_Its Schools_. Few, if any, places of anything like the same size, contain so many and so excellent Colleges, Academies, Boarding and Day Schools, as Ealing. Many circumstances have conspired to this result. In the first place, the _fons et origo_, probably, of this consummation, nature seems to have marked the spot for schools. The situation is near enough to the Thames to make the loveliest haunts of the river easily accessible, and it is distant enough to be free from the fogs and low humours of a riparian situation; it is remote enough from London to be almost pastoral in its charms yet close enough to be reached by many routes within an hour. The streets of the town and the urban roads are broad and well made, the latter lined with noble chestnuts that, in the spring, are a mass of spiked bloom, suggesting the boulevards of continental cities rather than the prosaic high ways of English life. It abounds in large open spaces, wide stretching greens and commons, everywhere foliage and bloom greet the senses. No noisome factories belch poison into the air. It is _rus in urbe_ in effect. The man of business can be wafted almost without effort to the very heart of the business centre of the world, and yet his home lie in gracious avenues lined with stately trees, and far remote from the toil and turmoil of the city and its eternal din. In all Ealing there is not what may be reasonably called a slum, and its most confined and gloomy alley might almost claim to rank as an open space compared with the crowded courts of the East End. Little wonder that the schoolmaster who is often spoken of as abroad is very much at home in Ealing. The illustrious men, distinguished in every pursuit of life, in arms, in commerce, in the calm of the cloister, and in the strife of the forum, in literature and in arts, who have drunk their first draughts of the Pierian Spring at Ealing, their names are many, illustrious, and historic. The most celebrated Private School in Great Britain, beyond question, was that kept in Ealing by Dr. Nicholas, and known as the Great Ealing School. It stood formerly on the site of the present Post Office in Ranelagh Road, and that of the buildings on the opposite side of the Ranelagh Road now used as a Repository. The House now called Thorne House, or St. Mary’s College, conducted by Mr. Fiscn, M.A., was. occupied as a Master’s House. Dr. Nicholas himself is spoken of more than once in Thackeray’s Papers as “Dr. Tickle-us of Great Ealing School.” How few private schools, indeed can any other private school? claim among its alumni such men as Sir Henry Lawrence, Lord Lawrence, Bishop Selwyn, Charles Knight, Sir Henry Rawlinson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Cardinal Newman, Professor Huxley and W. S. Gilbert. Charles Knight says of his schooldays here, “my school life was a real happiness. My nature bourgeoned under kindness.” The present Great Ealing School stands on the opposite side of the road to the former premises.