XV

XVTHE PUBLIC SCHOOLS"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere longthe Public Schools would have to justify not only theircurriculum, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training—i.e.something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization ofcurricula. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to"useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"?These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietorsof Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education—nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires some very English French and German; but, in spite of these privileges, he generally requires a year's residence at acrammer's before he has a chance for Sandhurst. For the ordinary life of the Professions the Public School makes no preparation whatever. Tommy may have acquired "taste," but he is no more qualified to be, as Dr. Warre says, a "bread-winner" than he was the day he began school-life.Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essay on "An Eton Boy," says, with regard to that boy's prowess as Master of the Beagles:—"The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the Battle of Waterloo was won in the Playing Fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those Playing Fields as well as victories—disasters due to an inadequate mental training, to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity."With "taste" we commonly hear "tone" combined in the eulogies of Public Schools. The Parent, who knows (though he would not for the world admit) that Tommy has learnt nothing at St. Winifred's or Rosslyn which will ever enable him to earn a penny, falls back upon the impalpable consolation that there is "a very nice tone about the school." Certainly Eton imparts manners to those who have not acquired them at home, and in this respect Radley is like unto it. But, taking the Public Schools as a whole, it can scarcely be denied that, however faithfully they cultivate the ingenuous arts, they suffer Youth to be extremelybrutal. If this be urged, the Parent will shift his ground and say, "Well, I like boys to be natural. I don't wish my son to be a Lord Chesterfield. Character is everything. It is the religious and moral influence of a Public School that I think so valuable." As to the Religion taught in Public Schools, it is, as Mr. T. E. Page of Charterhouse recently said with artless candour, exactly the same commodity as will probably be offered by the County Councils when the Education Bill has become law; and it is worth noting that, though Bishops shrink with horror at the prospect of this religion being offered to the poor, they are perfectly content that it should be crammed down the throats of their own sons. As to the morality acquired at Public Schools, a clergyman who was successively an Eton boy and an Eton master wrote twenty-five years ago: "The masters of many schools are sitting on a volcano, which, when it explodes, will fill with horror and alarm those who do not know what boys' schools are, or knowing it, shut their eyes and stop their ears." It must be admitted that the British Parent, dwelling on the slopes of that volcano, regards its chronic menace and its periodical activities with the most singular composure.In years gone by Harrow, like most other places where there was a Public School accessible to day boys, was a favourite resort of widowed ladies whose husbands had served in the Indian Armyor Civil Service. These "Indian Widows," as he called them, so pestered Dr. Vaughan, then Head Master, that he said in the bitterness of his soul: "Before I came to Harrow I thought 'Suttee' an abomination; but now I see that there is a great deal to be said for it." It is easy enough to see why Head Masters dislike the Home Boarding system. It defeats the curious policy by which assistant masters pay themselves out of their boarders' stomachs, and it brings all the arrangements of teaching and discipline under the survey, and perhaps criticism, of the parents; but, in spite of magisterial objections, the Home Boarding system is probably the only and certainly the most efficacious method of coping with those moral evils which all schoolmasters not wilfully blind acknowledge, and which the best of them strenuously combat. In that extension of Day Schools which Dr. Warre foresees lies the best hope of a higher tone in public education.The British Parent knows the weaknesses of the Public School system. He knows that he gets a very doubtful return for his money—that his son learns nothing useful and very little that is ornamental; is unsuitably fed, and, when ill, insufficiently attended; exposed to moral risks of a very grave type; and withdrawn at the most impressible season of life from the sanctifying influences of Motherhood and Home. He knows all this, and, knowing it, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundredhe sends all his boys to a Public School. Why? Partly because every one goes to a Public School and he has no wish to be eccentric or faddish; partly because the boys are tiresome at home and he wants peace; partly because, in existing conditions, he does not know how to get them educated while they are under his roof. But the strongest reason is none of these. He sends his sons to Eton or Harrow because he was there himself, has felt the glamour and learnt the spell; because some of his happiest memories hover round the Playing Fields or the Hill; because there he first knew what Friendship meant and first tasted the Romance of Life."I may have failed, my School may fail;I tremble, but thus much I dare:I love her. Let the critics rail,My brethren and my home are there."XVISCHOOLS AND BOARDING-HOUSES"Any two meals at a Boarding-House are together less than one square meal." This pleasing postulate was, I believe, in the first instance evolved from the bitter experience of a hungry mathematician who, at this season of the year, sought change of air and scene at Margate or Herne Bay. But to-day I use the word "Boarding-House" in that more restricted sense which signifies a Master's house for the accommodation of boys at a Public School. My reason for discussing the subject is that a stray sentence in my last chapter, about the profits derived from such Boarding-Houses, caused dire offence. I am the most docile creature alive, and the rebukes which I have incurred caused me, as the French say, to make a return upon myself. I subjected my conscience to severe cross-examination. I asked whether what I had written was wholly or even approximately true, or entirely false; and whether, if true, it was offensive or indelicate. Here is the sentence in all its unglossed brutality: "The proprietors of Boarding-Housesat the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera and build pineries and vineries at home." Now, of course, a Schoolmaster is nothing if not critical, and, in superintending the studies of his young friends, he rightly insists on the most scrupulous accuracy of phrase and figure. Not for the construing boy is the plea, dear to Biblical critics, that "the wider divergence is the higher unity." The calculating boy must not, if he values his peace, mistake inference for demonstration. Woe betide the excuse-making boy if he protests that he has spent an hour over his lesson when his tutor can show that he could only have spent fifty-five minutes. This Chinese exactness is all very well in the schoolroom, but tends to become a bore in the intercourse of social life. An Assistant Master, stung into activity by my recent strictures on Public Schools, has swooped down upon me with all the fierce alacrity which he would display in detecting a false quantity or an erroneous deduction. "Villas in the Riviera! Who buys Villas in the Riviera? Give, name, date, and place by return of post, or—write out five hundred lines." "What do you mean by Pineries and Vineries? I and my colleagues at St. Winifred's only grow cucumbers; and the Composition-Master, though he has large private means, gets his grapes from the Stores. Retract and apologize, or be for ever fallen."Now really, when I read all this virtuous indignation,I am irresistibly reminded of the Bishop in "Little Dorrit," who, when all the guests were extolling Mr. Merdle's wealth, spoke pensively about "the goods of this world," and "tried to look as if he were rather poor himself." In vain I protested that I meant no injurious allusion to Monte Carlo, and proposed to substitute "Mansions in the Isle of Wight" for "Villas in the Riviera." The substitution availed me nothing. "You say 'Mansions.' Do you really know more than one? And how do you know that the schoolmaster who bought it did not marry a wife with a fortune? You cannot investigate his marriage settlements, so your illustration counts for nothing." In the same conciliatory spirit, I urged that "Pineries and Vineries" was a picturesque phrase invented by Lord Randolph Churchill to describe the amenities of a comfortable country house, not of the largest order; but my pedagogue was not to be pacified. "If you didn't mean Pineries and Vineries, you shouldn't have said so. It creates a bad impression in the parents' minds. Of course no reasonable person could object to one's having gardens, or stabling, or a moderate shooting, or a share of a salmon river; but parents don't like the notion that we are living in luxury. They have a nasty way of contrasting it with the nonsense which their boys tell them about tough meat and rancid butter."At this point I began to see some resemblancebetween my correspondent and Matthew Arnold's critic in theQuarterlyof October 1868—"one of the Eton Under-Masters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation." For, in spite of all corrections and deductions, I cannot help regarding Public Schoolmasters as a well-paid race. Of course, it is true that their incomes are not comparable to those of successful barristers or surgeons, or even Ministers of State; but, on the other side, their work is infinitely easier; their earnings begin from the day on which they embark on their profession; and no revolution of the wheel of State can shake them from their well-cushioned seats. I am quite willing to admit that, on the figures supplied by my correspondent, he and his colleagues at St. Winifred's are not making so much money as their predecessors made twenty or thirty years ago. But, as far as I can understand, this diminution of incomes does not arise from diminution of charges, but only from the fact that the force of public opinion has driven schoolmasters to recognize, rather more fully than in days gone by, some primary needs of boy-nature. When the Royal Commission of 1862 was enquiring into the boarding arrangements of a famous school, one of the Commissioners was astonished to find that, in spite of the liberal charge for board, the boys got nothing but tea and bread and butter for breakfast. Apparently wishing to let the masters down easy,he suggested that perhaps eggs also were provided. To this suggestion the witness's answer was monumental: "Eggs, indeed, are not provided, but in some houses a large machine for boiling eggs is brought in every day; so that, if the boys bring their eggs, they are boiled for them." Surely the Master who first conceived this substitution of hardware for food deserved a permanent place among Social Economists; but "the bigots of this iron time," though they may not actually "have called his harmless art a crime," have resolved that, when a father pays £200 a year for his boy's schooling, the boy shall have something more substantial than bread and butter for breakfast. This reform alone, according to my correspondent, knocked some hundreds a year off each House-Master's income.Then, again, as regards Sanitation. Here, certainly not before it was wanted, reform has made its appearance, and the injured House-Master has had to put his hand in his pocket. When I was at a Public School, in that Golden Age of Profits to which my correspondent looked back so wistfully, the sanitary arrangements were such as to defy description and stagger belief. In one Pupil-Room there was only the thickness of the boarded floor between the cesspool and the feet of the boys as they sat at lessons. In my own house, containing forty boarders, there were only two baths. In another, three and evenfour boys were cooped together, by day as well as by night, in what would, in an ordinary house, be regarded as a smallish bedroom. Now all this is changed. Drainage is reconstructed; baths are multiplied; to each boy is secured a sufficient air-space at lessons and in sleep. The Sanitary Engineer is let loose every term—"What pipes and air-shafts! What wild ecstasy!"But the "ecstasy" is confined to the bosom of the Engineer as he draws up his little account, and the House-Master moans, like Mr. Mantalini, over the "Demnition Total."Yet another such deduction must be borne in mind. Volumes of nonsense have been written about the Fagging System. Sentimental writers have gushed over the beautiful relation which it establishes between Fag-Master and Fag. Some, greatly daring, have likened it to the relation of elder and younger brothers. Others, more historically minded, have tried to connect it with the usages of Chivalry and the services rendered by the Page to the Knight. As a matter of fact, it was, as "Jacob Omnium," himself an Old Etonian, pointed out fifty years ago, "an affair of the breeches pocket." As long as younger boys could be compelled (by whatever methods) to clean lamps and brush clothes and toast sausages and fill tubs for elder boys it was obvious that fewer servants were required. One of the mostbrilliant Etonians now living has said that "to see a little boy performing, with infinite pains and hopeless inadequacy, the functions of a domestic servant, might have moved Democritus to tears and Heraclitus to laughter." That Fagging has its uses, more especially in the case of spoilt boys brought up in purse-proud homes, few Public Schoolmen will deny; but the British Parent tends increasingly to draw a distinction between the duties of a fag and those of a footman; and the wages-bill becomes an increasingly important item in the House-Master's expenditure.What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, as I have repeatedly said, that a Boarding-School, whether public or private, is not the ideal method of educating boys; but, pending that great increase of Day-Schools for the sons of the upper classes which Dr. Warre foresees, it is the only method practically available for the great majority of English parents. Whether the instruction imparted in the Public Schools is or is not worth the amount which it costs is a matter of opinion; and, indeed, as long as the parent (who, after all, has to pay) is satisfied, no one else need trouble himself about the question. As to domestic arrangements and provision for health and comfort, it may be frankly conceded that the Schoolboy of to-day is much better off than his father or even his elder brother was; and that the improvements in his lot have tendedto diminish the profits on which the House-Master used to grow rich.P.S.—Having the terrors of the ferule before my eyes, let me hasten to say, with all possible explicitness, that in my account of my correspondence with the outraged Schoolmaster, I have aimed at giving a general impression rather than a verbal transcript.XVIISQUARESAll true lovers of Lewis Carroll will remember that Hiawatha, when he went a-photographing, "pulled and pushed the joints and hinges" of his Camera,"Till it looked all squares and oblongs,Like a complicated figureIn the Second Book of Euclid."But it is not of squares in the mathematical sense that I speak to-day, but rather of those enclosed spaces, most irregularly shaped and proportioned, which go by the name of "Squares" in London.It is in sultry August that the value of these spaces is most clearly perceived; for now the better-disposed owners fling open the gates of their squares and suffer them to become, at least temporarily, the resting-places of the aged and decrepit, and the playgrounds of the children. To extend these benefits more widely and to secure them in perpetuity are objects for which civic reformers have long striven; and during the present session of Parliament[6](for, as Dryasdust would remind us, Parliament is not proroguedbut only adjourned) two Acts have been passed which may do something at least towards attaining the desired ends. One of these Acts provides that, in cases where "Open Spaces and Burial Grounds" are vested in Trustees, the Trustees may transfer them to the Local Authorities, to be maintained for the use and service of the public. The other forbids for all time the erection of buildings on certain squares and gardens which belong to private owners, those owners having consented to this curtailment of their powers. The conjunction of "Burial Grounds" with "Open Spaces" in the purview of the former Act has a rather lugubrious sound; but in reality it points to one of the happiest changes which recent years have brought to London."A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed—here, in a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring 'our dear brother here departed' to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death and every poisonous element of death in action close on life,—here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raisedin corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages that civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."When Dickens wrote that hideous description, worthy to be illustrated by Hogarth in his most realistic mood, he did not exaggerate—he could not exaggerate—the obscenity of burial-grounds in crowded cities. To-day they are green with turf and bright with flowers, and brighter still with the unconquerable merriment of childhood at play among the dim memorials of the forgotten dead. What is true of the particular spot which Dickens described is true all over London; and the resting-places of the departed have been made oases of life and health in this arid wilderness of struggling and stifled humanity.Though so much has been done in the way of making the Churchyards available for public uses, comparatively little has been done with the Squares; and philosophers of the school erroneously called Cynical might account for this difference by the fact that, whereas the churchyards were generally in the hands of official trustees, such as Rectors, Churchwardens, Overseers, or Vestries, the principal squares of London are the private property of individual owners. Even the London Squares and Enclosures Act, just passed, illustrates the same principle. The preamble of the Act sets forth that in respect ofevery Square or Enclosure with which it deals the consent of the owner has been obtained. In each case, therefore, the owner has consented to legislation which will prevent himself or his successors from building on what are now open spaces, and, so far, each owner concerned has shown himself a patriotic citizen and a well-wisher to posterity. But, when we come to examine the schedule of properties to which the Act applies, it is interesting to compare the number belonging to private persons with the number belonging to public bodies. The Act applies to sixty-four properties; of these fifty-five belong to public bodies such as District Councils, Governors of Hospitals, and Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and nine to private persons, among whom it is pleasant to reckon one Liberal M.P., Sir John Dickson-Poynder, and, by way of balance, one Conservative peer, Lord Camden.A further study of the Schedule reveals the instructive fact that, with two exceptions in the City of Westminster and one in the Borough of Kensington, none of the scheduled properties lie within areas which could by any stretch of terms be called wealthy, fashionable, or aristocratic. Public authorities in such districts as Camberwell and Lewisham—private owners in Islington and Woolwich—have willingly surrendered their rights for the benefit of the community; but none of the great ground landlords have followed suit. The owners of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Squareand Portman Square and Cavendish Square and Berkeley Square—theSquares,par excellence, of fashionable London—have kept their seigniorial rights untouched. Pascal told us of some very human but very unregenerate children who said "This dog belongs tome," and "That place in the sun isMine," and Pascal's comment was, "Behold, the beginning and the image of all usurpation upon earth!" Similarly, the human but unregenerate landowners of fashionable London say, as they survey their possessions, "This Square belongs tome," "That place in the shade isMine," while the August sun beats down on the malodorous street, and tottering paupers peer wistfully at the benches under the plane trees, and street-boys flatten their noses against the iron railings and madly yearn for cricket-pitches so smooth and green.Although these fashionable Squares are so sedulously guarded