SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Under this heading we notice such Books of the week as have not been reserved for review in other forms.] Charterhouse. By A. H. Tod, M.A. (G. Bell and Sons. 3s. Cd. net.)—This is the first volume of a series of "Handbooks to the Great Public Schools." The plan is to make the present condition of the schools the main subject, the history of the past, commonly the staple of such books, being subordinated. The idea is a good one, and will, we trust: be successfully carried out. Mr. Tod's book is quite readable, but his account of "the method and routine of the educational system" is somewhat defective. There is a chapter, it is true, entitled "Work," but it occupies sewn pages only (" Games, &c.," have seventy-two allotted to them). Of what the boys learn, or are supposed to learn, very little is told us. We should have liked to know what one of the Forms, for instance, reads in the way of classics during a term. Mr. Tod gives but twenty pages to the foundation of the school and the first two and a half centuries of its history (1614-1872), but these are full of interest. One statement we read with amazement. Speakieg of Greek, Mr. Tod says : "Its study had been sadly neglected since the Reformation." Does he suppose that the knowledge of Greek was common in pre-Reformation days, and neglected in the times that followed ? Curiously enough, the anecdotes he quotes to illustrate his statement are of a monk who said that "a new language had been discovered called Greek," and that it was "the mother of heresies," and of a Bishop who thought that Greek wasnot Wanted "when all things be trans- lated into Latin." Were the monk and the Bishop Reformers?
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