ns, which hold good except in three or four other exceptional
cases under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder and wilder;
and the crowning beauty of the whole is, that, when the bewildered boy
has swallowed the whole,--tail, scales, fins, and bones,--he then is
allowed to read the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to
refer to them again during his college course.

The great trouble with the so-called classical course of education is,
that it is made strictly for but one class of minds, which it drills in
respects for which they have by nature an aptitude, and to which it
presents scarcely enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline,
while to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents
difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage. There are, we
will venture to say, in every ten boys in Boston four, and those not the
dullest or poorest in quality, who could never go through the discipline
of the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the brain and
nervous system as would leave them no power for anything else.

A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the line of natural
philosophy and mechanics, passed with brilliant success through the
Boston English High School. He won the first medals, and felt all that
pride and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student. He entered
the Latin Classical School. With a large philosophic and reasoning
brain, he had a very poor verbal and textual memory; and here he began
to see himself distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to him. They
could rattle off catalogues of names; they could do so all the better
from the habit of not thinking of what they studied. They could commit
the Latin Grammar, coarse print and fine, and run through the
interminable mazes of Greek accents and Greek inflections. This boy of
large mind and brain, always behindhand, always incapable, utterly
discouraged, no amount of study could place on an equality with his
former inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from school. Many a
fine fellow has been lost to himself, and lost to an educated life, by
just such a failure. The collegiate system is like a great coal-screen:
every piece not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well
enough for screening coal; but what if it were used indiscriminately for
a mixture of coal and diamonds?

"Poor boy!" said Ole Bull, compassionately, when one sought to push a
schoolboy fr