I visited this school, the bequest of the noble patriot. The old convent supplies an edifice. It consists of two classes; the lower containing one hundred and fifty scholars, the upper about forty. But two teachers are insufficient for the large number of pupils. The rector of the lower class was so friendly as to hold a little examination in my presence. I here again remarked the _naïveté_ of the Corsican character, as displayed by the boys. There were upwards of a hundred, between the ages of six and fourteen, separated into divisions, wild, brown little fellows, tattered and torn, unwashed, all with their caps on their heads. Some wore crosses of honour suspended on red ribbons; and these looked comical enough on the breasts of the little brown rascals--sitting, perhaps, with their heads supported between their two fists, and staring, frank and free, with their black eyes at all within range--proud, probably, of being Paoli scholars. These honours are distributed every Saturday, and worn by the pupil for a week; a silly, and at the same time, hurtful French practice, which tends to encourage bad passions, and to drive the Corsican--in whom nature has already implanted an unusual thirst for distinction--even in his boyhood, to a false ambition. These young Spartans were reading Telemachus. On my requesting the rector to allow them to translate the French into Italian, that I might see how they were at home in their mother-tongue, he excused himself with the express prohibition of the Government, which "does not permit Italian in the schools." The branches taught were writing, reading, arithmetic, and the elements of geography and biblical history. The schoolroom of the lower class is the chapter-hall of the old convent in which Clemens Paoli dreamed away the closing days of his life. Such a spacious, airy Aula as that in which these Corsican youngsters pursue their studies, with the view from its windows of the mighty hills of Niolo, and the battle-fields of their sires, would be an improvement in many a German university. The heroic grandeur of external nature in Corsica seems to me to form, along with the recollections of their past history, the great source of cultivation for the Corsican people; and there is no little importance in the glance which that Corsican boy is now fixing on the portrait yonder on the wall--for it is the portrait of Pasquale Paoli. CHAPTER X. CLEMENS PAOLI. "Blessed be the Lord my strength, who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight."--Psalm cxliv.