against the intrusion of outsiders, they are very little used by those who have the right of entrance. "Livery Servants and Dogs not admitted" is a legendary inscription which, in its substance, still operates. Here and there a nurse with a baby in her arms haunts the shade, or a parcel of older children play lawn-tennis or croquet to an accompaniment of chaff from envious street-boys. But, as a general rule, for twenty hours out of the twenty-four and for ten months out of the twelve the Squares areabsolutely vacant; and one of the most reasonable reforms which I could conceive would be to convert them from private pleasure-grounds to public gardens, and to throw the cost of maintaining them in order and beauty on the London County Council.As I said before, some Square-owners have, without waiting for legal compulsion, taken tentative steps towards this reform. The Trustees of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest and the shadiest of all London Squares, have made them over to the County Council, and, in the hot months of declining summer, the juvenile populations of Holborn and St. Giles play their breathless games where Babington was hanged and Russell beheaded. It was there that, on the 20th of July 1683, Sir Ralph Verney, riding out from London to his home in Buckinghamshire, "saw the scaffold making ready against Lord Russell's execution to-morrow—God help him, and save the country."But if once we leave the utilities and amenities of the London Squares and begin to meddle with their antiquities, we shall soon overflow all reasonable limits. Bloomsbury Square still reeks (at least for those who know their "Barnaby Rudge") with the blood which was shed in the Gordon Riots. Grosvenor Square—the last district of London which clung to oil-lamps in hopeless resistance to the innovation of gas—embodies the more recent memory of the Cato Street Conspiracy.In Berkeley Square (from what is now Lord Rosebery's house) Sarah Child eloped, and annexed the name and the banking-house of Child to the Earldom of Jersey. In Portman Square Mrs. Montagu presided over her court of Bluestockings and feasted the chimney-sweeps on May-day. In Manchester Square, under the roof which now houses the Wallace Collection, the dazzling beauty of Isabella Lady Hertford stirred the fatuous passion of George IV. In Cavendish Square, under the portico of Harcourt House, lately demolished, Disraeli said good-bye for ever to his confederate Lord George Bentinck. In Hanover Square, Chantrey's stately statue of William Pitt has looked down on a century of aristocratic weddings, ascending and descending the steps of St. George's Church. Sir George Trevelyan, commenting on a Valentine written by Macaulay for Lady Mary Stanhope, a great-niece of Pitt's, declares that "the allusion to the statue in Hanover Square is one of the happiest touches that can be found in Macaulay's writings," and that is a sufficient justification for quoting it:—"Prophetic rage my bosom swells;I taste the cake, I hear the bells!From Conduit Street the close arrayOf chariots barricades the wayTo where I see, with outstretched hand,Majestic, thy great kinsman stand,And half unbend his brow of pride,As welcoming so fair a bride."XVIIISUNDAY IN LONDONIt is the middle of August, and there is nobody in London—except, of course, some four millions of people who do not count. There is nobody in London; and, most specially and noticeably, there is nobody in Church. Be it far from me to suggest that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother, who flood London in August and September, are persons of indevout habits. But they have their own methods and places of devotion (of which I may speak anon), and do not affect the Parish Churches, with which I am now concerned. I have excellent opportunities of judging; for, year in year out, in tropical heat or Arctic cold, my due feet never fail to walk the round of our Stuccovian churches, and I can testify that in August and September Vacancy and Depression reign unchallenged. Seats are empty. Galleries are locked. Collections sink to vanishing-point. The Vicar of St. Ursula's, Stucco Gardens, accompanied by his second wife, is sitting under a white umbrella at Dieppe, watching the aquatic gambols of his twofold family.The Senior Curate is climbing in the Alps. The Junior Curate, who stroked his College Boat last year and was ordained at Trinity, officiates in agonies of self-conscious shyness which would draw tears from a stone. A temporary organist elicits undreamt-of harmonies. The organ-blower is getting his health in the hopfields. The choirboys are let loose—"On Brighton's shingly beach, on Margate's sand,Their voice out-pipes the roaring of the sea."The congregation represents the mere dregs and remnants of Stuccovia's social prime. Poor we have none, and our rich are fled to Scotland or Norway, Homburg or Marienbad. The seats are sparsely tenanted by "stern-faced men" (like those who arrested Eugene Aram), whom business keeps in London when their hearts are on the moors; over-burdened mothers, with herds of restless schoolboys at home for the holidays and craving for more ardent delights than Stucco Gardens yield; decayed spinsters of the type of Volumnia Dedlock, who, having exhausted the hospitable patience of their ever-diminishing band of friends, are forced to the horrid necessity of spending the autumn in London. The only cheerful face in the church belongs to the Pewopener, who, being impeded in the discharge of her function by arthritic rheumatism, is happiest when congregations are smallest and there are noweek-day services to "molest her ancient solitary reign."••••••Evensong is over. The organist is struggling with an inconceivable tune from "The English Hymnal" (for at St. Ursula's we are nothing if not up to date). The Curate, sicklied o'er with that indescribable horror which in his boating days he would have described as "The Needle," is furtively reperusing his manuscript before mounting the pulpit, and does not detect my craven flight as I slip through the baize door and disappear. It is characteristic of St. Ursula's that, even when empty, it is fusty; but this need surprise no one, for the architect was strong on a "scientific system of ventilation," and that, as we all know, means very little ventilation and an overwhelming amount of system.However, my courageous flight has delivered me from asphyxiation, and, before returning to my modest Sunday supper of Paysandu Ox-tongue and sardines, I think that I will reinflate my lungs by a stroll round Hyde Park. There is a lovely redness in the western sky over the Serpentine Bridge, but it is still broad daylight. The sere and yellow turf of the Park is covered by some of those four millions who do not count and do not go to church, but who, apparently, are fond of sermons. At the end of each hundred yards Icome upon a preacher of some religious, social, or political gospel, and round each is gathered a crowd of listeners who follow his utterances with interested attention. When I think of St. Ursula's and the pavid Curate and my graceless flight, I protest that I am covered with shame as with a garment. But the wrong done in the church can be repaired in the Park. I have missed one sermon, but I will hear another. Unluckily, when these compunctious visitings seized me I was standing by a rostrum of heterodoxy. For all I know the preacher may have followers among my readers; so, as I would not for the world wound even the least orthodox susceptibilities, I forbear to indicate the theory which he enounced. As he spoke, I seemed to live a former life over again; for I had once before been present at an exactly similar preaching, in company, either bodily or spiritual, with my friend Mr. James Payn, and his comments on the scene revived themselves in my memory, even as the remote associations of Ellangowan reawoke in the consciousness of Harry Bertram when he returned from his wanderings, and gazed, bewildered, on his forgotten home. (Henceforward it is Payn that speaks.) The preacher of Heterodoxy was entirely without enthusiasm, nor did his oratory borrow any meretricious attractions from the Muse. It was a curious farrago of logic without reason and premisses without facts, and was certainly theleast popular, though not the least numerously attended, of all the competing sermons in the Park. Suddenly the preacher gave expression to a statement more monstrous than common, on which an old lady in the crowd, who had heretofore been listening with great complacency, exclaimed in horror, "I'm surethisain't true Gospel," and immediately decamped. Up to that point, she had apparently been listening under the impression that the preacher belonged to her own blameless persuasion, and was in the blankest ignorance of all that he had been driving at.But Sunday in London has religious attractions to offer besides those purveyed by St. Ursula's and Hyde Park. I said at the outset that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother have their own methods and places of devotion—their Mecca is St. Paul's Cathedral. One of the pleasantest ways of spending a Sunday evening in London is to join the pilgrim-throng. The great west doors of the Cathedral are flung wide open, as if to welcome the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord Mayor, and all at once we find ourselves, hushed and awestruck, in the illimitable perspective. Even the staunchest believer in Gothic as the only religious architecture may admit, with disloyalty to his faith, that every year St. Paul's becomes more like a place of Christian worship and less like a glorified Council-hall or an Imperial Senate-house. And it is seen at itsbest in twilight. The shadows temper the garish splendour of mosaic and gold and electricity, and enhance the dominant sense of vastness and grandeur. And prayer ascends on the wings of music and sweet boy-voices ring, and the distant altar, with its gleaming lights, focuses the meaning and purpose of the whole. And then the great "Communion of Hymns" unites us all, American and English, Londoner and countryman, as citizens of a city not built with hands, patriots of a country which is not marked on the terrestrial globe. Bernard of Cluny and William Cowper and John Keble all contribute of their best. "Brief life is here our portion" seems to utter the real heart's desire of a tired-looking mechanic who stands by my side. "Hark, my soul!" seems to communicate its own intensity to the very tone and look of the people who are singing it. "Sun of my soul" is an evening prayer which sounds just as natural and as fitting in the inmost heart of London's crowd and grind and pressure as in the sweet solitude of the Hursley fields. In the pulpit a pale preacher, himself half worn-out before his prime by ten years' battle in a slum, is extolling the Cross as the test and strength and glory of human life—"While at his feet the human ocean lay,And wave on wave rolled into space away."A human stream indeed, of all sorts and conditions—oldmen and maidens, young men and children, rich and poor, English and foreigners, sightseers and citizens, dapper clerks and toil-stained citizens and red-coated soldiers—all interested, and all at ease, and all at home at what Bishop Lightfoot called "the centre of the world's concourse"—under the cross-crowned Dome of St. Paul's.XIXA SUBURBAN SUNDAY"It seems to the writer of this history that the inhabitants of London are scarcely sufficiently sensible of the beauty of its environs.... With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air of graceful Richmond. In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from all the tumult of the world and find himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the Cedars of Lebanon and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia."The judicious critic will have little difficulty in assigning this vivid passage to the too-graphic pen of Lord Beaconsfield; but he will also recognizethe fact that a description written in 1837 needs some modification when applied to 1906. The central solitude of London—Kensington Gardens—is still very much as it was. Just now, its dark foliage and dusky glades suggest all the romantic associations of Gustave Doré's forests, with a tall trooper of the Life Guards and a bashful nursery-maid, for a Red Cross Knight and an Enchanted Princess. If we go further afield and climb the uplands of Highgate and Hampstead, we look down upon a boundless and beautiful city dimly visible through a golden haze. But the difference between the environs of London now and the same environs when Lord Beaconsfield described them is that they are now united to the centre by an unbroken network of gaslit streets. The enormous increase in the population of London, which every year brings with it, fills up the gaps and spaces, and the metropolis is now a solid whole, with its circumference extending further and further every day into what a year ago was country. In other words, the suburbs are getting further off, and what are suburbs to-day will be town to-morrow; but still there are suburbs, and a Sunday spent in them is an interesting experience.Yesterday the well-known stuffiness of St. Ursula's, combined with the kind hospitality of some suburban friends, drove me to spend my Sunday about ten miles from Stucco Square. It is a characteristic of people who live in suburbsto believe that their lot is cast in a primæval solitude, and that, though the Dome of St. Paul's is plainly visible from their back gardens, the traveller who ventures to approach them needs explicit and intricate directions about routes and trains and changes and stations. The station for my friend's place was called by a name intensely suggestive of rurality—not exactly "Rosebank," but Rosebank will serve. Readers of Archbishop Temple's Life will remember that a clergyman, excusing himself for living a long way from his church, urged that it was only three miles as the crow flies, thereby drawing down on himself the implacable reply, "But you ain't a crow." In the same way I found that, though Rosebank is only ten miles from Stucco Square "as the crow flies," a human being seeking to approach it must first make a considerable journey to a central terminus, must then embark in a train which a tortoise might outstrip, must change twice, and must burrow through a sulphurous tunnel; and must even then run a considerable risk of being carried through Rosebank Station, which all self-respecting trains seem to ignore.Faced by these difficulties, I again took counsel with Lord Beaconsfield. "''Tis the gondola of London,' exclaimed Lothair, as he leapt into a hansom, which he had previously observed to be well-horsed." My Gondolier was ready with his terms—a very liberal payment, several hours' rest,his dinner and tea, and something extra for putting up his horse. Granted these preliminaries, he would "do the job on 'is 'ead." It would "be a little 'oliday to 'im." I in vain suggested that the opportunity of attending Divine Service twice at Rosebank Church might be regarded as part payment of his charge; he replied, with startling emphasis, that he didn't go into the country to go to church—not if he knew it; that, if I wanted him, I must take him on the terms proposed; and, further, that I mustn't mind starting early, for he wanted to get his horse down cool.The Gondolier had his own way; and, while the sparrows were still twittering and the housemaids were taking in the milk and the Sunday paper, I was well on my road to Rosebank. This much I will concede to the curiosity of readers—that my road led me out of London in a south-easterly direction, by the Horseferry, where James II. dropped the Great Seal into the Thames, along the Old Kent Road, of which a modern minstrel sang; past Kennington Common, now a "Park," where the gallant Jacobites of '45 underwent the hideous doom of Treason, where the iron-shuttered windows still commemorate the Chartist rising of '48, and where Sackville Maine took his Sunday walk with Mrs. Sackville and old Mrs. Chuff. On past the "Hamlet of Dulwich," where Mr. Pickwick spent the last years of his honoured life, to Chislehurst,where Napoleon III. hid his exiled head, and North Cray, where the tragedy of Lord Londonderry's death is not yet forgotten, and Shooters' Hill, where Jerry Cruncher stopped the coach with the terrifying message of "Recalled to Life." Now, as readers are sometimes unduly literal, and as I would not willingly involve any one in an hour's fruitless puzzling over a map, let me say that this itinerary is rather general than particular, and that, although the Gondolier pursued an extremely devious course and murmured when I suggested straighter paths, we did not touch all the above-mentioned places in our morning's drive. But evermore we tended south-eastwards, and evermore the houses grew imperceptibly less dignified. Stone and stucco we had left behind us on the northern side of the river, and now it was a boundless contiguity of brick—yellow brick, rather grimy,—small houses with porticos, slips of dusty garden between the front door and the road, and here and there a row of wayside trees. But everywhere gas, and everywhereomnibi(as the classical lady said,) and everywhere electric trams. Churches of every confession and every architecture lined the way, varied with Public-houses of many signs, Municipal Buildings of startling splendour (for Borough Councils have a flamboyant taste), and Swimming Baths and Public Libraries, and here and there a private Lunatic Asylum frowning behind suggestively solemn gates.Now we are in a long and featureless street, with semi-detached houses on either hand, and a malodorous cab-stand and a four-faced clock. "Which way for Rosebank?" shouts the Gondolier. "The first to your left and then turn sharp to the right," bellows a responsive policeman. We follow the direction given, and suddenly we are there—not at Rosebank, but quite out of even Greater London. The street ends abruptly. Trams and trains and gas and shops are left behind, and all at once we are in the country. The road is lined with hedgerows, dusty indeed, but still alive. Elms of respectable dimensions look down upon big fields, with here and there an oak, and cows resting under it. At one turn of the road there is a recognizable odour of late-cut hay, and in the middle distance I distinctly perceive a turnip-field, out of which a covey of partridges might rise without surprising any one. We pull up and gaze around. Look where I will, I cannot see a house, nor even a cottage. Surely my friends have not played a practical joke on me and asked me to spend a day in an imaginary Paradise. The Gondolier looks at his perspiring horse, and mops his own brow, and gazes contemptuously on the landscape. "I should call this the world's end if I was arst," he says. "Blow'd if they've even got a Public 'Ouse." Suddenly the sound of a shrill bell bursts on the ear. The Gondolier, who is a humorist, says "Muffins."I jump out of the gondola, and pursue the welcome tinkle round a sharp angle in the road. There I see, perched on the brow of a sandy knoll, a small tin building, which a belfry and a cross proclaim to be a church. Inside I discover the Oldest Inhabitant pulling the muffin-bell with cheerful assiduity. He is more than ready to talk, and his whole discourse is as countrified as if he lived a hundred miles from Charing Cross. "Yes, this is a main lonely place. There ain't many people lives about 'ere. Why, ten years ago it was all fields. Now there are some houses—not many. He lives in one himself. How far off? Well, a matter of a mile or so. He was born on the Squire's land; his father worked on the farm. Yes, he's lived here all his life. Remembers it before there was a Crystal Palace, and when there was no railways or nothing. He hasn't often been in the train, and has only been up to London two or three times. Who goes to the church? Well—not many, except the Squire's family and the school-children. Why was it built? Oh, the Squire wants to get some rich folks to live round about. He's ready to part with his land for building; and there's going to be a row of houses built just in front of the church. He reckons the people will be more likely to come now that there's a church for them to go to." And now the "ten-minutes" bell begins with livelier measure; the OldestInhabitant shows me to a seat; and, on the stroke of eleven, a shrill "Amen" is heard in the vestry, and there enters a modest procession of surpliced schoolboys and a clergyman in a green stole. His sons and daughters, the wife of the Oldest Inhabitant, and the sisters of the choristers, from the congregation, eked out by myself and my friends from Rosebank, who arrive a little flushed and complain that they have been waiting for me. The "service is fully choral," as they say in accounts of fashionable weddings; the clergyman preaches against the Education Bill, and a collection (of copper) is made to defray the expenses of a meeting at the Albert Hall. It is pleasant to see that, even in these secluded districts, the watch-dogs of the Church are on the alert.

