dmiration. There came into my mind that exquisite and
beautiful ode, the work too, strange to say, of a transcendent egotist,
Coventry Patmore, and the prayer he made:

"Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Nor vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"

This is where we may leave our problem; leave it, that is to say, if we
have faithfully struggled with it, if we have tried to amend ourselves
and to encourage others; if we have done all this, and reached a point
beyond which progress seems impossible. But we must not fling our
problems and perplexities, as we are apt to do, upon the knees of God,
the very instant they begin to bewilder us, as children bring a tangled
skein, or a toy bent crooked, to a nurse. We must not, I say; and yet,
after all, I am not sure that it is not the best and simplest way of
all!

IX

EDUCATION

I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and
now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am
afraid, what we were all about.

We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in
the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had
any aptitude for them or not. We shoved and rammed in a good many other
subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum. But
it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a
real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a
compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we
might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach. We
had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the
masters were horribly overworked. The whole thing whizzed, banged,
grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the
result. It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright,
keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full
of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their
fancy, ready to ask questions--such excellent material, I used to
think. At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and
conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, tho