ce. But what good it does, we are
much at a loss to conceive. Reasonable obedience is extremely useful
in forming the disposition. Submission to tyranny lays the foundation
of hatred, suspicion, cunning, and a variety of odious passions....

"The wretchedness of school tyranny is trifling enough to a man who
only contemplates it, in ease of body and tranquillity of mind,
through the medium of twenty intervening years; but it is quite as
real, and quite as acute, while it lasts, as any of the sufferings of
mature life: and the utility of these sufferings, or the price paid in
compensation for them, should be clearly made out to a conscientious
parent before he consents to expose his children to them."

Lady Holland tells us that in old age her father "used to shudder at the
recollections of Winchester," and represented the system prevailing there
in his youth as composed of "abuse, neglect, and vice." And, speaking of
the experience of lower boys at Public Schools in general, he described it
as "an intense system of tyranny, of which the English are very fond, and
think it fits a boy for the world; but the world, bad as it is, has nothing
half so bad."

"A man gets well pummelled at a Public School; is subject to every
misery and every indignity which seventeen years of age can inflict
upon nine and ten; has his eye nearly knocked out, and his clothes
stolen and cut to pieces; and twenty years afterwards, when he is a
chrysalis, and has forgotten the miseries of his grub state, is
determined to act a manly part in life, and says, 'I passed through
all that myself, and I am determined my son shall pass through it as I
have done'; and away goes his bleating progeny to the tyranny and
servitude of the Long Chamber or the Large Dormitory. It would surely
be much more rational to say, 'Because I have passed through it, I am
determined my son shall not pass through it. Because I was kicked for
nothing, and cuffed for nothing, and fagged for everything, I will
spare all these miseries to my child.'"

And, while he thus condemned the discipline under which he had been reared,
he had no better opinion of the instruction. Not that he was an opponent of
classical education: on the contrary, he had a genuine and reasoned
admiration for "the two ancient languages." He held that, compared to them,
"merely as vehicles of thought and passion, a