It is by no means so easy to inspect a school, or to find out the knowledge and the modes of thinking of young people, as might be supposed. It is not to be done by any one stalking stiffly into a school-room, giving himself the airs of a Dr Busby, and putting questions with the consequence of an examiner in the schools at Oxford. The very idea of a stranger being in the room, and much more of one authorised to examine, is enough to dislocate the thoughts of children, older and riper than village boys and girls commonly are; and the mere interruption of the usual formalities of class arrangement and class work is sufficient to break up the discipline which, in all parochial schools at least, rests upon a very precarious and doubtful basis. Much less is it possible, by a flying visit of one, or two, or three hours, to get at a true perception of what the average knowledge of children may be fairly rated at: it is only by repeated and patient inspection that the ordinary amount of work done, and knowledge gained, can be discovered. The young mind, too, does not commonly retain facts--it rather receives general impressions, and, though this is not produceable knowledge, it is, nevertheless, information, and cultivation of the mental powers, and formation of the character, not without great value. But because a child cannot answer certain questions at a certain time and place, it does not therefore follow that it is ignorant of the subject. The thoughts cannot be concentrated, the powers of the memory and of expression have not been sufficiently cultivated; the faculty of reproduction, and the method of arrangement and classification of ideas, do not exist. It is impossible for such a child to pass through the ordeal. And yet the common expression of young people, when the question they could not answer is explained for them--"Oh yes! I knew that--only I could not remember it," tells the whole truth, and reveals at once the constitution and the weakness of their minds. Examinations, unless they immediately follow the subject learnt, are not suited to young children, and may tend to give a false idea of their real acquirements. But, if to this dread of answering questions be added the awe arising from an examiner's--a strange examiner's presence, the physical impossibility of obtaining satisfactory replies is thereby confirmed. We remember it in our own case at school; in the presence of the university examiner, who periodically visited us, it was "Obstupui, steteruntque comæ; vox faucibus hæsit;" and even in the schools of adolescent life, the examiners put us many a stiff question in Plato and Aristotle at which we hung our heads and stammered out nonsense; but which, as soon as we got back to our rooms in college, came to our memory in provoking vividness.