staff in a French public school, I must add that their nomenclature in a communal college is somewhat different from that in a lycée. The director of a communal college is called the principal, not the provisor; the masters are called regents, not professors. The principal must have the degree of bachelor, and so must the regents; in those colleges which give the full course of secondary instruction, the regents charged with the higher parts of this course must be licentiates.

CHAPTER IV.

MATTERS 1AUGHT IN THE FRENCH SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

DIVISIONS AND CLASSES IN A FRENCH LYCÉE-MATTERS TAUGHT IN EACH CLASS.

AFTER the teachers I come to the matters taught. The programme of the French public schools is, as I have said, fixed by authority; the arrangement of classes and studies is the same in all. A lycée has three divisions,—an elementary division, a grammar division, and a superior division called often division for humanities. The classes, unlike those in our great public schools, have for their highest class not a sixth but a first. The lowest class is the classe de huitième ; boys are admitted to it very young, as young as seven years of age, if they can read and write; but even before this class the lycées are authorised to place a preparatory class, not numbered, in which the instruction given is mainly that of primary schools,* and does not include Latin. Here children of six years of age are admitted. The very good exercise of learning by heart from the classics of the mother tongue begins even in this preparatory class, and is continued to the top of the school. Latin begins in the classe de huitième, and is carried further in septième. After septième begins another division, that of grammar. It is obvious that when boys are admitted at six or seven years old a serious examination at entrance is out of place; but after the elementary division a boy's access to each division is guarded by an examination, which turns, of course, on the matters taught him in the division he is leaving. The lowest class in the division of grammar is sixième, the sixth form in the school, according to the French way of reckoning. Here begins

*Primary instruction may be given by a primary schoolmaster, but he must hold, unless he has the degree of bachelor, the full certificate of a primary teacher.

Greek, and also the study of the modern languages. These may be English, German, Spanish, or Italian, according to the wants of the localities and the wishes of the parents, France having a frontier either in contact or in close proximity with all these languages. It may wound an Englishman's vanity to find that the pre-eminence given in the schools of his own country to French is not given in France to English; in the lycées of Paris, German and English pretty nearly divide the pupils, the advantage resting, however, with German; partly because this is the native language of important provinces of France; partly because it is of more use to military students, which many boys in the lycées are going to be; and partly, no doubt, because in the scientific and intellectual movement of Europe at present England counts for so little and Germany for so much, In Germany, where French is obligatory, as with us, in the schools, and where English is optional, one cannot hear without a little mortification the two languages classified as, the one, the Handel-Sprache, the other, the Cultur-Sprache; English is the Handel-Sprache, learnt for mere material and business purposes; the Cultur-Sprache, learnt for the purposes of the mind and spirit, is French.

Drawing and singing are likewise obligatory matters of instruction in the French lycées, and are not paid for as extras. Two hours a week are, on an average, given to each. Drawing is taught as a matter of science, not of amusement, and the pupil is carried through a strict course from outline up to ornament and model drawing.

The fifth class (classe de cinquième) reads our old friend Cornelius Nepos, but it reads also authors not much, I think, in use in our schools,-Justin, Ælian, and Lucian. The division of lessons is the same here and in the sixth class; ten classes, as they are called, a week, and two hours of singing, one of drawing, and two of gymnastics.* A class lasts two hours; so this gives (not counting gymnastics) 24 hours of lessons in the week. The classes are thus divided:

Gymnastics form part of the regular course in the lycées, and are not charged for as extras.

seven classes and a half (15 hours) for classics; one class (two hours) for history and geography; two half classes (two hours) for modern languages; one half class (one hour) for arithmetic. The weekly number of classes remains the same all through the school; but the proportion of time given to classics and to other subjects varies, and so does the amount of additional lessons.

In quatrième, the head form of the grammar division, Latin prosody in the classical instruction, geometry in the scientific, appear as new subjects. An hour less is in this form given to classics, an hour more to mathematics. hour more than in the two forms below is here given to drawing.

An

Another divisional examination, and the boy passes into humanities. Of the division supérieure (humanities), the lowest class is troisième. Here Latin verse begins, and here, for the first time in the school, Homer appears. Among the books read in extracts by this form, and not commonly read, so far as I know, in our schools, I noticed Terence, Isocrates, Plutarch's Morals, and the Greek Fathers. Mathematics now get four hours a week; history, which we have just seen dividing its class with geography, gets the whole two hours; geography and modern languages become additional lessons, the first with one hour a week, the second with two. Music is reduced to one hour. The number of lesson-hours in the week (still not counting gymnastics) has thus risen from 24 to 26.

Inseconde, the same proportion between sciences and letters; but in sciences the programme is now algebra, geometry, and natural history, instead of arithmetic and geometry. The distribution of additional lessons remains the same. The Agricola of Tacitus, the easier dialogues of Plato, the easier orations of Demosthenes, appear among the books read.

Then the boy rises into our sixth form, called with the French from old time not first class, but Classe de rhétorique. The classics read are much what would be read in our sixth form; but in the mother-tongue the pupil studies the Pensées of Pascal, the Oraisons funèbres of Bossuet, La Bruyère, Fénelon's Lettre à l'Académie Française, Buffon's Discours sur le

Style, Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV., Boileau's Art Poétique, and La Fontaine's Fables. Even the selection of a body of English classics like this, excellent in themselves and excellently adapted for the purposes to which they are destined, is a progress which English public instruction has yet to make. Letters have eight out of the ten classes in rhétorique, which is the great classical form of the school. Sciences have only one class, divided between geometry and cosmography; but with an object which I shall notice presently, an additional lesson of an hour in the week has been established for the benefit of those pupils who desire to refresh their knowledge of the scientific instruction given in seconde and troisième. Otherwise the lessons occupy the same number of hours as in those two classes.

But now, after the great classical form of rhétorique, comes a crowning of the edifice which we have not, and which in some degree, perhaps, represents that part of education which with us the student gets later, at the University. This is the class of logique, or, as it is now officially called, of philosophie. The design of this class is thus summed up by the present minister, M. Duruy: General revision of the classical and scientific studies of the three previous forms; instruction in physics; and, above all, as the two characterising studies of this class, philosophy,—making the pupil busy himself with the substance of ideas as in rhetoric he busied himself with their form, and developing his reflection as rhetoric developed his imagination and taste,-and contemporary history. The programme of the course of philosophy divides the subject thus: Introduction, psychology, logic, moral philosophy, theology, history of philosophy. That of the course of contemporary history goes from 1815 to the present time; the professor has to introduce it with a 'rapid summary of the general facts which have modified, from the 15th century onwards, the ideas, interests, and constitution of European society.' He concludes it with 'France's share in the general work of civilisation.' The programme is a skilfully constructed framework, capable of being by a good teacher so filled up as to make the course very interesting and useful. In philosophie, the design of this class being such as I have