WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE.

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE was born in Liverpool Dec. 29, 1809, educated at Eton, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated in 1829, taking a double class in 1831. After traveling on the continent, he was returned to Parliament in 1832, and was in 1834 made a junior Lord of the Treasury, and in 1835 under Secretary for Colonial Affairs, by Sir Robert Peel. In the same year he retired from office with his leader, and returned with him in 1841 as Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and Master of the Mint. In this capacity he gave the explanation required of the commercial policy of the government and of the revived tariff in 1842. In 1843 he was made President of the Board of Trade, and in 1846, succeeded Lord Stanley as Secretary of State for the Colonies. In the following year he resigned, and in a few months he was elected member of the House for the University of Oxford, and in 1852 became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1855 he was in Parliament but out of office, until 1859, when he resumed office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, assisted in negotiating the commercial treaty with France, and aided the Oxford University Commissioners. He was rejected as member from Oxford in 1865, but was immediately returned for South Lancashire, and after the death of Lord Palmerston became leader in the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Russell's administration. In 1866 he brought in a Reform Bill, and again in 1868, when he was successful. As Premier after 1868 he signalized his ministry by disestablishing the Irish Church, and inaugurating a new system of land tenure in Ireland.

Mr. Gladstone has kept up his classical studies, for which he was eminent at Eton and Oxford, and published an elaborate work on Homer. He maintains the classical side of the question of a modern curriculum for secondary and superior schools.

Classical Training, the Basis of a Liberal Education.

The relation of pure science, natural science, modern languages, modern history, and the rest, to the old classical training, ought to be founded on a principle, and that these competing branches of instruction ought not to be treated simply as importunate creditors that take one shilling in the pound to-day because they hope to get another shilling to-morrow, and in the meantime have a recognition of their title. This recognition of title is just what I would refuse; deny their right to a parallel or equal position; their true position is ancillary; and as ancillary it ought to be limited and restrained without scruple as much as a regard to the paramount matter of education may dictate. But why, after all, is the classical training paramount? Is it because we find it established?

because it improves memory, or taste, or gives precision, or develops the faculty of speech? All these are but partial and fragmentary statements, so many narrow glimpses of a great and comprehensive truth. That truth I take to be, that the modern European civilization from the middle age downwards is the compound of two great factors, the Christian religion for the spirit of man, and the Greek (and in a secondary degree the Roman) discipline for his mind and intellect. St. Paul is the Apostle of the Gentiles, and is in his own person a symbol of this great wedding. The place, for example, of Aristotle and Plato in Christian education is not arbitrary, nor in principle mutable. The materials of what we call classical training were prepared, and we have a right to say were advisedly and providentially prepared, in order that it might become, not a mere adjunct, but (in mathematical phrase) the complement of Christianity in its application to the culture of the human being, as a being formed both for this world and the world to come.

If this principle be true, it is broad, and high, and clear enough; and it sup plies a key to all questions connected with the relation between the classical training of our youth, and all other branches of their secular education. It must of course be kept within its proper place, and duly limited as to things and persons. It can only apply in full to that small proportion of the youth of any country who are to become in the fullest sense educated. It involves no extravagant or inconvenient assumptions concerning those who are to be educated for trades and professions, in which the necessities of specific training must more or less limit general culture. It leaves open every question turning upon individual aptitudes and inaptitudes; and by no means requires that boys without a capacity for imbibing any of the spirit of classical culture are still to be mechanically plied with the instruments of it after their unfitness in the particular subject matter has become manifest. But it lays down the rule of education for those who have no internal and no external disqualification; and that rule becoming a fixed and central point in the system, becomes also the point around which all others may be grouped.

CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP.

DR. DONALDSON, in an Essay on Liberal Education in 1856, entitled Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning, considered with especial reference to Competitive Tests and University Teaching, takes strong ground in favor of maintaining the supremacy of classical studies in the public schools and universities, to the still further subordination of mathematical study, and to the assignment of instruction in the natural sciences to special schools.