XVTHE PUBLIC SCHOOLS"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere longthe Public Schools would have to justify not only theircurriculum, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training—i.e.something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization ofcurricula. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to"useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"?These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietorsof Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education—nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires some very English French and German; but, in spite of these privileges, he generally requires a year's residence at acrammer's before he has a chance for Sandhurst. For the ordinary life of the Professions the Public School makes no preparation whatever. Tommy may have acquired "taste," but he is no more qualified to be, as Dr. Warre says, a "bread-winner" than he was the day he began school-life.Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essay on "An Eton Boy," says, with regard to that boy's prowess as Master of the Beagles:—"The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the Battle of Waterloo was won in the Playing Fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those Playing Fields as well as victories—disasters due to an inadequate mental training, to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity."With "taste" we commonly hear "tone" combined in the eulogies of Public Schools. The Parent, who knows (though he would not for the world admit) that Tommy has learnt nothing at St. Winifred's or Rosslyn which will ever enable him to earn a penny, falls back upon the impalpable consolation that there is "a very nice tone about the school." Certainly Eton imparts manners to those who have not acquired them at home, and in this respect Radley is like unto it. But, taking the Public Schools as a whole, it can scarcely be denied that, however faithfully they cultivate the ingenuous arts, they suffer Youth to be extremelybrutal. If this be urged, the Parent will shift his ground and say, "Well, I like boys to be natural. I don't wish my son to be a Lord Chesterfield. Character is everything. It is the religious and moral influence of a Public School that I think so valuable." As to the Religion taught in Public Schools, it is, as Mr. T. E. Page of Charterhouse recently said with artless candour, exactly the same commodity as will probably be offered by the County Councils when the Education Bill has become law; and it is worth noting that, though Bishops shrink with horror at the prospect of this religion being offered to the poor, they are perfectly content that it should be crammed down the throats of their own sons. As to the morality acquired at Public Schools, a clergyman who was successively an Eton boy and an Eton master wrote twenty-five years ago: "The masters of many schools are sitting on a volcano, which, when it explodes, will fill with horror and alarm those who do not know what boys' schools are, or knowing it, shut their eyes and stop their ears." It must be admitted that the British Parent, dwelling on the slopes of that volcano, regards its chronic menace and its periodical activities with the most singular composure.In years gone by Harrow, like most other places where there was a Public School accessible to day boys, was a favourite resort of widowed ladies whose husbands had served in the Indian Armyor Civil Service. These "Indian Widows," as he called them, so pestered Dr. Vaughan, then Head Master, that he said in the bitterness of his soul: "Before I came to Harrow I thought 'Suttee' an abomination; but now I see that there is a great deal to be said for it." It is easy enough to see why Head Masters dislike the Home Boarding system. It defeats the curious policy by which assistant masters pay themselves out of their boarders' stomachs, and it brings all the arrangements of teaching and discipline under the survey, and perhaps criticism, of the parents; but, in spite of magisterial objections, the Home Boarding system is probably the only and certainly the most efficacious method of coping with those moral evils which all schoolmasters not wilfully blind acknowledge, and which the best of them strenuously combat. In that extension of Day Schools which Dr. Warre foresees lies the best hope of a higher tone in public education.The British Parent knows the weaknesses of the Public School system. He knows that he gets a very doubtful return for his money—that his son learns nothing useful and very little that is ornamental; is unsuitably fed, and, when ill, insufficiently attended; exposed to moral risks of a very grave type; and withdrawn at the most impressible season of life from the sanctifying influences of Motherhood and Home. He knows all this, and, knowing it, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundredhe sends all his boys to a Public School. Why? Partly because every one goes to a Public School and he has no wish to be eccentric or faddish; partly because the boys are tiresome at home and he wants peace; partly because, in existing conditions, he does not know how to get them educated while they are under his roof. But the strongest reason is none of these. He sends his sons to Eton or Harrow because he was there himself, has felt the glamour and learnt the spell; because some of his happiest memories hover round the Playing Fields or the Hill; because there he first knew what Friendship meant and first tasted the Romance of Life."I may have failed, my School may fail;I tremble, but thus much I dare:I love her. Let the critics rail,My brethren and my home are there."

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."

The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere longthe Public Schools would have to justify not only theircurriculum, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training—i.e.something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization ofcurricula. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."

When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to"useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"?

