beautiful interior in a schoolroom is a silent lesson in order and
good taste. Beauty and order have a most valuable influence on the
emotions and the character. It is a pleasure to see the attention that
is now given to the cultivation of taste. Clean, bright class-rooms;
pictures of artistic merit on the walls; busts; collections of fossils,
sea-shells, and the like--these are to be found even in remote country
schools. Such spontaneous education of the eye is something that cannot
be overestimated for importance and fruitfulness.

Lord Avebury puts the case for artistic environment very well indeed.
"Our great danger in education," he says, "is the worship of
book-learning--the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the
memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children are wearied by the
mechanical act of writing and the interminable intricacies of spelling;
they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places,
which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation
to their daily wants and occupations. We ought to follow exactly the
opposite course, and endeavour to cultivate their taste rather than fill
their minds with dry facts."

There is one precious faculty that runs the risk of being stifled by too
much memory work. I mean the faculty of imagination. Youth is the time
when fancy is busy; it is the period when the brain can furnish
unlimited scaffolding for castles in the air. Wordsworth was so
impressed, indeed, by the opulence of the youthful fancy, that he could
only account for it by supposing recent contact with heaven.

STUDY OF SCOTT.

I sometimes think that in the training of the youthful intellect and
imagination we have not made sufficient use of the novels and romances
of Scott. Of late years a great improvement is noticeable in this
respect, and Scott is coming to be regarded as (for school purposes) our
greatest historian. In some schools, as Lord Avebury has hinted, it was
formerly thought that pupils knew history adequately when they could
rattle off a list of dates and tell something of the deeds and misdeeds
of a set of unhappy persons who masqueraded as statesmen and courtiers.
Such unedifying farce has nothing to do with history, which is a
serious, instructive, and all-embracing study. The social life of the
great mass of a nation is far more important and interesting than the
eccentric deeds of a few high-placed rogues or saints. The old