ly to be taught, to be drilled into, his small compartment; in every
movement of his companions, with their quaint confining little cloth
gowns; in the keen, clear, well-authorised dominancy of some, the
instant submission of others. In fact, by one of our wise English
compromises, we still teach our so modern boys the Classics; a lesson
in attention and patience, at the least. Nay! by a double compromise,
with delightful physiognomic results sometimes, we teach them their
pagan Latin and Greek under the shadow of medieval church-towers, amid
the haunts, the traditions, and with something of the discipline, of
monasticism; for which, as is noticeable, the English have never wholly
lost an early inclination. The French and others have swept their
scholastic houses empty of it, with pedantic fidelity to their
theories. English pedants may succeed in doing the like. But the
result of our older method has had its value so far, at least, say! for
the careful aesthetic observer. It is of such diagonal influences,
through complication of influence, that expression comes, in life, in
our culture, in the very faces of men and boys--of these boys. Nothing
could better harmonise present with past than the sight of them just
here, as they [206] shout at their games, or recite their lessons,
over-arched by the work of medieval priors, or pass to church meekly,
into the seats occupied by the young monks before them.

If summer comes reluctantly to our English shores, it is also apt to
linger with us;--its flora of red and gold leaves on the branches
wellnigh to Christmas; the hot days that surprise you, and persist,
though heralded by white mornings, hinting that it is but the year's
indulgence so to deal with us. To the fanciful, such days may seem
most at home in the places where England has thus preferred to locate
the somewhat pensive education of its more favoured youth. As Uthwart
passes through the old ecclesiastical city, upon which any more modern
touch, modern door or window, seems a thing out of place through
negligence, the diluted sunlight itself seems driven along with a
sparing trace of gilded vane or red tile in it, under the wholesome
active wind from the East coast. The long, finely weathered, leaden
roof, and the great square tower, gravely magnificent, emphatic from
the first view of it over the grey down above the hop-gardens, the
gently-watered meadows, dwarf now everything beside; have the bigness
of