These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietorsof Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education—nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires some very English French and German; but, in spite of these privileges, he generally requires a year's residence at acrammer's before he has a chance for Sandhurst. For the ordinary life of the Professions the Public School makes no preparation whatever. Tommy may have acquired "taste," but he is no more qualified to be, as Dr. Warre says, a "bread-winner" than he was the day he began school-life.

Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essay on "An Eton Boy," says, with regard to that boy's prowess as Master of the Beagles:—

"The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the Battle of Waterloo was won in the Playing Fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those Playing Fields as well as victories—disasters due to an inadequate mental training, to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity."

With "taste" we commonly hear "tone" combined in the eulogies of Public Schools. The Parent, who knows (though he would not for the world admit) that Tommy has learnt nothing at St. Winifred's or Rosslyn which will ever enable him to earn a penny, falls back upon the impalpable consolation that there is "a very nice tone about the school." Certainly Eton imparts manners to those who have not acquired them at home, and in this respect Radley is like unto it. But, taking the Public Schools as a whole, it can scarcely be denied that, however faithfully they cultivate the ingenuous arts, they suffer Youth to be extremelybrutal. If this be urged, the Parent will shift his ground and say, "Well, I like boys to be natural. I don't wish my son to be a Lord Chesterfield. Character is everything. It is the religious and moral influence of a Public School that I think so valuable." As to the Religion taught in Public Schools, it is, as Mr. T. E. Page of Charterhouse recently said with artless candour, exactly the same commodity as will probably be offered by the County Councils when the Education Bill has become law; and it is worth noting that, though Bishops shrink with horror at the prospect of this religion being offered to the poor, they are perfectly content that it should be crammed down the throats of their own sons. As to the morality acquired at Public Schools, a clergyman who was successively an Eton boy and an Eton master wrote twenty-five years ago: "The masters of many schools are sitting on a volcano, which, when it explodes, will fill with horror and alarm those who do not know what boys' schools are, or knowing it, shut their eyes and stop their ears." It must be admitted that the British Parent, dwelling on the slopes of that volcano, regards its chronic menace and its periodical activities with the most singular composure.

In years gone by Harrow, like most other places where there was a Public School accessible to day boys, was a favourite resort of widowed ladies whose husbands had served in the Indian Armyor Civil Service. These "Indian Widows," as he called them, so pestered Dr. Vaughan, then Head Master, that he said in the bitterness of his soul: "Before I came to Harrow I thought 'Suttee' an abomination; but now I see that there is a great deal to be said for it." It is easy enough to see why Head Masters dislike the Home Boarding system. It defeats the curious policy by which assistant masters pay themselves out of their boarders' stomachs, and it brings all the arrangements of teaching and discipline under the survey, and perhaps criticism, of the parents; but, in spite of magisterial objections, the Home Boarding system is probably the only and certainly the most efficacious method of coping with those moral evils which all schoolmasters not wilfully blind acknowledge, and which the best of them strenuously combat. In that extension of Day Schools which Dr. Warre foresees lies the best hope of a higher tone in public education.

The British Parent knows the weaknesses of the Public School system. He knows that he gets a very doubtful return for his money—that his son learns nothing useful and very little that is ornamental; is unsuitably fed, and, when ill, insufficiently attended; exposed to moral risks of a very grave type; and withdrawn at the most impressible season of life from the sanctifying influences of Motherhood and Home. He knows all this, and, knowing it, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundredhe sends all his boys to a Public School. Why? Partly because every one goes to a Public School and he has no wish to be eccentric or faddish; partly because the boys are tiresome at home and he wants peace; partly because, in existing conditions, he does not know how to get them educated while they are under his roof. But the strongest reason is none of these. He sends his sons to Eton or Harrow because he was there himself, has felt the glamour and learnt the spell; because some of his happiest memories hover round the Playing Fields or the Hill; because there he first knew what Friendship meant and first tasted the Romance of Life.

"I may have failed, my School may fail;I tremble, but thus much I dare:

I love her. Let the critics rail,My brethren and my home are there."

XVISCHOOLS AND BOARDING-HOUSES"Any two meals at a Boarding-House are together less than one square meal." This pleasing postulate was, I believe, in the first instance evolved from the bitter experience of a hungry mathematician who, at this season of the year, sought change of air and scene at Margate or Herne Bay. But to-day I use the word "Boarding-House" in that more restricted sense which signifies a Master's house for the accommodation of boys at a Public School. My reason for discussing the subject is that a stray sentence in my last chapter, about the profits derived from such Boarding-Houses, caused dire offence. I am the most docile creature alive, and the rebukes which I have incurred caused me, as the French say, to make a return upon myself. I subjected my conscience to severe cross-examination. I asked whether what I had written was wholly or even approximately true, or entirely false; and whether, if true, it was offensive or indelicate. Here is the sentence in all its unglossed brutality: "The proprietors of Boarding-Housesat the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera and build pineries and vineries at home." Now, of course, a Schoolmaster is nothing if not critical, and, in superintending the studies of his young friends, he rightly insists on the most scrupulous accuracy of phrase and figure. Not for the construing boy is the plea, dear to Biblical critics, that "the wider divergence is the higher unity." The calculating boy must not, if he values his peace, mistake inference for demonstration. Woe betide the excuse-making boy if he protests that he has spent an hour over his lesson when his tutor can show that he could only have spent fifty-five minutes. This Chinese exactness is all very well in the schoolroom, but tends to become a bore in the intercourse of social life. An Assistant Master, stung into activity by my recent strictures on Public Schools, has swooped down upon me with all the fierce alacrity which he would display in detecting a false quantity or an erroneous deduction. "Villas in the Riviera! Who buys Villas in the Riviera? Give, name, date, and place by return of post, or—write out five hundred lines." "What do you mean by Pineries and Vineries? I and my colleagues at St. Winifred's only grow cucumbers; and the Composition-Master, though he has large private means, gets his grapes from the Stores. Retract and apologize, or be for ever fallen."Now really, when I read all this virtuous indignation,I am irresistibly reminded of the Bishop in "Little Dorrit," who, when all the guests were extolling Mr. Merdle's wealth, spoke pensively about "the goods of this world," and "tried to look as if he were rather poor himself." In vain I protested that I meant no injurious allusion to Monte Carlo, and proposed to substitute "Mansions in the Isle of Wight" for "Villas in the Riviera." The substitution availed me nothing. "You say 'Mansions.' Do you really know more than one? And how do you know that the schoolmaster who bought it did not marry a wife with a fortune? You cannot investigate his marriage settlements, so your illustration counts for nothing." In the same conciliatory spirit, I urged that "Pineries and Vineries" was a picturesque phrase invented by Lord Randolph Churchill to describe the amenities of a comfortable country house, not of the largest order; but my pedagogue was not to be pacified. "If you didn't mean Pineries and Vineries, you shouldn't have said so. It creates a bad impression in the parents' minds. Of course no reasonable person could object to one's having gardens, or stabling, or a moderate shooting, or a share of a salmon river; but parents don't like the notion that we are living in luxury. They have a nasty way of contrasting it with the nonsense which their boys tell them about tough meat and rancid butter."At this point I began to see some resemblancebetween my correspondent and Matthew Arnold's critic in theQuarterlyof October 1868—"one of the Eton Under-Masters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation." For, in spite of all corrections and deductions, I cannot help regarding Public Schoolmasters as a well-paid race. Of course, it is true that their incomes are not comparable to those of successful barristers or surgeons, or even Ministers of State; but, on the other side, their work is infinitely easier; their earnings begin from the day on which they embark on their profession; and no revolution of the wheel of State can shake them from their well-cushioned seats. I am quite willing to admit that, on the figures supplied by my correspondent, he and his colleagues at St. Winifred's are not making so much money as their predecessors made twenty or thirty years ago. But, as far as I can understand, this diminution of incomes does not arise from diminution of charges, but only from the fact that the force of public opinion has driven schoolmasters to recognize, rather more fully than in days gone by, some primary needs of boy-nature. When the Royal Commission of 1862 was enquiring into the boarding arrangements of a famous school, one of the Commissioners was astonished to find that, in spite of the liberal charge for board, the boys got nothing but tea and bread and butter for breakfast. Apparently wishing to let the masters down easy,he suggested that perhaps eggs also were provided. To this suggestion the witness's answer was monumental: "Eggs, indeed, are not provided, but in some houses a large machine for boiling eggs is brought in every day; so that, if the boys bring their eggs, they are boiled for them." Surely the Master who first conceived this substitution of hardware for food deserved a permanent place among Social Economists; but "the bigots of this iron time," though they may not actually "have called his harmless art a crime," have resolved that, when a father pays £200 a year for his boy's schooling, the boy shall have something more substantial than bread and butter for breakfast. This reform alone, according to my correspondent, knocked some hundreds a year off each House-Master's income.Then, again, as regards Sanitation. Here, certainly not before it was wanted, reform has made its appearance, and the injured House-Master has had to put his hand in his pocket. When I was at a Public School, in that Golden Age of Profits to which my correspondent looked back so wistfully, the sanitary arrangements were such as to defy description and stagger belief. In one Pupil-Room there was only the thickness of the boarded floor between the cesspool and the feet of the boys as they sat at lessons. In my own house, containing forty boarders, there were only two baths. In another, three and evenfour boys were cooped together, by day as well as by night, in what would, in an ordinary house, be regarded as a smallish bedroom. Now all this is changed. Drainage is reconstructed; baths are multiplied; to each boy is secured a sufficient air-space at lessons and in sleep. The Sanitary Engineer is let loose every term—"What pipes and air-shafts! What wild ecstasy!"But the "ecstasy" is confined to the bosom of the Engineer as he draws up his little account, and the House-Master moans, like Mr. Mantalini, over the "Demnition Total."Yet another such deduction must be borne in mind. Volumes of nonsense have been written about the Fagging System. Sentimental writers have gushed over the beautiful relation which it establishes between Fag-Master and Fag. Some, greatly daring, have likened it to the relation of elder and younger brothers. Others, more historically minded, have tried to connect it with the usages of Chivalry and the services rendered by the Page to the Knight. As a matter of fact, it was, as "Jacob Omnium," himself an Old Etonian, pointed out fifty years ago, "an affair of the breeches pocket." As long as younger boys could be compelled (by whatever methods) to clean lamps and brush clothes and toast sausages and fill tubs for elder boys it was obvious that fewer servants were required. One of the mostbrilliant Etonians now living has said that "to see a little boy performing, with infinite pains and hopeless inadequacy, the functions of a domestic servant, might have moved Democritus to tears and Heraclitus to laughter." That Fagging has its uses, more especially in the case of spoilt boys brought up in purse-proud homes, few Public Schoolmen will deny; but the British Parent tends increasingly to draw a distinction between the duties of a fag and those of a footman; and the wages-bill becomes an increasingly important item in the House-Master's expenditure.What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, as I have repeatedly said, that a Boarding-School, whether public or private, is not the ideal method of educating boys; but, pending that great increase of Day-Schools for the sons of the upper classes which Dr. Warre foresees, it is the only method practically available for the great majority of English parents. Whether the instruction imparted in the Public Schools is or is not worth the amount which it costs is a matter of opinion; and, indeed, as long as the parent (who, after all, has to pay) is satisfied, no one else need trouble himself about the question. As to domestic arrangements and provision for health and comfort, it may be frankly conceded that the Schoolboy of to-day is much better off than his father or even his elder brother was; and that the improvements in his lot have tendedto diminish the profits on which the House-Master used to grow rich.P.S.—Having the terrors of the ferule before my eyes, let me hasten to say, with all possible explicitness, that in my account of my correspondence with the outraged Schoolmaster, I have aimed at giving a general impression rather than a verbal transcript.

