teachers. The superior is in every respect a remarkable man. He was a distinguished pupil of the Ecole Normale; then he became a Jesuit, and, of course, quitted the service of the State; but his experience in the École Normale is no bad thing for his school. The good appearance of the boys struck me here as in the Rue des Postes, and the number of well-known names one heard among the boys was curious, and showed from what class this school is fed. Among the little ones I found a Maronite, and a young American from Mobile who could hardly speak French yet, and was glad, poor child, to be addressed in his own language. The cosmopolitan character of France is well shown by the number of boys from different parts of the world whom one finds getting their education in her schools. At Saint Louis I noticed a boy whose face was evidently that of an Oriental, and found on inquiry that he was the son of a Persian of rank, and had been sent there all the way from Persia.

The instruction at Vaugirard, having the degree of bachelor or the Government Schools in view, cannot but follow, in general, the same line as that of the lycées; the tutoring is the great difference. The house, class-room, and recreation arrangements have also a general similarity with those of the public schools, but the sense of a more agreeable, happier, and milder life than that of the lycée is felt at Vaugirard, and more at Vaugirard than in the Rue des Postes; for Vaugirard, though still Paris, is the very outskirts of Paris, and of the convent quarter of Paris,—a region full of trees and gardens. The Jesuit school is at the extremity of Vaugirard and gets the air of the country. In the Rue des Postes, too, the boys are older, and it is for the little boys that the cast-iron movement of the lycée appears most dismal, and the guidance of the ecclesiastical hand in bringing them up seems most protecting and natural. Something of this ecclesiastical shelter we are used to in the great schools and universities in England; and perhaps it is on this account that in spite of all which is to be said against the Jesuits and their training, I could not help feeling that the Vaugigard school was of all the schools I saw in France the one in which I would soonest have been a schoolboy.

Sorèze, Lacordaire's school, which I have elsewhere* described, was a first-class private school under the Dominicans, as Vaugirard under the Jesuits. The law forbids the title of lycée or college to be taken by any private establishments, but the Minister of Public Instruction can authorise certain old established schools of this kind to keep the name of collége if they have been used to bear it. It is in this way that two out of the seven great classical schools of Paris, Rollin and Stanislas, get the title of college. They, however, though not state establishments, not only follow the same course of teaching as the lycées, but employ professors of the same stamp. Private establishments are bound, as I have already said, to have for their head the holder of the degree of bachelor at least, or else of a certificate of capacity; but for their assistant teachers they may employ whom they will. But they are bound to keep a register with the full name, age, and birthplace of each assistant whom they employ, and to produce it whenever the inspector requires. And the authorities of public instruction have the power,† in a case of misconduct or immorality, to reprimand, suspend, or altogether interdict from teaching, either the head of a private school or any of his assistants, with the right of appeal, when the penalty goes so far as suspension or interdiction, to the Imperial Council in Paris. A teacher interdicted cannot be employed thenceforth in any school public or private. These powers seem extensive; but I am bound to say that all the private teachers whom I asked informed me that they were exercised in a way to cause no complaint; and that neither as to authorising the establishment of a private secondary school in the first place, nor as to inspecting or interfering with it afterwards, was the action of Government in the least degree unfair or vexatious.

The séminaires, where the clergy are educated, are under ecclesiastical management. They are nominally subject to state superintendence; but so far as I could learn this. superintendence comes to nothing, and no inspector ever enters them.

* See A French Eton, or Middle-Class Education and the State. (Macmillan.) + Loi du 15 mars 1850 sur l'Enseignement, art. 67, 68.

Loi du 15 mars 1850, art. 70.

CHAPTER VII.

CHARACTER OF DISCIPLINE AND INSTRUCTION IN THE FRENCH SECONDARY SCHOOLS.

DISCIPLINE IN THE FRENCH SCHOOLS-INSTRUCTION-GREEK LATIN VERSIONS DICTÉES- SCHOOL-BOOKS THE MOTHER-TONGUE — MODERN LANGUAGES - GEOGRAPHY-HISTORY-MATHEMATICS AND THE NATURAL SCIENCES-FOREIGN JUDGMENT OF ENGLISH MATHEMATICAL TEACHING RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION — REALSCHULE INSTRUCTION-RECENT ATTEMPTS TO DEVELOPE IT IN FRANCE-M. DURUY'S ENSEIGNEMENT SECONDAIRE SPÉCIAL.

