on chiefly in Scotland.

He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the
long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan
crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar
difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They
are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when
toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first,
their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and
candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them.
They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of
learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands,
to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the
Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children
were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that
they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They
were principally people of the lower classes,--laborers, hackmen,
fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally
among them were parents able to send their children to other schools,
yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in
these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative
nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and
thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not
been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the
streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of
the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly
redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little
people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that
had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means
regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at
least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality--and who can
tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for
the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it
would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded
that Honesty is the best Policy--a maxim that few Italians believe.
And here lies the trouble,--in the unfathomable, disheartening
duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel,
nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long
generations of slavery in the