other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and conventional
boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice, reasonable,
sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to nothing,
without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly despising
them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess that
there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these
were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as
providing a classical education, the system was effective, though
cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were
well enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them,
and intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to
develop themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result
certainly was that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.

The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful
industry among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen
and chilled, partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by
antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys,
everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not
on the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were
all to enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming
professors. Instead of simply reading away at interesting and
beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity
of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make
the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no
vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting
children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton
and Carlyle.