In the matter of discipline there was no shadow of choice anywhere. Capricious cruelty ruled under every scholastic roof. On the one side, we encounter Dean Colet, of St. Paul’s, whom Erasmus reported as “delighting in children in a Christian spirit;” which meant that he never wearied of seeing them suffer, believing that the more they endured as boys, the more worthy they would grow in manhood. On the other, we are confronted by the still more awful ghost of Dr. Keate, who could and did flog eighty boys in succession without a pause; and who, being given the confirmation list by mistake for the punishment list, insisted on flogging every one of the catechumens, as a good preparation for receiving the sacrament. Sir Francis Doyle, almost the only apologist who has so far ventured to appear in behalf of this fiery little despot, once remarked to Lord Blachford that Keate did not much mind a boy’s lying to him. “What he hated was a monotony of excuses.” “Mind your lying to him!” retorted Lord Blachford, with a keen recollection of his own juvenile experiences; “why he exacted it as a token of respect.” If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we seek those rare cases in which a home education was substituted, we are generally rewarded by finding the comforts greater and the cramming worse. It is simply impossible for a pedagogue to try and wring from a hundred brains the excess of work which may, under clever treatment, be extracted from one; and so the Eton boys, with all their manifold miseries, were at least spared the peculiar experiments which were too often tried upon solitary scholars. Nowadays anxious parents and guardians seem to labor under an ill-founded apprehension that their children are going to hurt themselves by over-application to their books, and we hear a great deal about the expedience of restraining this inordinate zeal. But a few generations back such comfortable theories had yet to be evolved, and the plain duty of a teacher was to goad the student on to every effort in his power.