If we confine ourselves to the province of the intellect, Education is properly a cultivation and development of those faculties, which all men have in common, though not all in the same degree of activity. Information, when it is nothing more, merely denotes an accumulation of stray particulars by means of the memory. On the other hand, Knowledge is information appropriated and thoroughly matured. We speak of knowledge of the world, knowledge of our profession or business, knowledge of ourselves, knowledge of our duties-all of which employ a completeness and maturity of habit and experience. And when knowledge extends to a methodical comprehension of general laws and principles, it is called Science. It is the natural and proper tendency of information to ripen into knowledge, just as knowledge itself is not complete until it is systematized into science. And as intellectual education necessarily presumes a certain increase in the information or acquired knowledge of the person under training, it is clear that, while the main object of education, namely, the gradual development of the faculties, should never be neglected, the information conveyed and the method of imparting it should be such as to lay the foundation and pave the way, for the superstructure of knowledge and science, in the case of those persons whose capacity and tastes render such an enlargement of the future field of study either probable or desirable. From this it follows, that the great object of education is utterly ignored by those teachers, who, when the mind is unformed and undisciplined, force upon the memory a crowd of unconnected and unprolific recollections, which can neither be digested nor retained, and which, if retained, produce no results on the healthy action of the understanding.

Even in cases, when this process is postponed beyond the period of earliest boyhood, even when it is adopted after a certain course of real mental discipline, its effects are prejudicial to the ripening mind, and unfavorable to the confirmation of those accurate habits without which information seldom settles into knowledge or rises into science. And it is always desirable that the process of liberal education should be carried on as long as possible, and that the acquirement of special knowledge, whether tending to science or applicable immediately to professional practice, should be postponed until the youth has accomplished more than half of the third septennium of his life. That periods of seven years constitute a real element in the life of man is acknowledged by the tacit consent or familiar language of all nations. At any rate, our own experiences teaches us that at seven years old the child passes into the boy, by a change of dentition; that at 14, the age of puberty is attained; at 21 the age of manhood; at 42 the age of maturity; and at 63—the grand climacteric as it is calied-the period of senility. Such a subdivision presumes that while growth of body is completed at 20, strength of body must be reached, if at all, at 30, and strength of mind, when we have well passed 35, which Dante calls

JOHN WILLIAM DONALDSON, D. D., was born in London, June 10, 1811-was educnted first at the University of London, then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he stood second in the first class of the Mathematical Tripos, in 1834, and the year following was elected follow. His first publication, The Theater of the Greeks, was issued in 1836, which was followed by New Cratylus in 1839, of which a new and enlarged edition was issued in 1859, and which, with his Varronicanus issued in 1844, ranked him with the great scholars of Germany. In 1850 he married the daughter of Sir Thomas Mortlock, and became head master of Bury St. Mary Grammar School. His edition of Antigone of Sophocles, of the Book of Jashar, of the Odes of Pindar, his Greek and Latin School, Grammars and Greek Lexicon, all show fine and accurate scholarship. He died February 10, 1861.

'the midway of our life.' And taking this view of the matter we might maintain with great confidence, that the education of the reasoning powers can not really terminate before the body has attained to maturity; that no man can be set free from the duty of forming and invigorating his mind before the period at which he reaches a full development of his material growth; that while his frame is still unformed his understanding can not have reached its completion, and that his intellect can not be perfect as an instrument of thought until nature has set the stamp of manly beauty on the young man's brow.

This necessity for a commensurate progress in mental and bodily growth, this presumption that accomplishment of the mind and beauty of person are attained at the same period, namely, when the boy has grown into a man, is involved in the language of that nation which understood better than any other wherein beauty consists, and by what means the graces and refinements of body and mind can best be imparted and secured. The Greeks had only one word to express personal beauty and mental accomplishment. The adjective kaλós, in its primary sense, furnished with outward adornments' in general; that of which the outward form or the outward effects are pleasing and grateful. 'But,' as I have said elsewhere (New Cratylus, § 324), 'to the Greek idea of raλos something beyond mere outward garnishing of the person was required; it was not a languishing beauty, a listless though correct set of features, an enervated voluptuousness of figure, to which the homage of their admiration was paid. It was the grace and activity of motion, which the practice of gymnastic exercises was calculated to promote the free step, the erect mien, the healthy glow, combined with the elegances of conversation and the possession of musical accomplishments; it was in fact the result of an union of the μovin and yvμraorikh of which their education was made up.' The name, which the Greeks gave to the process of making the mind and body both elegant or handsome or clever, implied that the business was not complete till a fullness of stature and a maturity of understanding had been attained. They called it raidcía, or boy-training,' and the word also noted the period of life during which this bringing up or education was to be carried on.

