The general discipline of the classes and the surveillance or want of surveillance of the pupils in their private rooms were rather on the model of an unreformed Oxford college than of a public school.[1009] Sense of personal responsibility and habits of self-government were to take the place of the schoolboy’s fear of punishment. Unhappily, before learning the new motives, the boys too often abused the absence of the old.[1010] About half of the professors were in holy orders and did duty in the college chapel. If Malthus took his turn with the rest, we need not suppose with his clerical biographer that he magnified the office. His sermons would always be earnest; they might often perhaps be too long. His week-day lectures, unless he made them liker the first essay with its fine writing than the later books with their plain unvarnished arguments, could not have been very fascinating to immature youths, especially as the lecturer had a slight defect in utterance.[1011] Eight years of teaching convinced him that Political Economy was not, as he once thought, too hard for boys of sixteen or seventeen;—“they could not only understand it,” he said, “but they did not even think it dull.”[1012] We may hope it was so; but in view of the whole case, it is probable that our author’s labours, in the classroom and out of it, were far from light, and that the pleasantness of the life was purchased with a large share of discomfort. The physical surroundings were all that could be desired. “We are so rural and quiet here, that there can be no greater contrast [to London]. This house is in a cluster of tall shrubs and young trees, with a little bit of smooth lawn sloping to a bright pond, in which old weeping willows are dipping their hair, and rows of young pear trees admiring their blooming faces. Indeed, there never was such a flash of shadowing high-hanging flowers as we have around us; and almost all, as it happens, of that pure, silvery, snowy, bridal tint; and we live, like Campbell’s sweet Gertrude, ‘as if beneath a galaxy of overhanging sweets, with blossoms white.’ There are young horse-chestnuts with flowers half a yard long, fresh, full-clustered white lilacs, tall Guelder roses, broadspreading pear and cherry trees, low thickets of blooming sloe, and crowds of juicy-looking detached thorns, quite covered with their fragrant May-flowers, half open, like ivory filigree, and half shut like Indian pearls, and all so fresh and dewy since the milky showers of yesterday; and resounding with nightingales, and thrushes, and skylarks, shrilling high up, overhead, among the dazzling slow-sailing clouds. Not to be named, I know and feel as much as you can do, with your Trossachs, and Loch Lomonds, and Inverarys; but very sweet, and vernal, and soothing, and fit enough to efface all recollections of hot, swarming, whirling, and bustling London from all good minds.”[1013]