"Methinks e'en now the interview I see. The mistress's kind smile, the master's glee. Much of my future happiness they said, Much of the easy life the scholars led; Of spacious playground, and of wholesome air, The best instruction, and the tenderest care; And when I followed to the garden door My father, till, through tears, I saw no more,-- How civilly they soothed my parting pain, _And how they never spake so civilly again_." Bravo! Southey! In these lines how many feelings of how many oppressed little hearts you have given vent to! Improvement, I do believe, has found its way, in a great degree, since then into private schools; but in many of them still, how much remains to be done! How much more may the spirits of masters and mistresses be humanized! How much more the law of love be substituted for the law of severity! It can not be too deeply impressed on the hearts of those who take the charge of children often at a great distance, that there is no tyranny so cowardly and mean as that which is exercised, not over grown men, but over tender children. Coleridge calls this change, being "first plucked up and transplanted;" and adds--"Oh, what a change! I was a depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half-starved;--at that time the portion of food to the Bluecoats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." For those who had friends to supply them, the distinction set up was of the most detestable kind. They had luxuries brought in and served up before these poor half-starved little wretches. Charles Lamb, under the title of Elia, describes his own case as one of these favored ones. "I remember Lamb at school, and can well remember that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived in town and were at hand, and he had the privilege of going to see them almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction which was denied us. The present treasurer of the Inner Temple can explain how it happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in the morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf; our _crug_ moistened with attenuated small beer in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. On Mondays, milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of 'extraordinary bread and butter' from the hot loaf of the Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant--(we had three banyan to four meat days in the week)--was endeared to his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a smack of ginger, or the fragrant cinnamon, to make it go down the more glibly. In lieu of our _half-pickled_ Sundays, or _quite fresh_ boiled beef on Thursdays, strong as caro equina, with destestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth; our scanty mutton crags on