The great schools had no new rivals; all the modern public schools--Cheltenham, Clifton, Marlborough, and the like--have sprung into existence or into importance since the year 1837. Those who did not go to the public schools had their choice between small grammar schools and private schools. There were a vast number of private schools. It was, indeed, recognised that when a man could do nothing else and had failed in everything that he had tried, a private school was still possible for him. The sons of the lower middle-class had, as a rule, no choice but to go to a private school. At the grammar school they taught Greek and Latin--these boys wanted no Greek and no Latin; they wanted a good ‘commercial’ education; they wanted to learn bookkeeping and arithmetic, and to write a good hand. Nothing else was of much account. Again, all the grammar schools belonged to the Church of England; sons of Nonconformists were, therefore, excluded, and had to go to the private school. The man who kept a private school was recommended for his cheapness as much as for his success in teaching. As for the latter, indeed, there were no local examinations held by the Universities, and no means of showing whether he taught well or ill. Probably, in the five or six years spent at his school, boys learned what their parents mostly desired for them, and left school to become clerks or shopmen. The school fees were sometimes as low as a guinea a quarter. The classes were taught by wretchedly paid ushers; there was no attention paid to ventilation or hygienic arrangements; the cane was freely used all day long. Everybody knows the kind of school; you can read about it in the earlier pages of ‘David Copperfield,’ and in a thousand books besides.