SCHOOLS AND BOARDING-HOUSES

"Any two meals at a Boarding-House are together less than one square meal." This pleasing postulate was, I believe, in the first instance evolved from the bitter experience of a hungry mathematician who, at this season of the year, sought change of air and scene at Margate or Herne Bay. But to-day I use the word "Boarding-House" in that more restricted sense which signifies a Master's house for the accommodation of boys at a Public School. My reason for discussing the subject is that a stray sentence in my last chapter, about the profits derived from such Boarding-Houses, caused dire offence. I am the most docile creature alive, and the rebukes which I have incurred caused me, as the French say, to make a return upon myself. I subjected my conscience to severe cross-examination. I asked whether what I had written was wholly or even approximately true, or entirely false; and whether, if true, it was offensive or indelicate. Here is the sentence in all its unglossed brutality: "The proprietors of Boarding-Housesat the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera and build pineries and vineries at home." Now, of course, a Schoolmaster is nothing if not critical, and, in superintending the studies of his young friends, he rightly insists on the most scrupulous accuracy of phrase and figure. Not for the construing boy is the plea, dear to Biblical critics, that "the wider divergence is the higher unity." The calculating boy must not, if he values his peace, mistake inference for demonstration. Woe betide the excuse-making boy if he protests that he has spent an hour over his lesson when his tutor can show that he could only have spent fifty-five minutes. This Chinese exactness is all very well in the schoolroom, but tends to become a bore in the intercourse of social life. An Assistant Master, stung into activity by my recent strictures on Public Schools, has swooped down upon me with all the fierce alacrity which he would display in detecting a false quantity or an erroneous deduction. "Villas in the Riviera! Who buys Villas in the Riviera? Give, name, date, and place by return of post, or—write out five hundred lines." "What do you mean by Pineries and Vineries? I and my colleagues at St. Winifred's only grow cucumbers; and the Composition-Master, though he has large private means, gets his grapes from the Stores. Retract and apologize, or be for ever fallen."

Now really, when I read all this virtuous indignation,I am irresistibly reminded of the Bishop in "Little Dorrit," who, when all the guests were extolling Mr. Merdle's wealth, spoke pensively about "the goods of this world," and "tried to look as if he were rather poor himself." In vain I protested that I meant no injurious allusion to Monte Carlo, and proposed to substitute "Mansions in the Isle of Wight" for "Villas in the Riviera." The substitution availed me nothing. "You say 'Mansions.' Do you really know more than one? And how do you know that the schoolmaster who bought it did not marry a wife with a fortune? You cannot investigate his marriage settlements, so your illustration counts for nothing." In the same conciliatory spirit, I urged that "Pineries and Vineries" was a picturesque phrase invented by Lord Randolph Churchill to describe the amenities of a comfortable country house, not of the largest order; but my pedagogue was not to be pacified. "If you didn't mean Pineries and Vineries, you shouldn't have said so. It creates a bad impression in the parents' minds. Of course no reasonable person could object to one's having gardens, or stabling, or a moderate shooting, or a share of a salmon river; but parents don't like the notion that we are living in luxury. They have a nasty way of contrasting it with the nonsense which their boys tell them about tough meat and rancid butter."

At this point I began to see some resemblancebetween my correspondent and Matthew Arnold's critic in theQuarterlyof October 1868—"one of the Eton Under-Masters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation." For, in spite of all corrections and deductions, I cannot help regarding Public Schoolmasters as a well-paid race. Of course, it is true that their incomes are not comparable to those of successful barristers or surgeons, or even Ministers of State; but, on the other side, their work is infinitely easier; their earnings begin from the day on which they embark on their profession; and no revolution of the wheel of State can shake them from their well-cushioned seats. I am quite willing to admit that, on the figures supplied by my correspondent, he and his colleagues at St. Winifred's are not making so much money as their predecessors made twenty or thirty years ago. But, as far as I can understand, this diminution of incomes does not arise from diminution of charges, but only from the fact that the force of public opinion has driven schoolmasters to recognize, rather more fully than in days gone by, some primary needs of boy-nature. When the Royal Commission of 1862 was enquiring into the boarding arrangements of a famous school, one of the Commissioners was astonished to find that, in spite of the liberal charge for board, the boys got nothing but tea and bread and butter for breakfast. Apparently wishing to let the masters down easy,he suggested that perhaps eggs also were provided. To this suggestion the witness's answer was monumental: "Eggs, indeed, are not provided, but in some houses a large machine for boiling eggs is brought in every day; so that, if the boys bring their eggs, they are boiled for them." Surely the Master who first conceived this substitution of hardware for food deserved a permanent place among Social Economists; but "the bigots of this iron time," though they may not actually "have called his harmless art a crime," have resolved that, when a father pays £200 a year for his boy's schooling, the boy shall have something more substantial than bread and butter for breakfast. This reform alone, according to my correspondent, knocked some hundreds a year off each House-Master's income.

Then, again, as regards Sanitation. Here, certainly not before it was wanted, reform has made its appearance, and the injured House-Master has had to put his hand in his pocket. When I was at a Public School, in that Golden Age of Profits to which my correspondent looked back so wistfully, the sanitary arrangements were such as to defy description and stagger belief. In one Pupil-Room there was only the thickness of the boarded floor between the cesspool and the feet of the boys as they sat at lessons. In my own house, containing forty boarders, there were only two baths. In another, three and evenfour boys were cooped together, by day as well as by night, in what would, in an ordinary house, be regarded as a smallish bedroom. Now all this is changed. Drainage is reconstructed; baths are multiplied; to each boy is secured a sufficient air-space at lessons and in sleep. The Sanitary Engineer is let loose every term—

"What pipes and air-shafts! What wild ecstasy!"

But the "ecstasy" is confined to the bosom of the Engineer as he draws up his little account, and the House-Master moans, like Mr. Mantalini, over the "Demnition Total."

Yet another such deduction must be borne in mind. Volumes of nonsense have been written about the Fagging System. Sentimental writers have gushed over the beautiful relation which it establishes between Fag-Master and Fag. Some, greatly daring, have likened it to the relation of elder and younger brothers. Others, more historically minded, have tried to connect it with the usages of Chivalry and the services rendered by the Page to the Knight. As a matter of fact, it was, as "Jacob Omnium," himself an Old Etonian, pointed out fifty years ago, "an affair of the breeches pocket." As long as younger boys could be compelled (by whatever methods) to clean lamps and brush clothes and toast sausages and fill tubs for elder boys it was obvious that fewer servants were required. One of the mostbrilliant Etonians now living has said that "to see a little boy performing, with infinite pains and hopeless inadequacy, the functions of a domestic servant, might have moved Democritus to tears and Heraclitus to laughter." That Fagging has its uses, more especially in the case of spoilt boys brought up in purse-proud homes, few Public Schoolmen will deny; but the British Parent tends increasingly to draw a distinction between the duties of a fag and those of a footman; and the wages-bill becomes an increasingly important item in the House-Master's expenditure.

What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, as I have repeatedly said, that a Boarding-School, whether public or private, is not the ideal method of educating boys; but, pending that great increase of Day-Schools for the sons of the upper classes which Dr. Warre foresees, it is the only method practically available for the great majority of English parents. Whether the instruction imparted in the Public Schools is or is not worth the amount which it costs is a matter of opinion; and, indeed, as long as the parent (who, after all, has to pay) is satisfied, no one else need trouble himself about the question. As to domestic arrangements and provision for health and comfort, it may be frankly conceded that the Schoolboy of to-day is much better off than his father or even his elder brother was; and that the improvements in his lot have tendedto diminish the profits on which the House-Master used to grow rich.

P.S.—Having the terrors of the ferule before my eyes, let me hasten to say, with all possible explicitness, that in my account of my correspondence with the outraged Schoolmaster, I have aimed at giving a general impression rather than a verbal transcript.

XVIISQUARESAll true lovers of Lewis Carroll will remember that Hiawatha, when he went a-photographing, "pulled and pushed the joints and hinges" of his Camera,"Till it looked all squares and oblongs,Like a complicated figureIn the Second Book of Euclid."But it is not of squares in the mathematical sense that I speak to-day, but rather of those enclosed spaces, most irregularly shaped and proportioned, which go by the name of "Squares" in London.It is in sultry August that the value of these spaces is most clearly perceived; for now the better-disposed owners fling open the gates of their squares and suffer them to become, at least temporarily, the resting-places of the aged and decrepit, and the playgrounds of the children. To extend these benefits more widely and to secure them in perpetuity are objects for which civic reformers have long striven; and during the present session of Parliament[6](for, as Dryasdust would remind us, Parliament is not proroguedbut only adjourned) two Acts have been passed which may do something at least towards attaining the desired ends. One of these Acts provides that, in cases where "Open Spaces and Burial Grounds" are vested in Trustees, the Trustees may transfer them to the Local Authorities, to be maintained for the use and service of the public. The other forbids for all time the erection of buildings on certain squares and gardens which belong to private owners, those owners having consented to this curtailment of their powers. The conjunction of "Burial Grounds" with "Open Spaces" in the purview of the former Act has a rather lugubrious sound; but in reality it points to one of the happiest changes which recent years have brought to London."A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed—here, in a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring 'our dear brother here departed' to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death and every poisonous element of death in action close on life,—here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raisedin corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages that civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."When Dickens wrote that hideous description, worthy to be illustrated by Hogarth in his most realistic mood, he did not exaggerate—he could not exaggerate—the obscenity of burial-grounds in crowded cities. To-day they are green with turf and bright with flowers, and brighter still with the unconquerable merriment of childhood at play among the dim memorials of the forgotten dead. What is true of the particular spot which Dickens described is true all over London; and the resting-places of the departed have been made oases of life and health in this arid wilderness of struggling and stifled humanity.Though so much has been done in the way of making the Churchyards available for public uses, comparatively little has been done with the Squares; and philosophers of the school erroneously called Cynical might account for this difference by the fact that, whereas the churchyards were generally in the hands of official trustees, such as Rectors, Churchwardens, Overseers, or Vestries, the principal squares of London are the private property of individual owners. Even the London Squares and Enclosures Act, just passed, illustrates the same principle. The preamble of the Act sets forth that in respect ofevery Square or Enclosure with which it deals the consent of the owner has been obtained. In each case, therefore, the owner has consented to legislation which will prevent himself or his successors from building on what are now open spaces, and, so far, each owner concerned has shown himself a patriotic citizen and a well-wisher to posterity. But, when we come to examine the schedule of properties to which the Act applies, it is interesting to compare the number belonging to private persons with the number belonging to public bodies. The Act applies to sixty-four properties; of these fifty-five belong to public bodies such as District Councils, Governors of Hospitals, and Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and nine to private persons, among whom it is pleasant to reckon one Liberal M.P., Sir John Dickson-Poynder, and, by way of balance, one Conservative peer, Lord Camden.A further study of the Schedule reveals the instructive fact that, with two exceptions in the City of Westminster and one in the Borough of Kensington, none of the scheduled properties lie within areas which could by any stretch of terms be called wealthy, fashionable, or aristocratic. Public authorities in such districts as Camberwell and Lewisham—private owners in Islington and Woolwich—have willingly surrendered their rights for the benefit of the community; but none of the great ground landlords have followed suit. The owners of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Squareand Portman Square and Cavendish Square and Berkeley Square—theSquares,par excellence, of fashionable London—have kept their seigniorial rights untouched. Pascal told us of some very human but very unregenerate children who said "This dog belongs tome," and "That place in the sun isMine," and Pascal's comment was, "Behold, the beginning and the image of all usurpation upon earth!" Similarly, the human but unregenerate landowners of fashionable London say, as they survey their possessions, "This Square belongs tome," "That place in the shade isMine," while the August sun beats down on the malodorous street, and tottering paupers peer wistfully at the benches under the plane trees, and street-boys flatten their noses against the iron railings and madly yearn for cricket-pitches so smooth and green.Although these fashionable Squares are so sedulously guarded against the intrusion of outsiders, they are very little used by those who have the right of entrance. "Livery Servants and Dogs not admitted" is a legendary inscription which, in its substance, still operates. Here and there a nurse with a baby in her arms haunts the shade, or a parcel of older children play lawn-tennis or croquet to an accompaniment of chaff from envious street-boys. But, as a general rule, for twenty hours out of the twenty-four and for ten months out of the twelve the Squares areabsolutely vacant; and one of the most reasonable reforms which I could conceive would be to convert them from private pleasure-grounds to public gardens, and to throw the cost of maintaining them in order and beauty on the London County Council.As I said before, some Square-owners have, without waiting for legal compulsion, taken tentative steps towards this reform. The Trustees of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest and the shadiest of all London Squares, have made them over to the County Council, and, in the hot months of declining summer, the juvenile populations of Holborn and St. Giles play their breathless games where Babington was hanged and Russell beheaded. It was there that, on the 20th of July 1683, Sir Ralph Verney, riding out from London to his home in Buckinghamshire, "saw the scaffold making ready against Lord Russell's execution to-morrow—God help him, and save the country."But if once we leave the utilities and amenities of the London Squares and begin to meddle with their antiquities, we shall soon overflow all reasonable limits. Bloomsbury Square still reeks (at least for those who know their "Barnaby Rudge") with the blood which was shed in the Gordon Riots. Grosvenor Square—the last district of London which clung to oil-lamps in hopeless resistance to the innovation of gas—embodies the more recent memory of the Cato Street Conspiracy.In Berkeley Square (from what is now Lord Rosebery's house) Sarah Child eloped, and annexed the name and the banking-house of Child to the Earldom of Jersey. In Portman Square Mrs. Montagu presided over her court of Bluestockings and feasted the chimney-sweeps on May-day. In Manchester Square, under the roof which now houses the Wallace Collection, the dazzling beauty of Isabella Lady Hertford stirred the fatuous passion of George IV. In Cavendish Square, under the portico of Harcourt House, lately demolished, Disraeli said good-bye for ever to his confederate Lord George Bentinck. In Hanover Square, Chantrey's stately statue of William Pitt has looked down on a century of aristocratic weddings, ascending and descending the steps of St. George's Church. Sir George Trevelyan, commenting on a Valentine written by Macaulay for Lady Mary Stanhope, a great-niece of Pitt's, declares that "the allusion to the statue in Hanover Square is one of the happiest touches that can be found in Macaulay's writings," and that is a sufficient justification for quoting it:—"Prophetic rage my bosom swells;I taste the cake, I hear the bells!From Conduit Street the close arrayOf chariots barricades the wayTo where I see, with outstretched hand,Majestic, thy great kinsman stand,And half unbend his brow of pride,As welcoming so fair a bride."

