ccording to the practice of different schools, consisted at Vendome of
a certain number of lines to be written out in play hours. Lambert and
I were so overpowered with impositions, that we had not six free days
during the two years of our school friendship. But for the books we took
out of the library, which maintained some vitality in our brains, this
system of discipline would have reduced us to idiotcy. Want of exercise
is fatal to children. The habit of preserving a dignified appearance,
begun in tender infancy, has, it is said, a visible effect on the
constitution of royal personages when the faults of such an education
are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious
sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act
on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of
kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what
deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from
the constant lack of air, exercise, and cheerfulness!

Indeed, the rules of punishment carried out in schools deserve the
attention of the Office of Public Instruction when any thinkers are to
be found there who do not think exclusively of themselves.

We incurred the infliction of an imposition in a thousand ways. Our
memory was so good that we never learned a lesson. It was enough for
either of us to hear our class-fellows repeat the task in French, Latin,
or grammar, and we could say it when our turn came; but if the master,
unfortunately, took it into his head to reverse the usual order and call
upon us first, we very often did not even know what the lesson was;
then the imposition fell in spite of our most ingenious excuses. Then we
always put off writing our exercises till the last moment; if there
were a book to be finished, or if we were lost in thought, the task was
forgotten--again an imposition. How often have we scribbled an exercise
during the time when the head-boy, whose business it was to collect them
when we came into school, was gathering them from the others!

In addition to the moral misery which Lambert went through in trying
to acclimatize himself to college life, there was a scarcely less cruel
apprenticeship through which every boy had to pass: to those bodily
sufferings which seemed infinitely varied. The tenderness of a child's
skin needs extreme care, especially in winter, when a school-boy is
constantly exchanging the fro