When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to "useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"? These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietors of Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education--nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires