In the instruction that was given there had been but little general improvement. The old classical education was, no doubt, in many ways admirably well suited for boys who were quick at languages. But it made the dull ten times as dull as they came from nature, and marked down many a lad as a hopeless blockhead whose good parts were merely overwhelmed by the gross ignorance of his teachers. Pedantry, scarcely less than penury, can freeze the genial current of the soul. If the fools and blockheads could only once gather their poor wits together, and only once give their thoughts utterance, what a tale of wrong would they pour forth against the brutal and ignorant pedants who had, in their childhood, puffed out the far too feeble light which had been given to light them through the world. Bad, indeed, was the general state of education when Rowland Hill set up for its reformer—so bad that it almost excuses the audacity of the young enthusiast. His audacity, certainly, was almost boundless. “We must honestly confess,” his eldest brother and he say, in the volume which they published on education, “that we retain hardly a single opinion relating to any part of our profession which we held in early life. One by one we have surrendered them all to the force of experience.” He was but twenty-five at most when he wrote this, and all the wisdom of our forefathers he had already scattered to the winds. With some reason did one of his pupils say, “There was a great want of reverence for authority in his school. There was no respect for the opinion of the great and good men of all ages—that _consensus_ of opinion.” In his old age, Rowland Hill described his career as a schoolmaster as a series of experiments. In the years when he was making his greatest changes, and striking out into the newest of paths, he had, as he himself said, no misgivings as to his fitness for his post; and yet it was not till after this time that he so painfully found out how little he knew, and how much he had still to learn. He had, however, this ground for his confidence, that all his plans did work. In the midst of his boldness he was still cautious. He had a horror of failure, and a strong but wholesome dread of that ridicule which awaits the mere dreamer. Many might well have thought that such a school as he described could scarcely have existed even in Utopia, and yet it flourished in Birmingham.