es of your
temperature for the benefit of your wife and family. If you once show
your boys that they have enough power to disturb your equilibrium and
interfere with your happiness, it is for them a victory, the results of
which they will always make you feel.

* * * * *

If you are annoyed by a boy constantly chatting with his neighbors, see
if he has a brother in the class. If he has, place them side by side,
and peace will be restored. Brothers will sometimes quarrel in class,
but have a quiet chat together, never.

* * * * *

Never overpraise clever boys, or they will never do another stroke of
work. Never snub the dull ones; you don't know that it is not out of
modesty that they will not shine over their schoolfellows.

Never ask young English public schoolboys any questions on history that
may be suggested to you by the proper names you will come across in the
text. Their knowledge of history[10] does not go much beyond the
certainty that Shakespeare was not a great Roman warrior, although his
connection with Julius Caesar, Antony, and Coriolanus keep a good many
still undecided as to the times he lived in.

[10] _I mean "modern history," for although public school-boys
know little or nothing of Marlborough and Wellington, they could
write volumes about Pericles, Scipio, and Hannibal. Ask them
something about the Reform Bill, the Repeal of the Corn Laws, or
the causes which led to American Independence, and you will have
little essays worth inserting in a comic paper._

Ask them under whose reign Ben Jonson flourished, and you will be
presented by them with a general survey of English history from the
Norman Conquest to the reign of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen
Victoria. A good many will also take the opportunity of making a show
of their knowledge of literary history (the temptation is
irresistible), and add that he was a great man who wrote a good
dictionary, and was once kept waiting for a long time in Lord
Chesterfield's antechamber, "which he did not like." Boys are generally
good at historical anecdotes, a remnant of their early training.

We once had to put into French the following sentence:

"Frederick the Great of Prussia had the portrait of the young Emperor
in every room of his Sans-Souci Palace, and being asked the reason why
he thus honored the portrait of his greatest en