SQUARES

All true lovers of Lewis Carroll will remember that Hiawatha, when he went a-photographing, "pulled and pushed the joints and hinges" of his Camera,

"Till it looked all squares and oblongs,Like a complicated figureIn the Second Book of Euclid."

But it is not of squares in the mathematical sense that I speak to-day, but rather of those enclosed spaces, most irregularly shaped and proportioned, which go by the name of "Squares" in London.

It is in sultry August that the value of these spaces is most clearly perceived; for now the better-disposed owners fling open the gates of their squares and suffer them to become, at least temporarily, the resting-places of the aged and decrepit, and the playgrounds of the children. To extend these benefits more widely and to secure them in perpetuity are objects for which civic reformers have long striven; and during the present session of Parliament[6](for, as Dryasdust would remind us, Parliament is not proroguedbut only adjourned) two Acts have been passed which may do something at least towards attaining the desired ends. One of these Acts provides that, in cases where "Open Spaces and Burial Grounds" are vested in Trustees, the Trustees may transfer them to the Local Authorities, to be maintained for the use and service of the public. The other forbids for all time the erection of buildings on certain squares and gardens which belong to private owners, those owners having consented to this curtailment of their powers. The conjunction of "Burial Grounds" with "Open Spaces" in the purview of the former Act has a rather lugubrious sound; but in reality it points to one of the happiest changes which recent years have brought to London.

"A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed—here, in a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring 'our dear brother here departed' to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death and every poisonous element of death in action close on life,—here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raisedin corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages that civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."

When Dickens wrote that hideous description, worthy to be illustrated by Hogarth in his most realistic mood, he did not exaggerate—he could not exaggerate—the obscenity of burial-grounds in crowded cities. To-day they are green with turf and bright with flowers, and brighter still with the unconquerable merriment of childhood at play among the dim memorials of the forgotten dead. What is true of the particular spot which Dickens described is true all over London; and the resting-places of the departed have been made oases of life and health in this arid wilderness of struggling and stifled humanity.

Though so much has been done in the way of making the Churchyards available for public uses, comparatively little has been done with the Squares; and philosophers of the school erroneously called Cynical might account for this difference by the fact that, whereas the churchyards were generally in the hands of official trustees, such as Rectors, Churchwardens, Overseers, or Vestries, the principal squares of London are the private property of individual owners. Even the London Squares and Enclosures Act, just passed, illustrates the same principle. The preamble of the Act sets forth that in respect ofevery Square or Enclosure with which it deals the consent of the owner has been obtained. In each case, therefore, the owner has consented to legislation which will prevent himself or his successors from building on what are now open spaces, and, so far, each owner concerned has shown himself a patriotic citizen and a well-wisher to posterity. But, when we come to examine the schedule of properties to which the Act applies, it is interesting to compare the number belonging to private persons with the number belonging to public bodies. The Act applies to sixty-four properties; of these fifty-five belong to public bodies such as District Councils, Governors of Hospitals, and Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and nine to private persons, among whom it is pleasant to reckon one Liberal M.P., Sir John Dickson-Poynder, and, by way of balance, one Conservative peer, Lord Camden.

A further study of the Schedule reveals the instructive fact that, with two exceptions in the City of Westminster and one in the Borough of Kensington, none of the scheduled properties lie within areas which could by any stretch of terms be called wealthy, fashionable, or aristocratic. Public authorities in such districts as Camberwell and Lewisham—private owners in Islington and Woolwich—have willingly surrendered their rights for the benefit of the community; but none of the great ground landlords have followed suit. The owners of Belgrave Square and Grosvenor Squareand Portman Square and Cavendish Square and Berkeley Square—theSquares,par excellence, of fashionable London—have kept their seigniorial rights untouched. Pascal told us of some very human but very unregenerate children who said "This dog belongs tome," and "That place in the sun isMine," and Pascal's comment was, "Behold, the beginning and the image of all usurpation upon earth!" Similarly, the human but unregenerate landowners of fashionable London say, as they survey their possessions, "This Square belongs tome," "That place in the shade isMine," while the August sun beats down on the malodorous street, and tottering paupers peer wistfully at the benches under the plane trees, and street-boys flatten their noses against the iron railings and madly yearn for cricket-pitches so smooth and green.

Although these fashionable Squares are so sedulously guarded against the intrusion of outsiders, they are very little used by those who have the right of entrance. "Livery Servants and Dogs not admitted" is a legendary inscription which, in its substance, still operates. Here and there a nurse with a baby in her arms haunts the shade, or a parcel of older children play lawn-tennis or croquet to an accompaniment of chaff from envious street-boys. But, as a general rule, for twenty hours out of the twenty-four and for ten months out of the twelve the Squares areabsolutely vacant; and one of the most reasonable reforms which I could conceive would be to convert them from private pleasure-grounds to public gardens, and to throw the cost of maintaining them in order and beauty on the London County Council.

As I said before, some Square-owners have, without waiting for legal compulsion, taken tentative steps towards this reform. The Trustees of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest and the shadiest of all London Squares, have made them over to the County Council, and, in the hot months of declining summer, the juvenile populations of Holborn and St. Giles play their breathless games where Babington was hanged and Russell beheaded. It was there that, on the 20th of July 1683, Sir Ralph Verney, riding out from London to his home in Buckinghamshire, "saw the scaffold making ready against Lord Russell's execution to-morrow—God help him, and save the country."

But if once we leave the utilities and amenities of the London Squares and begin to meddle with their antiquities, we shall soon overflow all reasonable limits. Bloomsbury Square still reeks (at least for those who know their "Barnaby Rudge") with the blood which was shed in the Gordon Riots. Grosvenor Square—the last district of London which clung to oil-lamps in hopeless resistance to the innovation of gas—embodies the more recent memory of the Cato Street Conspiracy.In Berkeley Square (from what is now Lord Rosebery's house) Sarah Child eloped, and annexed the name and the banking-house of Child to the Earldom of Jersey. In Portman Square Mrs. Montagu presided over her court of Bluestockings and feasted the chimney-sweeps on May-day. In Manchester Square, under the roof which now houses the Wallace Collection, the dazzling beauty of Isabella Lady Hertford stirred the fatuous passion of George IV. In Cavendish Square, under the portico of Harcourt House, lately demolished, Disraeli said good-bye for ever to his confederate Lord George Bentinck. In Hanover Square, Chantrey's stately statue of William Pitt has looked down on a century of aristocratic weddings, ascending and descending the steps of St. George's Church. Sir George Trevelyan, commenting on a Valentine written by Macaulay for Lady Mary Stanhope, a great-niece of Pitt's, declares that "the allusion to the statue in Hanover Square is one of the happiest touches that can be found in Macaulay's writings," and that is a sufficient justification for quoting it:—

"Prophetic rage my bosom swells;I taste the cake, I hear the bells!From Conduit Street the close arrayOf chariots barricades the wayTo where I see, with outstretched hand,Majestic, thy great kinsman stand,And half unbend his brow of pride,As welcoming so fair a bride."

XVIIISUNDAY IN LONDONIt is the middle of August, and there is nobody in London—except, of course, some four millions of people who do not count. There is nobody in London; and, most specially and noticeably, there is nobody in Church. Be it far from me to suggest that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother, who flood London in August and September, are persons of indevout habits. But they have their own methods and places of devotion (of which I may speak anon), and do not affect the Parish Churches, with which I am now concerned. I have excellent opportunities of judging; for, year in year out, in tropical heat or Arctic cold, my due feet never fail to walk the round of our Stuccovian churches, and I can testify that in August and September Vacancy and Depression reign unchallenged. Seats are empty. Galleries are locked. Collections sink to vanishing-point. The Vicar of St. Ursula's, Stucco Gardens, accompanied by his second wife, is sitting under a white umbrella at Dieppe, watching the aquatic gambols of his twofold family.The Senior Curate is climbing in the Alps. The Junior Curate, who stroked his College Boat last year and was ordained at Trinity, officiates in agonies of self-conscious shyness which would draw tears from a stone. A temporary organist elicits undreamt-of harmonies. The organ-blower is getting his health in the hopfields. The choirboys are let loose—"On Brighton's shingly beach, on Margate's sand,Their voice out-pipes the roaring of the sea."The congregation represents the mere dregs and remnants of Stuccovia's social prime. Poor we have none, and our rich are fled to Scotland or Norway, Homburg or Marienbad. The seats are sparsely tenanted by "stern-faced men" (like those who arrested Eugene Aram), whom business keeps in London when their hearts are on the moors; over-burdened mothers, with herds of restless schoolboys at home for the holidays and craving for more ardent delights than Stucco Gardens yield; decayed spinsters of the type of Volumnia Dedlock, who, having exhausted the hospitable patience of their ever-diminishing band of friends, are forced to the horrid necessity of spending the autumn in London. The only cheerful face in the church belongs to the Pewopener, who, being impeded in the discharge of her function by arthritic rheumatism, is happiest when congregations are smallest and there are noweek-day services to "molest her ancient solitary reign."••••••Evensong is over. The organist is struggling with an inconceivable tune from "The English Hymnal" (for at St. Ursula's we are nothing if not up to date). The Curate, sicklied o'er with that indescribable horror which in his boating days he would have described as "The Needle," is furtively reperusing his manuscript before mounting the pulpit, and does not detect my craven flight as I slip through the baize door and disappear. It is characteristic of St. Ursula's that, even when empty, it is fusty; but this need surprise no one, for the architect was strong on a "scientific system of ventilation," and that, as we all know, means very little ventilation and an overwhelming amount of system.However, my courageous flight has delivered me from asphyxiation, and, before returning to my modest Sunday supper of Paysandu Ox-tongue and sardines, I think that I will reinflate my lungs by a stroll round Hyde Park. There is a lovely redness in the western sky over the Serpentine Bridge, but it is still broad daylight. The sere and yellow turf of the Park is covered by some of those four millions who do not count and do not go to church, but who, apparently, are fond of sermons. At the end of each hundred yards Icome upon a preacher of some religious, social, or political gospel, and round each is gathered a crowd of listeners who follow his utterances with interested attention. When I think of St. Ursula's and the pavid Curate and my graceless flight, I protest that I am covered with shame as with a garment. But the wrong done in the church can be repaired in the Park. I have missed one sermon, but I will hear another. Unluckily, when these compunctious visitings seized me I was standing by a rostrum of heterodoxy. For all I know the preacher may have followers among my readers; so, as I would not for the world wound even the least orthodox susceptibilities, I forbear to indicate the theory which he enounced. As he spoke, I seemed to live a former life over again; for I had once before been present at an exactly similar preaching, in company, either bodily or spiritual, with my friend Mr. James Payn, and his comments on the scene revived themselves in my memory, even as the remote associations of Ellangowan reawoke in the consciousness of Harry Bertram when he returned from his wanderings, and gazed, bewildered, on his forgotten home. (Henceforward it is Payn that speaks.) The preacher of Heterodoxy was entirely without enthusiasm, nor did his oratory borrow any meretricious attractions from the Muse. It was a curious farrago of logic without reason and premisses without facts, and was certainly theleast popular, though not the least numerously attended, of all the competing sermons in the Park. Suddenly the preacher gave expression to a statement more monstrous than common, on which an old lady in the crowd, who had heretofore been listening with great complacency, exclaimed in horror, "I'm surethisain't true Gospel," and immediately decamped. Up to that point, she had apparently been listening under the impression that the preacher belonged to her own blameless persuasion, and was in the blankest ignorance of all that he had been driving at.But Sunday in London has religious attractions to offer besides those purveyed by St. Ursula's and Hyde Park. I said at the outset that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother have their own methods and places of devotion—their Mecca is St. Paul's Cathedral. One of the pleasantest ways of spending a Sunday evening in London is to join the pilgrim-throng. The great west doors of the Cathedral are flung wide open, as if to welcome the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord Mayor, and all at once we find ourselves, hushed and awestruck, in the illimitable perspective. Even the staunchest believer in Gothic as the only religious architecture may admit, with disloyalty to his faith, that every year St. Paul's becomes more like a place of Christian worship and less like a glorified Council-hall or an Imperial Senate-house. And it is seen at itsbest in twilight. The shadows temper the garish splendour of mosaic and gold and electricity, and enhance the dominant sense of vastness and grandeur. And prayer ascends on the wings of music and sweet boy-voices ring, and the distant altar, with its gleaming lights, focuses the meaning and purpose of the whole. And then the great "Communion of Hymns" unites us all, American and English, Londoner and countryman, as citizens of a city not built with hands, patriots of a country which is not marked on the terrestrial globe. Bernard of Cluny and William Cowper and John Keble all contribute of their best. "Brief life is here our portion" seems to utter the real heart's desire of a tired-looking mechanic who stands by my side. "Hark, my soul!" seems to communicate its own intensity to the very tone and look of the people who are singing it. "Sun of my soul" is an evening prayer which sounds just as natural and as fitting in the inmost heart of London's crowd and grind and pressure as in the sweet solitude of the Hursley fields. In the pulpit a pale preacher, himself half worn-out before his prime by ten years' battle in a slum, is extolling the Cross as the test and strength and glory of human life—"While at his feet the human ocean lay,And wave on wave rolled into space away."A human stream indeed, of all sorts and conditions—oldmen and maidens, young men and children, rich and poor, English and foreigners, sightseers and citizens, dapper clerks and toil-stained citizens and red-coated soldiers—all interested, and all at ease, and all at home at what Bishop Lightfoot called "the centre of the world's concourse"—under the cross-crowned Dome of St. Paul's.

