Able and successful though Rowland Hill was as a teacher, nevertheless he often regretted that he was withdrawn from duties which he alone could perform, to undertake that which another might have done with at least a fair amount of success. “I ought,” he records in his Journal, “to have nothing to do but to superintend others; my time is unfortunately too much occupied as a teacher.” Certainly the singular system of education which he had devised required for its proper working the almost undivided attention of its author. Before I describe it, I would ask the reader to bring before his mind the state of our schools in the days of our fathers. Let him read “Tom Brown.” Let him see what Rugby was even after Dr. Arnold had for some years been its master. Let him see the shocking brutality to which an inoffensive child could be exposed. I can never think on some of the scenes of that story without feeling that Arnold’s great name is stained by the cruel deeds that were done under his own roof. Had he thought a little more of suffering and a little less of sin, he would have been a better master and a greater man. At the time that Rowland Hill began his reforms Arnold was still at Oxford. He was not appointed to Rugby till six years after Matthew and Rowland Hill had brought out their work on Public Education. There had been little sign as yet of any improvement in our schools. There was still many a place where a gentle and timid child was exposed to savage and ignorant cruelty. These ancient foundations boast, and with justice, of the famous men whom they have reared. They are proud of their traditions; and yet I can never visit one of these old schools without seeing rise before my mind a long line of unhappy children who were too gentle, too delicately wrought for the rough and brutal world into which they were suddenly thrown, and whose little hearts were well-nigh broken by the cruelty of an unfeeling herd of masters and boys. “Continuo auditæ voces, vagitus et ingens, Infantumque animæ flentes in limine primo.” In the year 1821, Southey thus wrote of one of the playmates of his own childhood:— “The eldest son was taken from the Charter House because he was, literally, almost killed there by the devilish cruelty of the boys. They used to lay him before the fire till he was scorched, and shut him up in a trunk with sawdust till he had nearly expired with suffocation. The Charter House, at that time, was a sort of hell upon earth for the under boys. He was of weak understanding and feeble frame.”[46] I own the value and the force of the traditions of a school. I know that they cling to places, and are not easy to transplant; but, were I a Charter House boy, after reading such a passage as this, I should feel that I drew a freer, as well as a purer, air on the open downs above Godalming, than in the old buildings near Smithfield.