In the public schools, where the birch flourished rank and tall and in tropical luxuriance, Latin and Greek were the only subjects to which any serious attention was given. No science was taught; of modern languages, French was pretended; history and geography were neglected; mathematics were a mere farce. As regards the tone of the schools, perhaps we had better not inquire. Yet that the general life of the boys was healthy is apparent from the affection with which elderly men speak of their old schools. There were great Head Masters before Arnold; and there were public schools where manliness, truth, and purity were cultivated besides Rugby. One thing is very certain--that the schools turned out splendid scholars, and their powers of writing Latin and Greek verse were wonderful. A year ago we were startled by learning that a girl had taken a First Class in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge. This, to some who remembered the First Class of old, seemed a truly wonderful thing. Some even wanted to see her iambics. Alas! a First Class can now be got without Greek iambics. What would they have said at Westminster fifty years ago if they had learned that a First Class could be got at Cambridge without Greek or Latin verse? What is philology, which can be crammed, compared with a faultless copy of elegiacs, which no amount of cramming, even of the female brain, can succeed in producing? The Universities were still wholly in the hands of the Church. No layman, with one or two exceptions, could be Head of a College; all the Fellowships--or very nearly all--were clerical; the country living was the natural end of the Fellowship; no Dissenters, Jews, or Catholics were admitted into any College unless they went through the form of conforming to the rules as regards Chapel; no one could be matriculated without signing the Thirty-nine Articles--nearly twenty years later I had, as a lad of seventeen, to sign that unrelenting definition of Faith on entering King’s College, London. Perhaps they do it still at that seat of orthodoxy. Tutors and lecturers were nearly all in orders. Most of the men intended to take orders, many of them in order to take family livings. The number of undergraduates was about a third of that now standing on the College books. And the number of reading men--those who intended to make their University career a stepping-stone or a ladder--was far less in proportion to the number of ‘poll’ men than at the present day. The ordinary degree was obtained with even less difficulty than at present.