words will follow but too fast." People who pretend to have great thoughts which they cannot express are deceiving themselves; they are not labouring to bring forth, but merely "licking the formless embryo" of their minds. If a man has any clear conceptions, he will express them well enough, though ignorant of "ablative, conjunctive, substantive, and grammar." "When things are once formed in the fancy, words offer themselves in muster." "Ipsae res verba rapiunt," says Cicero. "The fine flourishes of rhetoric serve only to amuse the vulgar, who are incapable of more solid and nutritive diet." The attack on mere rhetoric in the sense of the technique of style is keen and incisive, and has not a little truth in it. "Words are to serve and to follow a man's purpose." He quotes Plato as approving of fecundity of conception rather than of fertility of speech, and Zeno as dividing his pupils into two classes, the philologi, who loved things and reasonings, and logophili, who cared for nothing but words. "I am scandalized," he says, "that our whole life should be spent in nothing else."

What would he have, then, in addition to the usual elements of all education, and the teaching of philosophy and of virtue? He would have a man learn thoroughly his own language first, and then that of his neighbour, regarding Greek and Latin as ornamental merely. Little, however, did Montaigne think that instruction, even in our own language, could degenerate into what it has become in these latter days—verbalism of a kind much more offensive than any to be found in classical teaching. He could not foresee detailed analysis of sentences, and the dreary pedantry of the school grammars of our native tongue. Paedagogic ingenuity had not yet invented such arid substitutes for the substance and living form of our motherspeech―arch-enemies of true humanistic culture-the logical babblement of the primary school. Truly teachers have an "infinite capacity for sinking."

Vernacular and modern languages once secured, Montaigne

would thereafter limit the course of study "to those things only where a true and real utility and advantage are to be expected and found. To teach a boy astronomy, for example, instead of what will make him wise and good, is absurd. After you have done this last, the pupil may be admitted to the elements of geometry, rhetoric, logic, and physics; and then the science which his judgment most affects he will generally make his own." But we must above all teach him "what it is to know and what to be ignorant, what valour is, and temperance and justice; the difference between ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and liberty; in brief, season his understanding with that which regulates his manners and his sense, that which teaches him to know himself, and how both well to die and well to live. Over and above this, let us make a selection of those subjects which directly and professedly serve for the instruction and use of life." But the direct instruction of the master is not all. "Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are otherwise of ourselves so stupid as to have our sight limited to the end of our own noses. One asking Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer 'of Athens,' but 'of the world.'" We must learn to measure ourselves aright: "whosoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image of our mother Nature portrayed in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in her face shall read her so universal and constant variety, whoever shall observe himself, and not only himself but a whole kingdom, no bigger than the least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison with the whole, that man alone is able to value things according to their true estimate and grandeur." The great world is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do. History naturally suggests itself in this connexion as a leading subject of study, for "thereby we converse with those great and heroic souls of former and better ages ❞—an empty and an idle study as commonly conducted, but of "inestimable

fruit and value" when prosecuted with care and observation. The object of history-teaching in the school is not facts, but the appreciation of historical characters.

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Meanwhile the body is not to be forgotten, for, not to speak of the moral instruction which may be conveyed in connexion with leaping, riding, wrestling etc., we have to form the youth's outward fashion and mien at the same time as his mind: for "tis not a soul, 'tis not a body we are training only, but a man, and we ought not to divide him." And, as Plato says, we are not to fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two horses harnessed to a coach." "It is not enough to fortify the soul: you are also to make the sinews strong, for the soul will be oppressed if not assisted by the bodily members, and would have too hard a task to discharge two offices at once." Effeminacy in food or clothes or habits is also to be eschewed.

So much for the end of education according to Montaigne, and the materials of instruction whereby that end is to be attained. Montaigne's public school, if he had to construct one in these days, would certainly be somewhat after the fashion of a German Real school, as regards its external organization, and, so far, he is rightly named a realist. But the leading purpose of all his instruction would essentially be ethical and humanistic. The only respect in which his curriculum would be realistic in the utilitarian meaning would be in the subordinate place assigned to Latin and Greek. So far is he from being a Realist in the modern sense, that he may be rather set down as an enemy of mere knowledge or information. "The cares and expense our parents are at in our education, point at nothing save to fill our heads with knowledge,” he says, “but not a word of judgment or virtue. We toil and labour to stuff the memory, and in the mean time leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished—void.”

It has to be noted that Montaigne, and after him Milton and Locke, think only of the education of the few and not of

the many-of the sons of gentlemen only: but we may remark that, while the extent to which school instruction is carried depends for the most part on the social position of the parent, the principles which regulate a prolonged education are equally operative in the briefest, if they are worth anything at all as principles.

Of equal importance with end and means is Method. On this Montaigne has less to say, but what he says contains probably the germs of the most important principles of all method.

"Tis the custom of schoolmasters to be eternally thundering in their pupils' ears as if they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the pupil is simply to repeat what the teacher has before said. I would have a tutor correct this error, and at the very first he should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste and relish things and of himself to choose and discern them, sometimes opening the way to him and sometimes making him break the ice himself; that is to say, I would not have him alone to invent and speak, but also hear his pupil invent and speak in his turn. Socrates, and since him Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak and then they spoke to them. The authority of those who teach is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn. It is good to make the pupil, like a young horse, trot before the master, that he may judge of his going and how much he, the master, is to abate of his own speed to accommodate himself to the vigour and capacity of his pupil. For want of this due proportion we spoil all: to know how to adjust this and to keep within an exact and due measure is one of the hardest things I know; and it is an effect of a judicious and well-tempered soul to know how to condescend to the boy's puerile movements and to govern and direct them. Those who, according to our common way of teaching, undertake with one and the same

lesson and the same measure of direction to instruct several boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken in their method; and at this rate it is no wonder if, in a multitude of scholars, there are not found above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and discipline." Here we have the foreshadowing of the organization of instruction and the classification of pupils. The importance of

examination as a part of good method is also insisted on. "Let the master," he says, "not only examine him about the grammatical construction of the bare words of the lesson, but about the sense and meaning of them, and let him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory, but of his understanding. Let him make the pupil put what he hath learned into a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to many subjects to see if he yet rightly comprehend it and have made it his own, taking instruction in his progress from the 'Institutions of Plato."" ""Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion," he says, "to vomit up what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed down, and the stomach has not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it to concoct.' "What is the good of having the stomach full of meat if it do not nourish us?" Here we have what used to be called the "Intellectual method" anticipated, the importance of assimilation enforced, and the distinguishing characteristic of cram well exposed. Montaigne, further, in opposition to theories of education still current, advises that the pupil be made to sift and examine for himself, and to accept nothing on mere authority. "We can say, Cicero says thus: that these were the manners of Plato: that these, again, are the very words of Aristotle: but what do we say ourselves that is our own? What do we do? What do

we judge? A parrot would say as much."

So much for the method of intellectual instruction. The method of moral teaching is summed up in the words that it should "insensibly insinuate" itself in so far as it is direct, as