but passes, ad libitum, from the one to the other. When one of them makes a mistake, the master strikes the table with his ferula; and the boy is obliged to pronounce the syllable ' over again, until he is perfect. It is now thirty years since I saw, with great pleasure, this method put in practice at Orléans; where it was introduced by the care and attention of Mr Garot. The school which I visited contained 100 pupils; ⚫ and the business was conducted with the greatest order and 'silence.' The Chanoine Cherrier, in a book published in 1755, describes a similar method; and such was that practised by the frères des écoles Chrétiennes. Very large tablets, on which were traced letters of such dimensions as to be visible to the whole school, were suspended at the extremity of the room, as the common book from which every scholar studied, and repeated the lesson to be learned. In the year 1747, Mons. Herbault, director of a school in the Hospice de la Pitié, in Paris, and which contained 300 poor children, having but one assistant, employed the best informed of the elder boys, to instruct the inferior classes. But Mr Herbault died; and with him fell this useful method of tuition.

About the year 1780, the Chevalier Pawlet, an officer once in the French service, but descended from a British family, if not himself a Briton, in going through the wood of Vincennes, was attracted by the screams of a child, toward a hole where it lay in the most miserable condition. Mons. Pawlet took it home with him, and resolved to take care of it. In a few weeks, the child informed his benefactor that he had three little friends, almost as wretched as himself; and requested that they might be permitted to partake of his good fortune. The Chevalier consented; and the noise of his generosity having spread abroad among the children of the neighbourhood, he soon found himself surrounded by 200, whom he formed the project of educating. To this end, he divided them into classes, with each a captain at its head, and a general staff to superintend the whole. He excluded all corporal punishments. The principal correction he inflicted was condemning them to remain idle; and this awful sentence was graduated into what he termed petite oisiveté, and grande oisivete. The children taught each other. All the domestic concerns of his large family were attended to by each, in rotation. Rewards and punishments were distributed, upon mature investigation and deliberation, by a jury of schoolfellows. Regular records were kept of every occurrence, by the Chevalier himself; and the noble adage of his heart was, If they cannot all be great men, they may all be good men.

It

does not, however, appear that this method of instruction became known far beyond the limits of the little circle in which it was practised. Mons. Pawlet lived in retirement; and his institution was not of a nature to force itself into public notice in France. It did not, however, remain altogether unknown. It did find one supporter-one benefactor; and the situation in which this benefactor stood in the world, sufficiently proves that he could not be the only one acquainted with it. The only person from whom he received assistance the only man who valued the undertaking, and supported it, was he of whom the French have often said, that he was the most virtuous man in his kingdom-Louis XVI. May not this trait entitle us to add, that he was the most enlightened and the most benevolent? His annual contribution amounted to no less than 32,000 francs, or 1,333. Sterling.

Every one of these methods, the best of which is the last, contains something of the modes applied by Bell and Lancaster; and it is certain, that whoever had studied the whole, might easily have combined a system more perfect than any of them separately. We are confident, however, that neither of our countrymen knew any thing about them. The merit, indeed, of any discovery or invention in all, or any of the modes, is very trifling. The praise which is due to them is of a higher order. It belongs to the heart, rather than the hand; and the heart which has earned it, cannot prevaricate. Messrs Bell and Lancaster never could urge a claim to the invention of a method whose merit lies all in charity, if it was not theirs.

A proverb of which no nation makes such frequent application as the French, and which, as history relates, was the favourite maxim of the most inventive and academic of dressmakers, Mademoiselle Bertin, is, Il n'y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié;' and we think the history of these didactic inventions affords a striking proof of its justice. Whether the great legislator of Sparta was the first discoverer of this method, it may not be easy to determine; but certain it is, if faith can be placed in his biographer Plutarch, that Lycurgus had prescribed some of the principles now in use, to the children of Sparta. He ordered that all those of the age of seven years, should be collected in one place, and subjected to the same discipline. He divided them into classes, at the head of which he placed the bravest and the most expert of their number; whose orders and example the least learned were bound to follow, and, by whose decree, rewards and punishments were distributed. In the Instit. Orat. lib. 1. cap. 2. of Quintilian, is

this phrase, which seems to speak of mutual instruction as a fixed and settled practice. Sicut firmiores in litteris profec"-tus alit æmulatio; ita, incipientibus, atque adhuc teneris, condiscipulorum quam preceptoris jucundior, hoc ipso quod facilior, imitatio. est. When Pietro della Valle was travelling in India, in the year 1623, he saw at the gate of a temple a number of children studying arithmetic, in a way which appeared to him remarkable. Four of them were learning the same lesson, which one of them pronounced aloud to the others, at the same time that he wrote it with his finger, on a stratum of sand that was spread upon the place round which they sat. When one of them had performed his part, another took his turn; and, as soon as all the sand was written upon, the traces were effaced, and the operation recommenced; and all this was performed without a master, or even a fixed superintendant. The practice of writing on sand is also mentioned by Erasmus. Et nunc sunt qui in tabellis pulvere oblitis stilo æreo argenteove scribunt. From these, and other documents now before us, it is evident that every method adopted in the new schools, had been known and practised, long before the existence of any of the modern claimants to the merit of invention.

