Homer, as also the _Ordo_ in the Delphin classics, were held to be mischievous aids, but the help was slight that could be derived from them, as the Latin language itself was not yet grasped. For whatever of the anomalous we moderns may observe in all this, let the good old traditional school-system of England be responsible--not the accomplished and benevolent man who transplanted the system, pure and simple, to Canadian ground. For ourselves: in one point of view, we deem it a piece of singular good fortune to have been subjected for a time to this sort of drill; for it has enabled us to enter with more intelligence into the discussions on English education that have marked the era in which we live. Without this morsel of experience we should have known only by vague report what it was the reviewers and essayists of England were aiming their fulminations against. Our early recollections in this regard, we treasure up now among our mental curiosities, with thankfulness: just as we treasure up our memories of the few years which, in the days of our youth, we had an opportunity of passing in the old father-land, while yet mail coaches and guards and genuine coachmen were extant there; while yet the time-honoured watchman was to be heard patrolling the streets at night and calling the hours. Deprived of this personal experience, how tamely would have read "School-days at Rugby," for example, or "The Scouring of the White Horse," and many another healthy classic in recent English literature--to say nothing of "The Sketch Book," and earlier pieces, which involve numerous allusions to these now vanished entities! Moreover, we found that our boyish initiation in the Eton formularies, however little they may have contributed to the intellectual furniture of the mind at an early period, had the effect of putting us _en rapport_, in one relation at all events, with a large class in the old country. We found that the stock quotations and scraps of Latin employed to give an air of learning to discourse, "to point a moral and adorn a tale," among the country-clergy of England and among members of Parliament of the ante-Reform-bill period, were mostly relics of school-boy lore derived from Eton books. Fragments of the _As in præsenti_, of the _Propria quæ maribus_; shreds from the Syntax, as _Vir bonus est quis_, _Ingenuas didicisse_, and a score more, were instantly recognized, and constituted a kind of talismanic mode of communication, making the quoter and the hearer, to some extent, akin.