administering castigation to one of her pupils laid across her knees, the others looking on. But it soon became a favourite subject for the illustrator and caricaturist.

The strictness of scholastic discipline existed in an aggravated form, no doubt, in early days, and formed part of a more barbarous system of retribution for wrong done or suffered. The principle of wholesale and indiscriminate flagellation for offences against the laws of the school or for neglect of studies marched hand in hand with the vindictive legislation of bygone days; and doubtless, from the first, the rod often supplied a vent for the temper or caprice of the pedagogue.

At Merchant Taylors’ in my time the cane was freely used, and the forms of chastisement were the cut on the hand and the bender, for which the culprit had to stoop.

The régime of the once redoubtable Dr. Busby at Westminster was a kind of survival of the Draconic rule of Udall at Eton when poor Tusser was there; and it is exceedingly probable that in the time of Charles II. notions of what was salutary for youth in the shape of unguentum baculinum, or stick-ointment, had undergone very slight alteration since the previous century. Busby, of whom there is a strange-looking portrait in Nichols’ Anecdotes, was the most sublime of coxcombical Dons, and within his own pale an autocrat second to none of the Cæsars. Smaller luminaries in the same sphere paid him homage in dedicatory epistles.

Everybody must remember the traditional anecdote of the visit of Charles II. to Westminster, and of the King, with his hat under his arm, walking complacently behind Busby through the school, the latter covered; and of the head-master, when his Majesty and himself (Ego et rex meus over again) were beyond observation, bowing respectfully to Charles, trencher-cap in hand, and explaining that if the boys had any idea that there was a greater man in England than him, his authority would be at an end.

But there is a second story of Busby and a luckless Frenchman who threw a stone by accident through one of the windows while the lessons were in progress and the principal was hearing a class. Busby sent for the offender, thinking it was one of the boys in the playground; but when the stranger was introduced, it was “Take him up,” and a flogging was inflicted before the whole assembly. The Frenchman went away in a fury, and at once sent a challenge to Busby by a messenger. The Doctor reads the cartel, and cries, “Take him up,” and the envoy shares the fate of his employer. He, too, enraged at the treatment, returns, and demands compensation from Monsieur; but the latter shrugs his shoulders, and can only say, “Ah, me! he be the vipping man; he vip me, he vip you, he vip all the world.”

It was of Busby that some one said how fortunate it was for the Seraphim and Cherubim that they had no nether extremities, or when he joined them, he would have “taken them up,” as the Red Indian in his happy hunting-grounds still pursues his favourite occupation on earth.

Charles Burney, one of a famous and accomplished family, kept school at one time at Greenwich. He subsequently removed to Chiswick. There are still persons living who recollect him and his oddities. He was a great martinet—a miniature Busby; but a singular point about him was his habit of inserting in the quarterly accounts sent to the parents a charge for the birch-rods bought in the course of the term, and applied for the benefit of his pupils. This was a novel and ingenious method, a treatment of the question from a financier’s point of view; and if black draughts and blue pills were recognised as legitimate items in the school-bill, why not the materials for external application?

The condition of the schoolmaster himself, on the other hand, and of his allies, the tutor and the usher, was as far removed from our present ideas as the code which he enforced and the books which he expounded. The freer diffusion of knowledge and an advanced civilisation have tended to liberate the schoolboy from the barbarous despotism of his teachers, the majority of whom were latter-day survivals of a decadent type, and to raise the latter in the social scale. The rod is broken, and Busbyism is extinct. But the successors of that renowned personage enjoy a higher rank and enlarged opportunities, and may maintain both if they keep pace with the progress of thought and opinion.

The schoolmaster has set his house in order at the eleventh hour, in obedience to external pressure, coming from men who have revolted against the associations and prejudices of early days, and inaugurated a new educational Hegira; and the evolutions of this modern platform are by no means fully manifest.

The propensity of the class to adhere to ancient traditions in regard to the application of corporal punishment was, of course, to be checked only by the force of public opinion. Had it not been that the latter was gradually directed against the evil, the probability is that this would have ranked among those popular antiquities which time has not seriously or generally touched. But so early as 1669 a representation on the subject was actually laid before Parliament in a document called “The Children’s Petition: Or, A modest remonstrance of that intolerable grievance our youth lie under in the accustomed severities of the school-discipline of this nation.” This protest was printed, and facing the title-page there meets the eye a notice to this effect: “It is humbly desired this book may be delivered from one hand to another, and that gentleman who shall first propose the motion to the House, the book is his, together with the prayers of posterity,”—in which last phrase a double sense may or may not lurk.

It required many attacks on such a stronghold as the united influence and prejudice of the teaching profession to produce an effect, and probably no effect was produced at first; for in 1698 another endeavour was made to obtain parliamentary relief, and in this instance the address humbly sought “an Act to remedy the foul abuse of children at schools, especially in the great schools of this nation.”

These preparatory movements indicated the direction in which sentiment and taste were beginning to stir, not so much at the outset, perhaps, from any persuasion that greater clemency was conducive to progress, but from a natural disposition on the part of parents to revolt against the senseless ill-usage of their boys by capricious martinets.

II.

I. The origin and history of a class of documents which may be viewed as the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to be considered. I refer to the vocabularies, glossaries, and nominalia, which afford examples of the method of instruction pursued in this country from the Middle Ages to the invention of printing.

Such of these manuals as we fortunately still possess represent the surviving residue of a much larger number; and from the perishable material