Now, every authority and passage here quoted to show the antiquity of the method, we have extracted from some one or other of about a dozen French pamphlets, upon the subject in question; yet, strange to say! there is hardly one of them which does not assert that it is altogether of French origin; and that the true sources from which it is derived, are, according to some, the Freres ignorantins; and, according to others, the Chevalier Pawlet.

We certainly cannot just admit this;-and yet we are very much disposed to believe, that both the English and the French have really invented all that they pretend to; and, after all, there is no great effort of genius. But, in France, the method of the Chevalier Pawlet never passed the threshold of his own schoolroom; and found but one patron, in the Monarch-with whose bounty it was soon forgotten;-while in England, the methods of Bell and Lancaster forced themselves at once into public notice; and spread, with the rapidity of an explosion, over the whole kingdom. Every man who reflected, became the patron of the one or of the other; and support, to an immense amount, poured in from every quarter. Looking mere ly to the matter of money, let us but consider the twenty guineas which was the produce of the first French subscription; the twenty francs paid annually by each member of the Society for the Amelioration of Elementary Instruction; and all the

VOL. XXXIII. NO. 66.

K k

sums which have been expended or collected, for this purpose, in that kingdom; and ask, whether, when compared with those which have been raised in Britain, they bear any relacion to the respective wealth of the two countries? Let us recollect the debts which Mr Lancaster, while labouring in obscurity, and struggling with ruin, had contracted-the 6449. sterling paid by five or six individuals, most of whom belonged to a class which in France is considered as little more than a mere expletive in society: the 8000l. subscribed, in one instance, and the 30,000l. in another: the contributions levied all over the kingdom, at the lectures delivered by Mr Lancaster, to explain and diffuse his system: the constant and voluntary support these schools have received from persons of every rank, from the Monarch and his sons, down to the humblest individual? If no proportion does exist between the riches of both nations, and the sums expended in both in support of these schools-as in fact there does not-to what must be attributed the more than ten times tenfold largesses of this nation, but to a stronger conviction of the advantages of educating the poor? and what sentiment could urge men thus to part with their property for such an object but true patriotism and humanity?

The following observations will put this in a still stronger light. The average price of provisions throughout England may be computed as double of what it is in France. Yet the average expense of educating each child by the new method, in the former country, is estimated at about five or six shillings; in the latter at 7s. 6d. or 10s.; that is to say, the expense in France is 10, when it should be 3: consequently there are seven-tenths in favour of England. But the economy of the method is in proportion to the number of pupils collected into one school; as one master, one building, one set of instruments, &c. can serve for all, when not exceeding one thousand scholars. The total number of schools in France, is said, by Mr Jomard, to be 1000; and the places to be 123,000; of which only ds, or 80,000, are occupied. The actual average for each school in France is then eighty scholars. Now, let us suppose the expense of each pu pil in any given school-as it nearly is-inversely as to the number of pupils in that school, we shall have, for the average number of pupils in each school in England, According to the late Reports made to the National and to the British and Foreign Societies, the sum total of schools in Britain upon the new methods, amounted to near 1800; and at that number we may now fairly reckon them. Hence 478,800,

80 × 10

3

=266.

or about half a million of persons, are now educating by these methods in Britain-or six times as many as in France. But the Population of these Islands being to that of France nearly as two to three, it follows, that the proportion of British population actually undergoing this process of instruction, is nine times as great as that of the French. What a grand result would the formula which we hazarded upon a former occasion as the expression of civilization-the quantity of good and useful things diffused through society, multiplied by their quality, and divided by their price-present if applied to the subject now under consideration: to that which is the cause of every other advantage-INSTRUCTION! It is true, that the adoption of the mode is more recent among the French; but then we had spared them the dilatory labour of the first application.

With the authorities of Plutarch, of Quintilian, of Erasmus, and the example of India before their eyes, it would have been but justice in the French to place all modern claimants upon the same footing as to invention. But no; the French have invented, and the English have not! The fact certainly is otherwise; but it is not worth disputing about;-the merit which truly belongs to this country being, not that one or two Englishmen had perceived a more advantageous method of communicating instruction to those classes of society, which usually remain uneducated; but that, no sooner was the efficacy of this me thod ascertained by experience, than it was universally approv ed of, and adopted, with as little opposition as any innovation which promised such extensive and important consequences, ever had experienced. It is infinitely creditable to England, that the expediency of spreading knowledge among all classes, was questioned but by an imponderable portion of the community; and that their arguments had no effect upon the remainder. It is no less creditable, that we had made every effort to communicate what we had adopted to every nation of the globe; for a narrow-minded interest would have suggested that, as know.. ledge is power, so we should keep all knowledge to ourselves.

One of the authors before us, indeed, affirms, that the other nations of Europe have been taught the methods of mutual instruction chiefly by France.

Without any blind prejudice,' says he, I cannot but reflect upon the rapidity with which the method has spread from France, all over the Continent; while, though it had been practised in England 15 years, it remained circumscribed there; at least in as far as Europe is concerned. Is it not because society is more intimate, and that there is a continual interchange of facts and of reflections; because one person spreads about, in ten different places, what he has