instruction in the lycées. Still more has he done this with that of the bachelor's degrees, both in arts and science. This programme, which was before a very wide one, he has now made identical, as I have said, with that of the lycée's two highest classes in humanities, and with that of its class of elementary mathematics. This simplification, the degree in question being for youths of seventeen or eighteen, seems clearly judicious.

CHAPTER V.

THE LYCÉES.

THE LYCÉES OF PARIS- HEALTH OVERWORK - COMPETITIVE EXAMINATIONS FOR LITTLE BOYS THE LYCÉE OF VANVES INTERNES AND EXTERNES.

WITH the provision I have described for the supply of professors, they are a body, all through France, of one stamp and training; the pick of them no doubt comes, in the long run, to the Paris lycées, but the ablest of young professors may expect to find himself, at some moment in the beginning of his career, at a school in the provinces. The field for him in Paris, however, is large. Paris has seven great classical schools de plein exercice, as it is called; that is, in which the full course of instruction which I have detailed above is given. All lycées are de plein exercice, while of the 247 communal colleges only 152 are so. The rest have only the elementary division and the division of grammar; they do not add to grammar the division of humanities. The seven great classical schools of Paris are the lycées Louis le Grand, Napoléon, Saint Louis, Charlemagne, Bonaparte, Bourbon, and the Colleges Stanislas and Rollin. Of these the lycées Louis le Grand, Napoléon, and Saint Louis, and the two colleges, take boarders; Charlemagne and Bonaparte take day-scholars only. Most of them retain the site, at least, of an old pre-revolutionary school; Saint Louis is the Collége d'Harcourt, founded in that great school-movement of the 14th century which I have already mentioned, by two brothers, members of Philip the Fair's Council, Raoul d'Harcourt, canon of Paris, and Robert d'Harcourt, bishop of Coutances. Napoléon was the old College Henri IV, and as, from the neighbourhood of the Panthéon, one sees its long pile, flanked by the Church of St. Étienne du Mont, where Pascal lies buried, one must own that a venerable look of old France

it still retains. Bonaparte was the College Bourbon. Louis le Grand was the famous Jesuit school of Clermont, which Louis the Fourteenth one day visited, and the performance of the scholars being admired by one of his suite: What would you expect?' said the king, c'est mon collége.' That night the Jesuits erased the name of Clermont, fixed in large letters on the front of their building, and the next morning saw Louis le Grand in its stead. Louis le Grand is the only one of these Paris lycées which managed to live on through the Revolution, notwithstanding the decree suppressing the ancient colleges. The Jesuits had long been expelled, but it had an adroit director at its head; and though straitened by the trials of the time, it was never actually closed.

These seven establishments have a total of 5,968 scholars. Louis le Grand, the largest, has 1,330; Bonaparte has 1,220; Charlemagne 930; Saint Louis 800; Napoléon 688; Stanislas 620; Rollin 380. The lycée of Vanves, a mile or two out of Paris, formed to relieve Louis le Grand of its little boys and to give them country air, has 700 scholars; but without counting Vanves, the seven great schools of Paris contain very nearly 6,000 scholars. The nine English public schools which were the object of a Royal Commission's inquiry, have 3,027 scholars. Only six of the nine have really, in public estimation, the rank of great public schools, the rank which the seven great Paris schools hold; still, let them all be counted in, and yet the public classical schools of Paris alone have nearly twice as many scholars as the public classical schools of all England. Nay, of all Scotland and Ireland besides; for these two countries have no public classical schools of the rank of the great English schools or of the Paris lycées, and Scotch or Irish parents who desire, and can afford, schools of this rank for their children, must send them to the English schools.

I visited all the lycées of Paris, and I believe there is no part of a lycée's organism, from the elementary division up to mathématiques spéciales, which I have not seen at work, and no part of the instruction which I have not heard given. The internal management and the working aspect of all

these institutions are similar, though the exterior of the buildings is often strikingly different. The modern, handsome, and wealthy appearance of the lycée Bonaparte suits its position in the newer and more luxurious quarter of Paris,— the quarter most frequented by visitors,-with the Rue de la Paix, the Grand Hôtel, the Opéra, and the Madeleine for neighbours. On the other side of the Seine, in the old quarter of the schools and the religious, in the neighbourhood of the Sorbonne and Sainte Geneviève, the somewhat dilapidated front of Louis le Grand or Napoléon suits the antiquity and associations of the region. Many of the public school buildings in France, the old school sites and fabrics having been, as I have already said, restored after the Revolution, as far as possible, to their former destination, are in fact very old, and the rebuilding and repairing of the lycées and those sanitary works in connection with them which earlier ages neglected, but which are now thought, and rightly, to be of such great importance, are a cause of constant and heavy expense to the government. In this way the whole front of Saint Louis, which stands on the new continuation, upon the left bank of the Seine, of the Boulevard Sébastopol, has just been re-built, and a very handsome building this lycée now is. You ring at the decorated entrance in the boulevard, and the porter admits you to the open and spacious vestibule, looking on the school's first great court, surrounded by high white walls with uniform tiers of windows, and communicating directly with the parloir, where at all the French public schools a boarder's parents, or those authorised by them, can come and see him between twelve and one, or between half-past four and five. Ascending a staircase, one reaches the cabinet of the censor and that of the provisor. The room of the provisor communicates with the apartment where he is lodged (for the provisor lives at the lycée), and the provisor's lodging at Saint Louis is most enviable. Its occupant when I was there was M. Legrand, but he has since left it to become provisor at Bonaparte, a much easier post, because at Bonaparte there are no boarders. Every one who has had opportunities of observing must have been struck to see how much work

Frenchmen seem able to do, and to do with spirit and energy; the provisor of a great lycée certainly needs to have ability of this sort, with the business and responsibility of a boarding house of some 500 boys pressing upon him. M. Legrand had it to perfection; constantly appealed to, with a rain of letters, messages, meetings, applicants, visitors, perpetually beating upon him, he seemed to suffice to all claims, and to suffice not only industriously but smoothly; but he began his work, he told me, at four in the morning. On several occasions he took me through the different departments of the lycée; the internal economy of such an institution could not be better seen thàn at Saint Louis and with such a cicerone as M. Legrand. The series of large courts for a school of 800 boys, courts generally quiet, but at the breaking up of a lesson or in the short time allotted to recreation noisy enough; spacious and airy, sometimes shaded with trees, but looking, to an ex-schoolboy from any of the great English schools, hopelessly prison-like; on the ground floor round the courts the school-rooms, salles de classe, with their professor, and their 30 or 40 boys seated at desks rising one behind the other; or the work-rooms, salles d'étude, rooms of much the same aspect and dimensions as the salles de classe, but with a maître répétiteur presiding in them instead of a professor, and with the boys learning their lessons instead of saying them; above, the refectories with their show of table napkins and silver cups, and the large dormitories scrupulously neat and clean, at one end the curtained bed of the usher in charge, in the door at the other end a window by which to overlook the room from without, and, near it, ingenious mechanical devices by which the visits of the functionary whose business it is to see, so often in the night, that all is well in each bedroom, are recorded, and the controller is himself controlled; then the dispensary and infirmaries, the service done by sisters of charity, with rooms for all stages of illness and the eternal usher overlooking those invalids who are up and together; the linen stores and clothes-rooms, everything beautifully kept, each boy's things ticketed and numbered with the greatest exactness; the bath-rooms, offices, kitchens, the supplies of bread and wine,