SUNDAY IN LONDON

It is the middle of August, and there is nobody in London—except, of course, some four millions of people who do not count. There is nobody in London; and, most specially and noticeably, there is nobody in Church. Be it far from me to suggest that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother, who flood London in August and September, are persons of indevout habits. But they have their own methods and places of devotion (of which I may speak anon), and do not affect the Parish Churches, with which I am now concerned. I have excellent opportunities of judging; for, year in year out, in tropical heat or Arctic cold, my due feet never fail to walk the round of our Stuccovian churches, and I can testify that in August and September Vacancy and Depression reign unchallenged. Seats are empty. Galleries are locked. Collections sink to vanishing-point. The Vicar of St. Ursula's, Stucco Gardens, accompanied by his second wife, is sitting under a white umbrella at Dieppe, watching the aquatic gambols of his twofold family.The Senior Curate is climbing in the Alps. The Junior Curate, who stroked his College Boat last year and was ordained at Trinity, officiates in agonies of self-conscious shyness which would draw tears from a stone. A temporary organist elicits undreamt-of harmonies. The organ-blower is getting his health in the hopfields. The choirboys are let loose—

"On Brighton's shingly beach, on Margate's sand,Their voice out-pipes the roaring of the sea."

The congregation represents the mere dregs and remnants of Stuccovia's social prime. Poor we have none, and our rich are fled to Scotland or Norway, Homburg or Marienbad. The seats are sparsely tenanted by "stern-faced men" (like those who arrested Eugene Aram), whom business keeps in London when their hearts are on the moors; over-burdened mothers, with herds of restless schoolboys at home for the holidays and craving for more ardent delights than Stucco Gardens yield; decayed spinsters of the type of Volumnia Dedlock, who, having exhausted the hospitable patience of their ever-diminishing band of friends, are forced to the horrid necessity of spending the autumn in London. The only cheerful face in the church belongs to the Pewopener, who, being impeded in the discharge of her function by arthritic rheumatism, is happiest when congregations are smallest and there are noweek-day services to "molest her ancient solitary reign."

Evensong is over. The organist is struggling with an inconceivable tune from "The English Hymnal" (for at St. Ursula's we are nothing if not up to date). The Curate, sicklied o'er with that indescribable horror which in his boating days he would have described as "The Needle," is furtively reperusing his manuscript before mounting the pulpit, and does not detect my craven flight as I slip through the baize door and disappear. It is characteristic of St. Ursula's that, even when empty, it is fusty; but this need surprise no one, for the architect was strong on a "scientific system of ventilation," and that, as we all know, means very little ventilation and an overwhelming amount of system.

However, my courageous flight has delivered me from asphyxiation, and, before returning to my modest Sunday supper of Paysandu Ox-tongue and sardines, I think that I will reinflate my lungs by a stroll round Hyde Park. There is a lovely redness in the western sky over the Serpentine Bridge, but it is still broad daylight. The sere and yellow turf of the Park is covered by some of those four millions who do not count and do not go to church, but who, apparently, are fond of sermons. At the end of each hundred yards Icome upon a preacher of some religious, social, or political gospel, and round each is gathered a crowd of listeners who follow his utterances with interested attention. When I think of St. Ursula's and the pavid Curate and my graceless flight, I protest that I am covered with shame as with a garment. But the wrong done in the church can be repaired in the Park. I have missed one sermon, but I will hear another. Unluckily, when these compunctious visitings seized me I was standing by a rostrum of heterodoxy. For all I know the preacher may have followers among my readers; so, as I would not for the world wound even the least orthodox susceptibilities, I forbear to indicate the theory which he enounced. As he spoke, I seemed to live a former life over again; for I had once before been present at an exactly similar preaching, in company, either bodily or spiritual, with my friend Mr. James Payn, and his comments on the scene revived themselves in my memory, even as the remote associations of Ellangowan reawoke in the consciousness of Harry Bertram when he returned from his wanderings, and gazed, bewildered, on his forgotten home. (Henceforward it is Payn that speaks.) The preacher of Heterodoxy was entirely without enthusiasm, nor did his oratory borrow any meretricious attractions from the Muse. It was a curious farrago of logic without reason and premisses without facts, and was certainly theleast popular, though not the least numerously attended, of all the competing sermons in the Park. Suddenly the preacher gave expression to a statement more monstrous than common, on which an old lady in the crowd, who had heretofore been listening with great complacency, exclaimed in horror, "I'm surethisain't true Gospel," and immediately decamped. Up to that point, she had apparently been listening under the impression that the preacher belonged to her own blameless persuasion, and was in the blankest ignorance of all that he had been driving at.

But Sunday in London has religious attractions to offer besides those purveyed by St. Ursula's and Hyde Park. I said at the outset that the Country Cousin and the Transatlantic Brother have their own methods and places of devotion—their Mecca is St. Paul's Cathedral. One of the pleasantest ways of spending a Sunday evening in London is to join the pilgrim-throng. The great west doors of the Cathedral are flung wide open, as if to welcome the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Lord Mayor, and all at once we find ourselves, hushed and awestruck, in the illimitable perspective. Even the staunchest believer in Gothic as the only religious architecture may admit, with disloyalty to his faith, that every year St. Paul's becomes more like a place of Christian worship and less like a glorified Council-hall or an Imperial Senate-house. And it is seen at itsbest in twilight. The shadows temper the garish splendour of mosaic and gold and electricity, and enhance the dominant sense of vastness and grandeur. And prayer ascends on the wings of music and sweet boy-voices ring, and the distant altar, with its gleaming lights, focuses the meaning and purpose of the whole. And then the great "Communion of Hymns" unites us all, American and English, Londoner and countryman, as citizens of a city not built with hands, patriots of a country which is not marked on the terrestrial globe. Bernard of Cluny and William Cowper and John Keble all contribute of their best. "Brief life is here our portion" seems to utter the real heart's desire of a tired-looking mechanic who stands by my side. "Hark, my soul!" seems to communicate its own intensity to the very tone and look of the people who are singing it. "Sun of my soul" is an evening prayer which sounds just as natural and as fitting in the inmost heart of London's crowd and grind and pressure as in the sweet solitude of the Hursley fields. In the pulpit a pale preacher, himself half worn-out before his prime by ten years' battle in a slum, is extolling the Cross as the test and strength and glory of human life—

"While at his feet the human ocean lay,And wave on wave rolled into space away."

A human stream indeed, of all sorts and conditions—oldmen and maidens, young men and children, rich and poor, English and foreigners, sightseers and citizens, dapper clerks and toil-stained citizens and red-coated soldiers—all interested, and all at ease, and all at home at what Bishop Lightfoot called "the centre of the world's concourse"—under the cross-crowned Dome of St. Paul's.

