THE FOURTH CENTENARY OF ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL.
[TO TITS EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sni„—This is a year of centenaries, with this or that numeral prefixed to them. St. Paul's School has been celebrating its fourth, and learned persons have been careful to explain that the numeral is far too modest, that it might well have been the eighth, if not something even higher. This is not the place to argue the matter. Dean Colet had the art which was characteristic of his century. He could make a thing new without breaking its continuity with the old order. So he turned a Cathedral school into a public school. He gave it new statutes, a new curriculum, a munificent endowment,
and, not the least important change of all, a new government. Dean of St. Paul's as he was, he took it away from the Chapter of the Cathedral to put it into the hands of the Mercers' Company.
But whatever the centenary, its celebration has been a very significant one. There are persons yet living, I believe, who remember a time when the young Pauline, if he wanted to learn arithmetic, had to go to a teacher outside the walls; it was too trivial a subject to be taught within the precincts. And now the great function of the week has been the opening of a new building for the teaching of science, a spacious building, with a chemical and a physical laboratory, erected —another sign of the times—with extraordinary rapidity, for the first atone was laid no further back than January last.
An old arts teacher, whose wants were limited to a modest classroom, a table, a few books, and, possibly, a blackboard with a piece of chalk, views with respectful astonishment the magnificent demands of his brethren of science. But be recognises that the times change. This is what John Colet had the grace to do. Consequently he founded—shall we say refounded ?—a school which has done magnificent work : never better than under its late chief, Frederick William
Walker. Floreat aeternum !—I am, Sir, &c., A. J. C.
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