To do them justice, however, their pupils were not entirely neglected. If they could not read fluently, neither could they seat themselves with any degree of comfort; and if they were backward in summing and spelling, they seldom failed to return home at night with swollen eyes and scored palms. The tree of knowledge in those days was only valued on account of the tough and elastic materials which it furnished for the manufacture of instruments of childish torture. The normal aspect of a village school used then to be, an aged crone in the chimney-corner, spectacles on nose, and rod in hand; a loutish boy, crowned with a fool’s cap, whining by her side; a class of trembling dunces before her, endeavouring in vain to shirk unchastised through lessons which they were as unapt to learn as their mistress was to teach; and, in the background, the body of the school, ignorant, rude, dirty, and of evil savour—just such a brutal and unpromising brood as the incapable old hen who presided over them might be expected to rear. In the present year of our Lord 1860, a village, nay, a workhouse school, in any district of England, presents a very different, and a much pleasanter sight. Order, cleanliness, and intelligence now predominate; the active and experienced teachers—young men and women in the prime of life, carefully trained to teach—understand their duties thoroughly, and are proud of their success in discharging them. Punishments are now rare, and never cruel; the children have a happy and cultivated look, and the result of this improved system of school-teaching obtrudes itself gratefully on the eye and ear of the visitor in well-written copies and careful drawings, in distinctly enunciated reading, in harmonious singing, and in arithmetical calculations of surprising accuracy and rapidity. And all these valuable results have been produced by a very moderate degree of judicious encouragement and vigilance on the part of the legislature, which has, in the first place, taught the teachers of the children of the poor the art of teaching—an art until lately entirely neglected in this country; and, secondly, has kept them up to their work by a careful system of school inspection. Every school which now benefits by a grant of government money is examined and reported on, publicly and periodically, by the government inspectors of schools, able and accomplished men, as thoroughly versed in the art of examination as the teachers they overlook are in the art of teaching.