With the Greeks, then, I believe that a liberal or general education—that which the Romans called humanitas, because the pursuit and discipline of science is given to man only of all the animals-ought to be carried on as long as the mind and body are still immature, that is, nearly till the twentieth year if possible; and while I believe with Plato that the boy-training, which alone is worthy of the name, is that which is pursued for its own sake without reference to extrinsic objects (Legg. 1. p. 643 B), I think also that we import into the legitimate province of the teacher that which does not belong to it, when we crowd a mass of multifarious acquirements into the period allotted to the growth and improvement of our reasoning powers and our physical energies. The true object of a liberal education is thus described by Döderlin:

Even at the present day, one hear voices which tell us that the school forms a more appropriate preparation for the business of life when it encourages such employments as are most subservient to this, and most connected with it. For example, the medical man will be best trained by the earliest possible study of the physical sciences. But reason has prophesied, and experience has fulfilled the prediction, that this sort of education (the infallibility of which has always found the quickest acceptance with the most narrowminded, and which appears to the most superficial the only road to an adequate training) is calculated only to debase every one of the more intellectual occupations to the rank of a better sort of trade. Accordingly, all public schools, unless they mistake their destination, hold this as an unassailable principle: that although a classical education presumes that all its pupils are designed for some intellectual employment, it does not trouble itself to inquire what particular sort of employment this is to be. The future physician and lawyer, as well as the future clergyman and teacher, essentially different as their contemplated employments may be, are trained precisely in the same manner, having regard only to that which they have in common, namely, that their ulterior occupation, whatever it may be, will demand the most practiced exercise of the intellectual faculties.

It is the primary object of the education of classical schools to impart to

the mind of every pupil a capacity for learning that business of which the Universities and other higher institutions profess to convey the definite teaching. The schoolmaster, therefore, is not deterred by the thought, that so much of the learning which he has, with great pains and infinite labor, conveyed to his scholars, and which they have acquired with no little exertion of their own, has been learned by many of them only to be forgotten sooner or later. As the sculptor, when he has finished his statue, does not hesitate to break up the model (the most troublesome part of his work), so the grown-up man does not forget or lay aside, what he was taught at school, until he has derived the full advantage from these studies. He may fail to recognize their unseen fruits, but he can not eradicate them: for his lessons have strengthened his mind in learning and thinking, just as his exercise in the playground braced and invigorated his body.'—Reden und Aufsätze.

And Frederic Jacobs has protested in language equally forcible. ▾

'It has been repeatedly said, that it is of less consequence in youth what a man learns, than how he learns it, and that the saying of Hesiod, The half is often better than the whole,' admits of an application here. The heaping up of knowledge for the sake of knowledge brings no blessing; and all education, in which vanity bears the sceptre, misses its object. The young are not called upon to learn all that may by possibility be useful at some future period; for if so, as Aristotle facetiously remarks, we should have to descend to learning cookery; but only such particulars as excite a general activity of mind, sharpen the understanding, enliven the imagination, and produce a beneficial effect on the heart. Not only on grounds of science, but also, and especially, on moral grounds, it is more important to be master of one subject than to be su perficially acquainted with many. Knowledge strengthens; superficial acquaintance with many branches of knowledge puffs up and produces a pedantic arrogance; and this is perhaps the most unhappy endowment which a youth can carry with him from school into the world. It is hated because it is illiberal. Illiberality, however, with regard to knowledge, always prevails in those who know neither its root nor its summit.'

To attempt to support by arguments a view of liberal education, which has been held by enlightened men from the days of Plato and Aristotle down to our time, would be only to waste words. And I shall consider myself entitled to start from the postulates, that, wherever it is possible, that is, in all cases which fall within the scope of University teaching, the discipline of the mind should be carried on to the end of the period of adolescence; that this discipline should be general and not professional; and that it should not consist in sciolism or a smattering of miscellaneous acquirements.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN SCHOLARSHIP COMPARED.

HAVING introduced into the exposition of the present drift of English opinion, on the relative value of studies in the curriculum for a modern liberal education-much that is relatively disparaging to English scholarship, we cite the following passages from an elaborate defense of English Classical Training by Dr. Donaldson. In order, however, that I may confute the educational objectors on their own ground, and meet the invidious comparison with the Scholarship of Germany, to which they provoke us, I must inquire into the system of classical education pursued in that country, and I must examine the means which they possess of producing scholars, and the causes which create so large a number of writers on learned subjects. In such an inquiry it would not be fair to take as our text-books the biographical sketches of two scholars recently deceased-Godfrey Hermann, of Leipsig, the greatest Greek scholar among the modern Germans, who died on the last day of 1848, and Charles Lachmann, of Berlin, their greatest Latin scholar and general philologer, who died soon after, though at a much earlier age, on March 13, 1849. By selecting these two specimens of German scholarship we should indeed adduce the most favorable instances which could be found, but we should not exemplify the general character of the German philologer. For, in their activity of mind and body, Hermann and Lachmann came nearer to Englishmen than 99 out of 100 Germans; and both