En Avant, ..ifessieurs! being a Tutor's Counsel to his Pupils.
By the
Rev. G. H. D. Mathias. (Chapman and Hall.)—The most curious feature of this pleasant little book is the contrast it affords between the present tutor and the tutor of the last generation. Mr. Mathias writes shortly and colloquially on a great many subjects—novels, Tennyson, Shakespeare, the Mendicity Society, foreign travel, and drawing. All his advice is sound, if not very deep, and whether his pupils take it or not, they will be certain to read it. A tutor of an earlier generation would never have dreamt of discussing such subjects, and if he had discussed them at all, he would have done so in a style warranted not to be readable. Consistently with his duty to the parents who had entrusted him with "that precious deposit—the souls of the young men under my charge," he could not enter on frivolous topics, on modern poets, or any accomplishments short of Greek accentuation. As for his talking about novels, we cannot find a comparison strong enough to express his horror. The natural result was that the tutor of olden time had no real in- fluence over the greater part of the minds of his pupils. Their general run of thought, their amusements, their interests wore strange to him. As long as they did their work and fell into no openly bad habits, ho did not think himself bound to interfere with them. Now, the principle on which Mr. Mathias goes is the exact contrary. He gives us very few precepts about actual study, but a great many about the helps to study which lie in making it intelligible. He does not insist on ordinary duties, but shows how they may be done, and how other men have done them. Ho excites curiosity by copious anecdote and illustration, and fixes dull things in the memory by associating them with a point or a story. What pupil would not recognize the great British traveller read- ing Murray out loud in the Cathedral of Lausanne, "as if an English verger had been dropped, with all his exact and dreary round of informa- tion complete, into the Swiss cathedral?"
Previous page
