schools in the town where he lived, though he happened to be King of the French. It was good for them, but it made no difference to the others, nor to the school. King Milan of Servia was afterwards educated at the same _lycée_. [Sidenote: Views of the Reactionary Aristocracy.] [Sidenote: Religious and Political Reasons.] A boy gains no rank, and loses none, by being at a French _lycée_. It is true that the reactionary aristocracy looks upon the _lycées_ with disfavour, but that is not because they are cheap,[14] or because some of the pupils are poor, for the aristocracy is willing to send its children to priestly seminaries, which are still cheaper, and where most of the pupils are poorer. The reasons are not social, but religious and political. The _lycées_ have lay masters, the seminaries have priests; the _lycées_ are animated with a republican spirit, the seminaries are royalist. Everything has a political colour in France. When a young noble has not been to a seminary he is educated on its principles by a clerical tutor at home, or else in some Jesuit school abroad. [Sidenote: Education itself gives little Position in France.] [Sidenote: Revival of the Middle-age Idea.] [Sidenote: The Brilliant Nobility.] Not only does the place of education give no social position to a Frenchman, but education itself now gives him very little, because it has been made accessible to poor men. Eton and Oxford are respected because they are expensive;--if the same education, or a better, were given in cheap schools, it would lose its social significance. France seems to have reached, or almost reached, that point towards which the whole world is tending, when education will be too common to confer rank, and it is even possible we may get back to the middle-age idea that it is lordly to be illiterate. Even now, something of this sentiment is distinctly perceptible in France. Clever young men in the middle class are considered to be working creditably for persons in their line of life, but the nobility do not meet them on that ground; they outshine them, not in learning, but in field-sports and equipages. [Sidenote: The Native Language.] [Sidenote: Clever Frenchwomen in the Middle Classes.] [Sidenote: Rare Use of the Best English.]