XIXA SUBURBAN SUNDAY"It seems to the writer of this history that the inhabitants of London are scarcely sufficiently sensible of the beauty of its environs.... With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air of graceful Richmond. In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from all the tumult of the world and find himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the Cedars of Lebanon and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia."The judicious critic will have little difficulty in assigning this vivid passage to the too-graphic pen of Lord Beaconsfield; but he will also recognizethe fact that a description written in 1837 needs some modification when applied to 1906. The central solitude of London—Kensington Gardens—is still very much as it was. Just now, its dark foliage and dusky glades suggest all the romantic associations of Gustave Doré's forests, with a tall trooper of the Life Guards and a bashful nursery-maid, for a Red Cross Knight and an Enchanted Princess. If we go further afield and climb the uplands of Highgate and Hampstead, we look down upon a boundless and beautiful city dimly visible through a golden haze. But the difference between the environs of London now and the same environs when Lord Beaconsfield described them is that they are now united to the centre by an unbroken network of gaslit streets. The enormous increase in the population of London, which every year brings with it, fills up the gaps and spaces, and the metropolis is now a solid whole, with its circumference extending further and further every day into what a year ago was country. In other words, the suburbs are getting further off, and what are suburbs to-day will be town to-morrow; but still there are suburbs, and a Sunday spent in them is an interesting experience.Yesterday the well-known stuffiness of St. Ursula's, combined with the kind hospitality of some suburban friends, drove me to spend my Sunday about ten miles from Stucco Square. It is a characteristic of people who live in suburbsto believe that their lot is cast in a primæval solitude, and that, though the Dome of St. Paul's is plainly visible from their back gardens, the traveller who ventures to approach them needs explicit and intricate directions about routes and trains and changes and stations. The station for my friend's place was called by a name intensely suggestive of rurality—not exactly "Rosebank," but Rosebank will serve. Readers of Archbishop Temple's Life will remember that a clergyman, excusing himself for living a long way from his church, urged that it was only three miles as the crow flies, thereby drawing down on himself the implacable reply, "But you ain't a crow." In the same way I found that, though Rosebank is only ten miles from Stucco Square "as the crow flies," a human being seeking to approach it must first make a considerable journey to a central terminus, must then embark in a train which a tortoise might outstrip, must change twice, and must burrow through a sulphurous tunnel; and must even then run a considerable risk of being carried through Rosebank Station, which all self-respecting trains seem to ignore.Faced by these difficulties, I again took counsel with Lord Beaconsfield. "''Tis the gondola of London,' exclaimed Lothair, as he leapt into a hansom, which he had previously observed to be well-horsed." My Gondolier was ready with his terms—a very liberal payment, several hours' rest,his dinner and tea, and something extra for putting up his horse. Granted these preliminaries, he would "do the job on 'is 'ead." It would "be a little 'oliday to 'im." I in vain suggested that the opportunity of attending Divine Service twice at Rosebank Church might be regarded as part payment of his charge; he replied, with startling emphasis, that he didn't go into the country to go to church—not if he knew it; that, if I wanted him, I must take him on the terms proposed; and, further, that I mustn't mind starting early, for he wanted to get his horse down cool.The Gondolier had his own way; and, while the sparrows were still twittering and the housemaids were taking in the milk and the Sunday paper, I was well on my road to Rosebank. This much I will concede to the curiosity of readers—that my road led me out of London in a south-easterly direction, by the Horseferry, where James II. dropped the Great Seal into the Thames, along the Old Kent Road, of which a modern minstrel sang; past Kennington Common, now a "Park," where the gallant Jacobites of '45 underwent the hideous doom of Treason, where the iron-shuttered windows still commemorate the Chartist rising of '48, and where Sackville Maine took his Sunday walk with Mrs. Sackville and old Mrs. Chuff. On past the "Hamlet of Dulwich," where Mr. Pickwick spent the last years of his honoured life, to Chislehurst,where Napoleon III. hid his exiled head, and North Cray, where the tragedy of Lord Londonderry's death is not yet forgotten, and Shooters' Hill, where Jerry Cruncher stopped the coach with the terrifying message of "Recalled to Life." Now, as readers are sometimes unduly literal, and as I would not willingly involve any one in an hour's fruitless puzzling over a map, let me say that this itinerary is rather general than particular, and that, although the Gondolier pursued an extremely devious course and murmured when I suggested straighter paths, we did not touch all the above-mentioned places in our morning's drive. But evermore we tended south-eastwards, and evermore the houses grew imperceptibly less dignified. Stone and stucco we had left behind us on the northern side of the river, and now it was a boundless contiguity of brick—yellow brick, rather grimy,—small houses with porticos, slips of dusty garden between the front door and the road, and here and there a row of wayside trees. But everywhere gas, and everywhereomnibi(as the classical lady said,) and everywhere electric trams. Churches of every confession and every architecture lined the way, varied with Public-houses of many signs, Municipal Buildings of startling splendour (for Borough Councils have a flamboyant taste), and Swimming Baths and Public Libraries, and here and there a private Lunatic Asylum frowning behind suggestively solemn gates.Now we are in a long and featureless street, with semi-detached houses on either hand, and a malodorous cab-stand and a four-faced clock. "Which way for Rosebank?" shouts the Gondolier. "The first to your left and then turn sharp to the right," bellows a responsive policeman. We follow the direction given, and suddenly we are there—not at Rosebank, but quite out of even Greater London. The street ends abruptly. Trams and trains and gas and shops are left behind, and all at once we are in the country. The road is lined with hedgerows, dusty indeed, but still alive. Elms of respectable dimensions look down upon big fields, with here and there an oak, and cows resting under it. At one turn of the road there is a recognizable odour of late-cut hay, and in the middle distance I distinctly perceive a turnip-field, out of which a covey of partridges might rise without surprising any one. We pull up and gaze around. Look where I will, I cannot see a house, nor even a cottage. Surely my friends have not played a practical joke on me and asked me to spend a day in an imaginary Paradise. The Gondolier looks at his perspiring horse, and mops his own brow, and gazes contemptuously on the landscape. "I should call this the world's end if I was arst," he says. "Blow'd if they've even got a Public 'Ouse." Suddenly the sound of a shrill bell bursts on the ear. The Gondolier, who is a humorist, says "Muffins."I jump out of the gondola, and pursue the welcome tinkle round a sharp angle in the road. There I see, perched on the brow of a sandy knoll, a small tin building, which a belfry and a cross proclaim to be a church. Inside I discover the Oldest Inhabitant pulling the muffin-bell with cheerful assiduity. He is more than ready to talk, and his whole discourse is as countrified as if he lived a hundred miles from Charing Cross. "Yes, this is a main lonely place. There ain't many people lives about 'ere. Why, ten years ago it was all fields. Now there are some houses—not many. He lives in one himself. How far off? Well, a matter of a mile or so. He was born on the Squire's land; his father worked on the farm. Yes, he's lived here all his life. Remembers it before there was a Crystal Palace, and when there was no railways or nothing. He hasn't often been in the train, and has only been up to London two or three times. Who goes to the church? Well—not many, except the Squire's family and the school-children. Why was it built? Oh, the Squire wants to get some rich folks to live round about. He's ready to part with his land for building; and there's going to be a row of houses built just in front of the church. He reckons the people will be more likely to come now that there's a church for them to go to." And now the "ten-minutes" bell begins with livelier measure; the OldestInhabitant shows me to a seat; and, on the stroke of eleven, a shrill "Amen" is heard in the vestry, and there enters a modest procession of surpliced schoolboys and a clergyman in a green stole. His sons and daughters, the wife of the Oldest Inhabitant, and the sisters of the choristers, from the congregation, eked out by myself and my friends from Rosebank, who arrive a little flushed and complain that they have been waiting for me. The "service is fully choral," as they say in accounts of fashionable weddings; the clergyman preaches against the Education Bill, and a collection (of copper) is made to defray the expenses of a meeting at the Albert Hall. It is pleasant to see that, even in these secluded districts, the watch-dogs of the Church are on the alert.

A SUBURBAN SUNDAY

"It seems to the writer of this history that the inhabitants of London are scarcely sufficiently sensible of the beauty of its environs.... With the exception of Constantinople, there is no city in the world that can for a moment enter into competition with it. For himself, though in his time something of a rambler, he is not ashamed in this respect to confess to a legitimate Cockney taste; and for his part he does not know where life can flow on more pleasantly than in sight of Kensington Gardens, viewing the silver Thames winding by the bowers of Rosebank, or inhaling from its terraces the refined air of graceful Richmond. In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from all the tumult of the world and find himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the Cedars of Lebanon and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia."

The judicious critic will have little difficulty in assigning this vivid passage to the too-graphic pen of Lord Beaconsfield; but he will also recognizethe fact that a description written in 1837 needs some modification when applied to 1906. The central solitude of London—Kensington Gardens—is still very much as it was. Just now, its dark foliage and dusky glades suggest all the romantic associations of Gustave Doré's forests, with a tall trooper of the Life Guards and a bashful nursery-maid, for a Red Cross Knight and an Enchanted Princess. If we go further afield and climb the uplands of Highgate and Hampstead, we look down upon a boundless and beautiful city dimly visible through a golden haze. But the difference between the environs of London now and the same environs when Lord Beaconsfield described them is that they are now united to the centre by an unbroken network of gaslit streets. The enormous increase in the population of London, which every year brings with it, fills up the gaps and spaces, and the metropolis is now a solid whole, with its circumference extending further and further every day into what a year ago was country. In other words, the suburbs are getting further off, and what are suburbs to-day will be town to-morrow; but still there are suburbs, and a Sunday spent in them is an interesting experience.

Yesterday the well-known stuffiness of St. Ursula's, combined with the kind hospitality of some suburban friends, drove me to spend my Sunday about ten miles from Stucco Square. It is a characteristic of people who live in suburbsto believe that their lot is cast in a primæval solitude, and that, though the Dome of St. Paul's is plainly visible from their back gardens, the traveller who ventures to approach them needs explicit and intricate directions about routes and trains and changes and stations. The station for my friend's place was called by a name intensely suggestive of rurality—not exactly "Rosebank," but Rosebank will serve. Readers of Archbishop Temple's Life will remember that a clergyman, excusing himself for living a long way from his church, urged that it was only three miles as the crow flies, thereby drawing down on himself the implacable reply, "But you ain't a crow." In the same way I found that, though Rosebank is only ten miles from Stucco Square "as the crow flies," a human being seeking to approach it must first make a considerable journey to a central terminus, must then embark in a train which a tortoise might outstrip, must change twice, and must burrow through a sulphurous tunnel; and must even then run a considerable risk of being carried through Rosebank Station, which all self-respecting trains seem to ignore.

Faced by these difficulties, I again took counsel with Lord Beaconsfield. "''Tis the gondola of London,' exclaimed Lothair, as he leapt into a hansom, which he had previously observed to be well-horsed." My Gondolier was ready with his terms—a very liberal payment, several hours' rest,his dinner and tea, and something extra for putting up his horse. Granted these preliminaries, he would "do the job on 'is 'ead." It would "be a little 'oliday to 'im." I in vain suggested that the opportunity of attending Divine Service twice at Rosebank Church might be regarded as part payment of his charge; he replied, with startling emphasis, that he didn't go into the country to go to church—not if he knew it; that, if I wanted him, I must take him on the terms proposed; and, further, that I mustn't mind starting early, for he wanted to get his horse down cool.

The Gondolier had his own way; and, while the sparrows were still twittering and the housemaids were taking in the milk and the Sunday paper, I was well on my road to Rosebank. This much I will concede to the curiosity of readers—that my road led me out of London in a south-easterly direction, by the Horseferry, where James II. dropped the Great Seal into the Thames, along the Old Kent Road, of which a modern minstrel sang; past Kennington Common, now a "Park," where the gallant Jacobites of '45 underwent the hideous doom of Treason, where the iron-shuttered windows still commemorate the Chartist rising of '48, and where Sackville Maine took his Sunday walk with Mrs. Sackville and old Mrs. Chuff. On past the "Hamlet of Dulwich," where Mr. Pickwick spent the last years of his honoured life, to Chislehurst,where Napoleon III. hid his exiled head, and North Cray, where the tragedy of Lord Londonderry's death is not yet forgotten, and Shooters' Hill, where Jerry Cruncher stopped the coach with the terrifying message of "Recalled to Life." Now, as readers are sometimes unduly literal, and as I would not willingly involve any one in an hour's fruitless puzzling over a map, let me say that this itinerary is rather general than particular, and that, although the Gondolier pursued an extremely devious course and murmured when I suggested straighter paths, we did not touch all the above-mentioned places in our morning's drive. But evermore we tended south-eastwards, and evermore the houses grew imperceptibly less dignified. Stone and stucco we had left behind us on the northern side of the river, and now it was a boundless contiguity of brick—yellow brick, rather grimy,—small houses with porticos, slips of dusty garden between the front door and the road, and here and there a row of wayside trees. But everywhere gas, and everywhereomnibi(as the classical lady said,) and everywhere electric trams. Churches of every confession and every architecture lined the way, varied with Public-houses of many signs, Municipal Buildings of startling splendour (for Borough Councils have a flamboyant taste), and Swimming Baths and Public Libraries, and here and there a private Lunatic Asylum frowning behind suggestively solemn gates.

Now we are in a long and featureless street, with semi-detached houses on either hand, and a malodorous cab-stand and a four-faced clock. "Which way for Rosebank?" shouts the Gondolier. "The first to your left and then turn sharp to the right," bellows a responsive policeman. We follow the direction given, and suddenly we are there—not at Rosebank, but quite out of even Greater London. The street ends abruptly. Trams and trains and gas and shops are left behind, and all at once we are in the country. The road is lined with hedgerows, dusty indeed, but still alive. Elms of respectable dimensions look down upon big fields, with here and there an oak, and cows resting under it. At one turn of the road there is a recognizable odour of late-cut hay, and in the middle distance I distinctly perceive a turnip-field, out of which a covey of partridges might rise without surprising any one. We pull up and gaze around. Look where I will, I cannot see a house, nor even a cottage. Surely my friends have not played a practical joke on me and asked me to spend a day in an imaginary Paradise. The Gondolier looks at his perspiring horse, and mops his own brow, and gazes contemptuously on the landscape. "I should call this the world's end if I was arst," he says. "Blow'd if they've even got a Public 'Ouse." Suddenly the sound of a shrill bell bursts on the ear. The Gondolier, who is a humorist, says "Muffins."

I jump out of the gondola, and pursue the welcome tinkle round a sharp angle in the road. There I see, perched on the brow of a sandy knoll, a small tin building, which a belfry and a cross proclaim to be a church. Inside I discover the Oldest Inhabitant pulling the muffin-bell with cheerful assiduity. He is more than ready to talk, and his whole discourse is as countrified as if he lived a hundred miles from Charing Cross. "Yes, this is a main lonely place. There ain't many people lives about 'ere. Why, ten years ago it was all fields. Now there are some houses—not many. He lives in one himself. How far off? Well, a matter of a mile or so. He was born on the Squire's land; his father worked on the farm. Yes, he's lived here all his life. Remembers it before there was a Crystal Palace, and when there was no railways or nothing. He hasn't often been in the train, and has only been up to London two or three times. Who goes to the church? Well—not many, except the Squire's family and the school-children. Why was it built? Oh, the Squire wants to get some rich folks to live round about. He's ready to part with his land for building; and there's going to be a row of houses built just in front of the church. He reckons the people will be more likely to come now that there's a church for them to go to." And now the "ten-minutes" bell begins with livelier measure; the OldestInhabitant shows me to a seat; and, on the stroke of eleven, a shrill "Amen" is heard in the vestry, and there enters a modest procession of surpliced schoolboys and a clergyman in a green stole. His sons and daughters, the wife of the Oldest Inhabitant, and the sisters of the choristers, from the congregation, eked out by myself and my friends from Rosebank, who arrive a little flushed and complain that they have been waiting for me. The "service is fully choral," as they say in accounts of fashionable weddings; the clergyman preaches against the Education Bill, and a collection (of copper) is made to defray the expenses of a meeting at the Albert Hall. It is pleasant to see that, even in these secluded districts, the watch-dogs of the Church are on the alert.

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