BOOKS.

TURING OF 1TPPINGHAM.* Iv to Arnold of Rugby belongs the glory of having breathed a new and nobler spirit into English public-school life, to Thring

of Uppingham must be accorded the credit of having con- densed the new spirit into a system, and elaborated the pattern of the machinery without which the benefits of the bettor way could not be perpetuated beyond the life of the reformer,

or extended even in his generation so as to reach the dull and the backward, the boy below the average, and the boy who is different from the average. Very early in the book, Mr. Thring's biographer tells us that soon after the Head-Master's death, somebody in the House of Commons pronounced him to have been "the most Christian man of his generation," and explained the ground of this high praise thus :—

" He was the first man in England to assert openly that in the economy of God's world a dull boy had as much right to have his power, such as it is, fully trained as a boy of talent, and that no school did honest work which did not recognise this truth as the basis of its working arrangements."

Whether Thring was absolutely the most Christian man of his generation, and whether he was really the first to pro- claim the rights of the dull boy, are points that cannot be proved and do not much matter. But certain it is that the claim of the dull boy and the over-sensitive boy, and of every sort of boy in danger of being left out of the net of any rough-and-ready scheme of education, was constantly before his eyes ; and that this fact was duly appreciated by parents, —who paid him the compliment, as the fame of his school became established, of picking out the least " likely " boy in their family to entrust to his care, while sending their promising boys elsewhere,— a compliment the practical

working of which Thring made good use of as one among many illustrations of the unsatisfactoriness of the plan of testing the excellence of schools by applying one cat-and- dried method of examination to all :— "A school depends so much on the kind of material it gets.

Our reputation [i.e., the reputation of Uppingham] in early days rested entirely on the care we took of individuals. Now the result was this. I know in many instances the stupid boys of a family were sent here, the clever elsewhere. Thus our real excellence stood in the way of our false excellence. How terribly would this have been aggravated had we had a Govern- ment examiner handicapping us against sundry other schools ; what a temptation to drop honest work would have arisen in addition to the many already only too powerful."

Which words of wisdom we commend to parents—if there are still any such in England—who think the school that flies the longest honour-list is the one most likely to make a silk purse of the sow's ear of the family.

Mr. Parkin, to whom has fallen the task of writing Thring's Life and editing his diary and letters, may be Congratulated on having executed admirably a particularly difficult duty. It is true that his book cannot be said to have the charm, either personal or literary, of the book it inevitably calls to mind,—Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold. But this is not

the fault of Mr. Parkin. It is the fault, in part, of Mr. Thring himself, whose character—be it said with reverence—was rather lacking in the graces that constitute charm ; and it is the fault, in yet greater part, of the position in public

interest and in practical necessity to which the subject of public-school education had come in the day when Thring became Head-Master of Uppingham. Thring went up to Cam- bridge from Eton with a King's Scholarship in the year 1841, that is to say, in the year immediately preceding that in which Dr. Arnold died. By the time he was appointed Head- Master of Uppingham in 1853, all the great principles of Christian morality and gentlemanly honour which Dr. Arnold had electrified the world by courageously applying to the relations of master and boy, had become the accepted common. Places of respectable opinion. The way of governing a school

* Life, Diary, and Lotions of Bdtoard Thring Head-Master of Uppingltam School. By George B. Parkin, 0.M.G., M.A., Hon. LL.D. University of New Brunswick. Principal of Upper Canada College. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. 1178. net.]

which in 1829 was a beautiful and untried ideal had become in 1853—at least in theory—a familiar standard by which to judge all schools and schoolmasters. And results which had been wondered at as miracles a quarter of a century before were now demanded as matters of course and common right. It is hardly to overstate the change that had been effected during the interval between the beginning of Arnold's Head- Mastership and the beginning of Thring's, to Bay that in 1829 the state of things in the great public schools was so bad that opinion was setting towards a conviction that the system must be given up, whereas by 1853 the new spirit, and the new hope begotten of it, had carried opinion round to a positive enthusiasm for public-school life, and a conviction that it must be better for any and every boy than home life. In the very eagerness of parents to send their boys to men who professed the principles of Dr. Arnold, and strove to carry the spirit of an earnest and manly Christianity into the work of schoolmastering, Thring saw, at the very beginning of his career, the danger of an increase of all those features of school organisation which he knew to be fatal to the good working of the new principles. The more people trusted a Head-Master, the more eager they would be to place their boys in his school and in his house ; and the immense size of the popular schools, the over- crowding of the popular houses, were in his eyes the evils at the bottom of most of the abuses of the actual public- school system. This conviction was tweed upon the experi- ence of nine creditable and not unhappy years of his own boyhood spent at Eton, five as an Oppidan and three as a colleger. He had not suffered in his own person from the system, being precisely one of the boys—strong morally, physically, and intellectually—who thrive anywhere and in any atmosphere, and whose case is generally cited as proving the excellence of the system, in spite of which they have done well. Bat he came out of the ordeal, as he himself expresses it, "hating the system, though loving the place."

