sound divinity and history; in French, as well as in English literature.'

To the talents which Mr. Frere inherited from both parents there was added an influence which is always most interesting to trace the influence of a high-minded and accomplished woman. Such was Lady Fenn, his father's surviving sister, and the widow of Sir John Fenn, editor of the Paston Letters.' As the authoress of 'Cobwebs to catch Flies,' under the name of 'Mrs. Lovechild,' Lady Fenn shares with Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer the honour of founding that species of fiction for children which was perfected by Miss Edgeworth. In the conversations of his later years, Mr. Frere described this type of a class to be revered the more as it becomes rarer:—

'It is difficult to give any one nowadays an idea of the kind of awe which, in my boyhood, a learned old lady like her inspired, down in the country, not only in us, her nephews and nieces, and in those of her own age and rank who could understand her intellectual superiority, but even in the common people around her. I remember one day, coming from a visit to her, I stopped to learn what some village boys outside her gate were wrangling about-they were disputing whether the nation had any reason to be afraid of an invasion by Buonaparte, and one of the disputants said, with a conscious air of superior knowledge-"I tell ye, ye don't know what a terrible fellow he is: why, he don't care for nobody! If he was to come here to Dereham, he would'nt care that," snapping his fingers; "no! not even for Lady Fenn, there!"'

In his sixteenth year, Frere went from an excellent preparatory school to Eton. His descriptions of the dignified authority of Dr. Davies are valuable as a record of one of the strongest traditions of our public schools. The boys watched with jealous pride the bearing of their Head-master on the frequent visits of George III., and the good-natured king used to humour the pedagogue in magnifying his office; like Charles II. and Busby. At Eton, Frere formed a life-long friendship with Canning, for whom he cherished a love and admiration, which absence never diminished, and neither age nor death itself could dull.' He joined Canning and a few other Etonians of their own standing in starting 'The Microcosm,'-a title admirably expressive of the miniature world of a public school,— the papers in which gave a clear promise of the striking literary ability which its principal writers afterwards displayed. Mr. Hookham Frere was fond of reverting to his school-boy days, and we are indebted to Sir Bartle for some interesting reminiscences of this period of his uncle's life. Talking of a barring out at the school, when eighty boys, and among them Mr.

Arthur

Arthur Wellesley, afterwards the Duke of Wellington, were flogged, he said:

'No one who has not seen it can estimate the good Eton does in teaching the little boys of great men that they have superiors. It is quite as difficult and as important to teach this to the great bankers' and squires' boys, as to dukes' sous, and I know no place where this was done so effectually as at Eton. Neither rank nor money had any consideration there compared with that which was paid to age, ability, and standing in the school.'

With these recollections, says his biographer, he was not unnaturally disposed to question the wisdom of the plans, which, even thirty years ago, were sometimes propounded for making fundamental changes in the system and subjects of teaching in our public schools.

"It was not," he maintained, "of so much importance what you learnt at school, as how you learnt it. At school a boy's business is not simply or mainly to gain knowledge, but to learn how to gain it. If he learns his own place in the world, and, in a practical. fashion, his duty towards other boys, and to his superiors as well as to his inferiors; if he acquires the apparatus for obtaining and storing knowledge and some judgment as to what kind of knowledge is worth obtaining, his time at school has not been misspent, even if he carries away a very scanty store of actual facts in history, or literature, or physical science. If, in his school-boy days, you cram his head with such facts beyond what are merely elementary, you are very apt to addle his brains, and to make a little prig or pedant of him, incapable, from self-conceit, of much further progress afterwards. Nor can any boy carry from school any great number of facts which will really be useful to him, when he comes in after life to make those branches of knowledge his special study, because they are all, but especially the physical sciences, progressive, and the best ascertained facts, as well as theories, of to-day, may be obsolete and discredited ten years hence. You find many learned men who have been great students and experimentalists, and even discoverers, in very early youth; but the number of facts worth remembering, which they accumulated in boyhood, always bears a very small proportion to what they have learnt after leaving school, and in early manhood."

For these and similar reasons, he held that no physical science, nor even history nor literature, taught as separate branches of knowledge, could ever be efficient substitutes for classics and mathematics, at our public schools and universities, by way of mental training, to fit a boy to educate himself in after life: classics as forming style, and giving a man power to use his own language correctly in writing and speaking, and even in thinking; and mathematics as the best training for reasoning, and as a necessary foundation for the accurate study of physics and natural philosophy.'

These remarks deserve the attention of all interested in edu

cation,

cation, as the testimony of one who spoke from his own experience of the system which formed men like Canning and himself. It is true that, as is usual with earnest protests against prevalent errors, especially when thrown out in conversation, they are onesided; but they are on the side which needs in the present day vigorous and unwavering defence. Their one-sidedness consists in the implied assumption that the intellectual discipline given by classical and mathematical studies can only be secured by the neglect of physical knowledge. This is not the place to enter on the wide question, to which the discussions going on around us must give occasion to return. We have lately argued in favour of the introduction of physical science into our public schools; and we believe that time can be found for all that is needful in this way, provided only that such studies be put in their relation to those which train the mind in abstract proper reasoning, in the principles and use of language, and in familiarity with the creative minds and heroic deeds of other times the knowledge which places the individual man in contact with the life of humanity from the beginning of the world. This can only be done by giving the highest place-we stay not now to argue whether the first in order of time, nor in what proportion to other studies-to that knowledge of Antiquity, of which the key is found alone in the languages and literature of Rome, and, above all, of Greece.

