A Practical Handbook to the Principal Schools of England. Edited
by Charles Eyre Pascoe. (Sampson Low and Co.)—A very useful little volume. It gives an account of more than forty schools, the selec- tion having been made with care, and it being supposed that the great middle-class and county schools do not come within the scope of the work, without any notable omissions. Under each school is given an account of the education given (which, in theory at least, is pretty much the same everywhere), of the expenses, of the advantages in the way of scholarships, exhibitions, and deductions in favour of particular classes (as of the clergy at Marlborough and Rossall, the Army at Wel- lington, and the Navy at the Royal Naval School), with lists of masters, times of holidays, &c. The work of collecting and arranging all this information seems to have been very carefully and thoroughly done. All that we have to criticise in it is the unusually bad English of the intro- duction, which a cynic would account for by the editor's statement that he has "himself been permitted to realise the advantages of a free education at one of the great foundation-schools of England." What a sentence is the following?—" It only needs to consider the exactions of the State alone in this matter of education to estimate the importance and influence it must have upon the career of a young man, wholly apart from any selfish considerations of happiness, and satisfaction, the natural outcomes of a generous devotion to study "1 Parents will find the book very useful, but they must keep it carefully out of the hands of their sons, to whom, in the matter of style, it will be pessimi exempli.
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