was not flogged, at least once. Yet he never entered the class, or left it, without feeling perfectly up to the work. "But I was driven stupid. Oh! the bodily and mental wearisomeness of sitting six hours a day, staring idly at a page, without motion and without thought, and trembling at the gradual approach of the merciless monster. I never got a single prize, and once sat boobie at the annual public examination." At this period the beauty of no Roman word, or thought, or action, he says, ever occurred to him; nor did he fancy that Latin was of any use except to torture boys. When he rose to be under Dr. Adam, however, matters seemed to have improved with young

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Cockburn; and he lays stress upon the "sensible and affecting address" that venerable rector made to him and other of the boys on leaving-in which Dr. Adam pointed out the opposite tendencies of early eminence, and of early obscurity, upon school lads; warning those who had been distinguished, against presumption, and those who had hitherto been unnoticed, against despair, and explaining to both, that, even in the very next stage, he had often known them change natures; the one from fancying that nothing more required to be done, the other from discovering that they had everything to do.

Smollett introduces a judicious pedagogue, by whose careful tendance young Perry Pickle is redeemed from the pains and penalties of irretrievable duncedom. The absurd discipline to which the boy had been previously subjected, had strangely perverted the bias of his disposition. The new master "found him in a state of sullen insensibility, which the child had gradually contracted, in a long course of stupefying correction,”—and by discriminating treatment and observant tact, enabled him soon to acquit himself of the imputation of dulness. Like Cymon, in Dryden's adaptation from Boccaccio, he studied lessons he before abhorred :

Thus the man-child advanced, and learn'd so fast,
That in short time his equals he surpass'd;

which is the way with so many when, and only `when, they have left school-for good.

Linnæus thought himself ill-managed at school: whatever the cause, his masters made severe complaints of his stolidity, and one of them, at Wexio, pronounced him, at nineteen, "if not a positive blockhead," at any rate unfit for holy orders, for which he was intended. They recommended his being apprenticed to handicraft trade, instead.

Sir Isaac Newton for some time could be got to take but little interest in his books, and stood very low in the school. A curious accident, or incident, is alleged as the turning-point to a more prosperous issue: "the boy who was above him, having one day," says Sir David Brewster, "given him a severe kick upon the stomach, from which he suffered great pain, Isaac laboured incessantly till he got above him in the school, and from that time he continued to rise until he was the head-boy."

Mr. Thackeray says of Steele, that he fears no good report could be given by his masters and ushers at the Charterhouse of that thickset, square-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish boy. "He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times. Though he had very good parts of his own he got other boys to do his lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging-block."

At the various schools to which Robert Clive was sent, he seems to have been both idle and unruly. His father resented his neglect of his studies; and in after life, when informed from time to time of

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