The account of Thring's boyhood, with the glimpses it gives of his home life and of the relation in which he stood to his parents, given in the two first chapters of the biography, make not only very lively reading, but they throw an instructive light upon the motives and the spirit of the labours chronicled in the bulk of the book. But though it was at Eton that Thring had the opportunity of seeing for himself how the teaching of a school suffered when there were nine or ten masters for five hundred or seven hundred boys, and a single class might contain a hundred scholars (it was not very long before Thring's time that a class of two hundred had existed), and how the morals of a school were endangered by arrangements permitting seventy boys of various ages to herd together in one room without supervision of any kind,— it was not at Eton only that the evils of overgrown numbers and crowded houses and classes prevailed. Even at reformed Rugby the Head-Master's house held between sixty and seventy boys, and in some of the forms the classes averaged sixty pupils to a single master. In Thring's ideal school— and in the actual school he created at Uppingham—no house was allowed to receive more than thirty boys, no class to swell to much above five-and-twenty. The problem was how to make the Governors of the Uppingham Grammar School, the parents of boys in general, and the masters who were willing to serve under him accept the pecuniary consequences of such limitations and appreciate the prin- ciples they represented. Also in a lesser degree how to arrange matters so that a school constructed upon these principles should not only succeed, but pay. And the story of how Thring really did this is what this book tells in abundant and perspicuous detail; detail much too abundant, some readers may be inclined to object, since the character of it is necessarily prosaic. But these will only be readers who do not appreciate the importance of the issues involved, and the extraordinary energy, sincerity, and practical talent of the man who grappled with them successfully.

Thring was an autocrat by temperament as well as by convic- tion. But he had the qualities which justify a man in being an autocrat, though, being human, he did not escape having the defects which make autocrats superficially unarniable and to all appearance over-confident in their own wisdom. He gave his own life, his own means, his own credit unsparingly—it may almost be said unscrupulously—to the work to which he believed himself called by God. And he demanded and accepted sacrifices not less complete from his colleagues and coadjutors. But never at any turn of affairs, never in any crisis, would he allow the assumption that the sacrifices made by his coadjutors or the services rendered by his colleagues entitled them to expect that he should allow their judgment to override his. He consulted with the under-masters certainly ; but always on the understanding that what he wanted from them was information, not advice. Those who, having neither the call to govern nor the gift of government, are in love with the democratic doctrine which teaches that the wise and strong man is only really strong and wise when he defers to the collective judgment of a mob of individuals, each presumably inferior to himself in wisdom and strength, may call this tenacity of judgment and authority offensive self-con- fidence. And it would be absurd to deny that in the ordinary acceptation of the term Thring was self-confident, and some- times offensively so. And yet, though we confess that every page of his diary bristles with the determination to fight Governors, masters, and parents to the death if necessary ; though, after reading it carefully through, we cannot recall a single passage in which he admits that he might have done better had he taken some advice he rejected or yielded to some influence he resisted ; yet paradoxical as the declaration may seem, we are constrained to say that we are far more impressed by his humility than by his self-confidence. He was resolute outwardly, but inwardly he possessed the humility before God which, after all, is the only kind of humility a man at the helm can be allowed to indulge himself in. Thring recognised no responsibility to any Court but the Supreme One, and by the manner in which he kept the judg- ment of God and the fear of God continually before his eyes in all the arduous and complicated interests of his career he reminds us singularly of Carlyle, and still more of Carlyle's hero, Cromwell.

In amusing anecdote, in graceful social and domestic detail, this biography must be acknowledged to be very poor. With the exception of the early chapters already mentioned, and one chapter towards the end of the first volume which is devoted to the pretty episode of Mr. Thring's epistolary friendship and deathbed interview with Mrs. Ewing, there is absolutely nothing, from beginning to end of the book, to relieve the painful strain of the close chronicle of the Head-Master's labours in building up and ruling his school. It is in the main a story of "machinery," to borrow a favourite expression of Thring's own. But many entries in the diary—and these by no means the least arresting and interesting—are reoords, always very short and reserved, of interviews with boys who had sought his advice in delicate situations or moments of temptation, or who came to him to make confession of wrong done. And one entry— perhaps the most touching of all—tells of a farewell interview with a boy who had not done well at the school, and as to whom the Master acknowledges with sorrow that here he has failed. Some letters from old pupils, gone out into the world, also help to light up the more personal and individual side of Thring's work. But testimony to " influence " is always delicate ground, andMr. Parkin is to be commended for not having over- done—as he very easily might—this part of his work. There are also some very important pages in the book in which the question of school morality is handled with great wisdom, delicacy, and thoroughness. Thring started on his career as a Head-Master with the belief that a boy ought to find in a properly organised public school en atmosphere "better than home," and after thirty years' experience it was his conviction that in spite of all the difficulties of dealing with boys in numbers, it was easier to train them morally, as well as in- tellectually, in a school—provided, of course, the "machinery" and the spirit were good—than in an average home.