It will be observed that Mr. Frere does not argue for merely elementary knowledge; but against cramming a school-boy's head with actual facts in history, or literature, or physical science, beyond what are merely elementary.' His great principle is, that if intellectual power is cultivated, it will make its own acquisitions in after life-and make them equally from any field to which duty may direct, or to which natural genius may guide. And, we venture to add, though some may deem it paradoxical, that the very absence of forced cultivation at school is often likely to give that natural genius freer scope. It has happened to us to contrast our own experience of recreation found from schoolwork in literature, science, and general knowledge, with the distaste for such pursuits in boys of the present generation, to whom all these things are school-work, and therefore repulsive out of school. The fruits of Eton training in boys like Canning and Frere are to be seen in such a work as the 'Microcosm ;' not so much in its literary merit-high as that is—but in the self-acquired general knowledge to which its contents bear witness, and in the mental energy which prompted them to put forth their powers in such work at the critical age of seventeen or eighteen.

Of

Of course Mr. Frere's very humiliating disclosure of Mr. Canning's awful ignorance of the fact that tadpoles turn to frogs will be made the most of, in defiance of his warning, 'Now, don't you go and tell that story of Canning to the next fool you meet. Canning could rule, and did rule, a great and civilised nation; but in these days people are apt to fancy that any one who does not know the natural history of frogs must be an imbecile in the treatment of men.' We will venture to say, in passing, that such a knowledge of the Frogs' of Aristophanes as bore the fruit of Mr. Frere's translations, was of infinitely greater value to a statesman than a little fact of natural history which he could learn from anybody any day; but the two things have no necessary contrast. But there is another sort of self-instruction which we can imagine, because we see its results in the volumes before us. We can imagine two boys, of noble presence and with features lighted up by the flashes of genius, at the age when the fruits of early training begin to ripen, and when the mind yearning to be about its appointed business bursts the bonds of systems, whether good or bad, turning the one to its own profit and casting off the other:-we can imagine such boys walking in the meadows between the lordly pile of Windsor and the scholastic halls of Eton; and, heedless alike of the croaking of frogs or the wriggling of tadpoles, discoursing of what they should do to emulate the poets, heroes, and patriots, with whose words and deeds their daily studies had imbued their minds:-we can imagine them reading together or reciting the choice portions of our own literature stored in their memories by an admiration the more loving as such learning was no school-task :—and then from this happy union of the old and new, from spontaneous genius disciplined by the best examples, we see them prompted irresistibly to prune their own feathers for a first flight in the pages of the Microcosm.' Those pages furnish an ample answer to the silly assumption that a training in Greek and Latin leads to ignorance of, or indifference to, our own literature. In parts only of Frere's five papers, written at the age of seventeen or eighteen, we find-besides marks of a wide 'general knowledge'-proofs of a familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Gawain Douglas, and Caxton, with Spenser and Shakspeare, More and Bacon, Milton and Dryden, and (among the lesser lights) Blackmore and Ossian; with Norse Sagas, Scotch and Irish antiquities, and North American Indians. And, what is infinitely better, we find a strange maturity of thought, and a perfect power of writing that English which had no special place in the writer's education. If we are told that all Eton boys are not Cannings and Freres, we have only to repeat that we are not now arguing

arguing the whole question of education, but presenting that side of it which is illustrated by men like Frere and Canning, and in a lesser degree by thousands who share their spirit, though falling short of their gifts. It may be interesting to add that the 'Microcosm' was published in forty weekly numbers, between the 6th of November, 1786, and the 30th of July, 1787, when, at the Long Vacation, its cessation was ingeniously explained by an account of the death-bed of its imaginary editor, Mr. Gregory Griffin.' Among the contributors was Robert ('Bobus ') Smith (the brother of Sydney Smith), of whose powers we learn from Mr. Frere, as from other sources, that his schoolfellows formed the highest opinion.

Frere's contributions to the Microcosm' already indicated his great critical power; and about the same time he proved the poetic genius, which has placed him at the very head of English translators. Here too his knowledge of the brilliant fragments of the Greek lyric poets-of which the elegant imitations by Horace are but the shadow of a shade-prove how far his classical reading went beyond school routine. His exquisite 'Lament of Danaë,' from Simonides, is perhaps generally known; but his vresion of a fragment of Alcæus may be referred to as breathing the patriotism which thus early inspired his poetry.

The two friends were separated for a time, on leaving Eton; when Canning went to Oxford, and Mr. Frere to Caius College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow. His Latin Essay, which gained the Members' Prize in 1792, is interesting for its clever speculations on a question to which eighty years have given such a brilliant answer-'An morum emendationem et virtutis cultum in nascenti Sinûs Botanici republicâ sperari liceat and for the proofs it contains of the influence of Adam Smith, on whose opening of the road to Free Trade the young Tory pronounces a warm eulogy. On leaving the University in 1795, Mr. Frere entered public life in the Foreign Office under Lord Grenville, and in the following year he was returned to Parliament, as member for the close borough of West Looe in Cornwall. In our reformed House of Commons, a young man, situated as Mr. Frere was, can only hope to enter it by playing the demagogue and pandering to the tastes of some radical constituency. But, being independent, Mr. Frere was able to follow his honest convictions by supporting Mr. Pitt. 'His attachment to Mr. Pitt,' says his biographer, was a much warmer personal feeling than that which the haughty character of his chief inspired in most of his political adherents; but it was discriminating and enduring; and when the generation of public men, to which they both belonged, had passed away

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