‘It was a school,’ again to quote Miss Beale’s own account of her education, ‘considered much above the average for sound instruction; our mistresses were women who had read and thought; they had taken pains to arrange various schemes of knowledge; yet what miserable teaching we had in many subjects; history was learned by committing to memory little manuals; rules of arithmetic were taught, but the principles were never explained. Instead of reading and learning the masterpieces of literature, we repeated week by week the Lamentations of King Hezekiah, the pretty but somewhat weak “Mother’s Picture” of Cowper, and worse doggrel verses on the solar system.’[11] The arrangements were doubtless similar to those of the period in all schools of the same kind, such as were described by Miss Beale in one of her early articles on the Education of Girls. ‘I know one school,’ she wrote, ‘existing to the end of the first half of the nineteenth century, in which the terms were not less than £100 a year. The following was the arrangement of hours: Rise at seven o’clock ... Lessons till eight; breakfast, consisting of bread and butter, with extremely weak coffee; lessons till twelve, luncheon, consisting of bread and butter, or bread and jam, and “turns” till one o’clock. These “turns” consisted in going thirty times post haste round and round the garden; they could scarcely be accomplished unless the luncheon were carried round in the hand and eaten _en route_. Lessons from one o’clock until three forty-five. Dinner four o’clock, and “turns” in fine weather immediately following, as after luncheon. Lessons until eight, then tea, and bed at nine.’[12] The school was at Stratford, and it lent perhaps a personal reminiscence to a favourite line of Chaucer’s _Prologue_, on which, in the literature lessons at Cheltenham, Miss Beale never failed to dwell. ‘After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.’ She always had a horror of schoolgirl French, and the practice at one time so common of permitting no talk except in French. ‘Our thinking power was hindered from developing by intercourse with one another, because we were required to speak in a tongue in which we could indeed talk, but in which conversation was impossible; and the language we spoke was one peculiar to English boarding schools.’[13]