HE long school-hours and the constant supervision in the French schools are favourable to discipline, and the Frenchman is born with a turn for military precision and exactitude which makes the teacher fall easily into the habit of command, and the pupil into that of obedience. French teachers who have seen our schools are struck with the greater looseness of order and discipline in them, even during class hours; and I have seen large classes in France worked and moved with a perfection of drill that one sometimes finds in the best elementary schools in England, but rarely, I think, in our classical schools. Our government through prepositors or prefects, and our fagging, are unknown in the French schools; for the former, the continual presence and supervision of the maître d'étude leaves no place; the latter is abhorrent to French ideas. The set of modern opinion is undoubtedly against fagging, and perhaps also against government through the sixth form; one may doubt, however, whether the force of old and cherished custom, the removal of excess and abuses in the exercise of these two powers, and certain undeniable benefits attending that of, at any rate, the latter of the two, may not yet long preserve them in the great English schools. The same can hardly be said of flogging, which, without entering into long discussions about it, one

may say the modern spirit has irrevocably condemned as a school punishment, so that it will more and more come to appear half disgusting, half ridiculous, and a teacher will find it more and more difficult to inflict it without a loss of self-respect. The feeling on the Continent is very strong on this point. The punishments in the French schools are impositions and confinement; at Vanves I saw a kind of punishmentparade, the culprits being marched round and round a court. The employment of punishments, however, is certainly less than with us, and here, too, the great number of school hours saves the French schoolmaster from a difficulty. It is a part of the censor's business to collect, and to give at the end of every week to the provisor, a report from the usher on the behaviour, and from the professor on the progress, of each boy in the school; at the end of every quarter the provisor forwards the summary of these reports to the parents.

Comparing the instruction with that of our own great classical schools, one is at once struck by the fact that the French schools carry Greek by no means so far as we do. Their Greek composition is next to nothing; there is no Greek verse, and even the Greek exercise has lately been abolished in troisième and seconde, on the ground that it was the merest grammatical exercise, not carried far enough to give the pupil the least power of really writing Greek, and that an exercise of this sort was out of place after troisième began. Different lycées have a special reputation for different branches of instruction; thus Saint Louis is famous for mathematics, Louis-le-Grand for the humanities generally, Charlemagne for Greek. But even at Charlemagne the upper boys, whom I heard at lesson under a distinguished professor, M. Boissier, had certainly nothing like the mastery of Greek of the upper boys in our best public schools; one might almost say that in the iambics of Sophocles they could get along pretty well, but that any chorus was decidedly too much for them. The Greek lessons are much fewer in number than with us. The grounding seemed to me good enough. The little boys in sixième whom I heard at Bonaparte saying their Greek grammar left nothing to be desired.

In Latin the French schools seem to me quite equal with

G

ours; perhaps it is from the affinity of the language with their own, but they seem, if there is a difference between our best schools and theirs, to be more at home with Latin, and to take to it more kindly than we do. They do not, however, get through nearly so much of the Latin authors, but their Latin composition, prose and verse, is very good. From the specimens I saw I should say they had a Ciceronian and Virgilian tradition just like some of our famous schools, and produced work very much the same as the best of them. In this respect both we and they, I think, beat Germany, though a German boy has a fuller command of a Latin of a certain kind than either our boys or the French.

Both in Latin and Greek the quantity of writing work done by the French boys strikes an Englishman with astonishment; the professors seem to be extraordinarily fond of versions dictées, as they are called; a passage from a classic is dictated, the boy takes it away with him, translates it out of class hours, and a good deal of time in a subsequent class hour is given to the revision of this translation of his. A day boy sometimes makes strange work of the passage dictated, and then, as he has not the étude to do his translation in, gets no opportunity of setting himself straight, and is altogether bewildered. I cannot but think that the French might with advantage write a good deal less, and adopt our plan of making the boys learn and say their lesson out of a book a good deal more. In our elementary schools I have often regretted that the master teaches the lessons so much, instead of making the boys, as in our classical schools, learn it beforehand; the French professors proceed more like our elementary teachers in this respect, and then, when the master teaches the lesson, of course there has to be a great deal of going over it again afterwards, in the étude or the conférence. The lycées have much more of this than our schools, and I am inclined to prefer, at least for teaching classics, our plan, which makes the boy depend more on himself, and, above all, takes him through a great deal more of an author.

The French use books of selections a great deal, and I believe Rugby was rather an exception to the common rule of the English public schools in using them in the higher forms