highest possible achievement of the human intellect. Annually, the senior boys competed for a prize in Latin Hexameters. The successful performances were recited at our Public Speaking, which took place at the close of the Midsummer half year. Their Latinity was perfect for the best of reasons; they were arrangements of phrases which had been really penned by Ovid and Virgil. The native Muse was cultivated a little, too. We were required to commit portions of the ‘Elegant Extracts’ to memory: and the senior boys also wrote English prize-poems, which were clever imitations of the mannerisms (only) of Pope and Dryden. The ‘usual branches of a solid English education’ were certainly in a rather stunted condition at Old Bob’s. Arithmetic was taught ostensibly; we had to write out a given number of sums weekly, done by what means no matter, in a book. One boy, I recollect, by the particular request of his parents, learned mathematics; that is to say, getting Euclid’s propositions by rote. Geography was sometimes mentioned among us—in connexion with the Argonautic Expedition for instance, or the Garden of the Hesperides. English History we read in classes during the fortnight before the vacations, Old Bob probably conceiving it expedient that his scholars should, if questioned by their friends on the subject, appear to know that there was some difference between William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell. Sometimes Milton’s Paradise Lost was substituted for our historical reading, namely, for Goldsmith’s Abridgment. We received rather less instruction in Astronomy than may be presumed to have fallen to the share of Galileo’s judges, and we utterly ignored the use of any globes except those in use at football and cricket. Some few, at their friends’ express stipulation, learned French, Drawing, and Dancing, on sufferance, and grievously against the grain of Old Bob, who considered that modern languages and accomplishments could be acquired during the holidays, or picked up in after-life anyhow; and who suspected that at Rood Priory they were mere pretexts for shirking severer lessons. Certainly these studies involved no whipping, and were interspersed with considerable amusement, at the expense of the French teacher at least, and his countryman the dancing-master.