March 18, 1887. j 



SCIENCE, 



275 



goes further than this. They can best be judged 

 on the great annual festival when the parents are 

 invited to see the triumplis of their children. 

 Speeches in different languages are delivered by 

 children of various ages, often with a pathos that 

 draws tears from those who hear them : this is a 

 good part of their training. The head boy reads 

 out the list of those who have gained prizes. 

 After reciting a string of names, he suddenly 

 pauses, thus attracting the attention of all pres- 

 ent. The prefect of studies, who stands behind 

 him, comes to his rescue, and utters the boy's own 

 name, which he has been too modest to pro- 

 nounce himself. Had he repeated it among the 

 others, it would have attracted no attention, but 

 the modesty which avoided the appearance of 

 self -laudation was used to extort the applause of 

 the multitude. 



The boys are examined viva voce. Nothing 

 can be more fair. Any one at random is asked to 

 take a Virgil or Sophocles, to submit any pas- 

 sage for translation, and to ask any questions he 

 pleases. If the examiner does his work honestly, 

 he soon finds what a mistake he has made. He 

 submits a passage for translation. The boy makes 

 a mistake ; the examiner stops him. The boy 

 blunders ; the examiner insists upon a correct 

 translation, which takes a long time in coming. 

 Thei'e is general discomfort and confusion. The 

 whole sympathy of the audience is with the good- 

 looking ingenuous youth on the platform, and not 

 with the bald-headed pedant who is examining 

 him. The examiner asks a question ; the boy an- 

 swers it wrong. As often as the examiner re- 

 jects the answer given to him, so often does the 

 impatience of the audience arise against the stupid 

 man who does not know how to ask questions 

 that the boys can answer. 



If the Jesuits had no faults of their own, they 

 at least deserve the condemnation of posterity for 

 suppressing their rivals the Jansenists, who offered 

 to France the best opportunity of receiving a 

 humanistic education devoted to the noblest ends. 

 The object of the distinguished men who founded 

 the little schools of Port Royal was exactly the 

 opposite to that of their Jesuit rivals. They de- 

 sired to make tlie moral character of their pupils 

 strong and independent, and to train their intel- 

 lects from tlie first in the severe studies of close 

 and logical reasoning. In the individual attention 

 they gave to their pupils, they were superior even 

 to the Jesuits. The whole number of children 

 that passed through their schools was small ; and 

 no teacher was allowed to have charge of more 

 than five or six, while the masters were thus able 

 to study the characters and capacities of their 

 pupils in the minutest details. Pains were always 



taken to avoid undue familiarity. Between the 

 pupils themselves, as between their professors, 

 there was to reign a dignified and temperate 

 courtesy, removed equally from sickly sentimen- 

 tality and from rough and boisterous good-fellow- 

 ship. The grammar of Port Royal was not a col- 

 lection of rules to be learned by heart, but a 

 treatise on logic, which forms the basis of all 

 grammar. Where rules or examples had, of ne- 

 cessity, to be learned, they were, in disregard of 

 precedent, placed in such a form as to be most 

 easily remembered. The Jansenists were guilty of 

 another innovation which gave a great handle to 

 their opponents. They taught the dead lan- 

 guages of antiquity from the living tongue 

 of their own France. What impiety, said the 

 Jesuits, thus to vulgarize studies which ought 

 never to be presented to us without solemn and 

 even sacred associations 1 We hear little or noth- 

 ing in the Port Royal schools of the cultivation of 

 Latin verses. The air which they breathed was 

 too bracing for that trivial exercise. On the other 

 hand, they did great service to the study of Greek. 

 It is true that the Jesuits maintained Greek as a 

 prominent study in their schools, which the 

 University of Paris had been compelled to sur- 

 render by the clamor of parents. Yet the ' Gar- 

 den of Greek roots,' an attempt to popularize the 

 study by imparting the most necessary knowledge 

 of Greek in French verses, remained for a long 

 time a standard school-book, and was used for 

 that purpose by so careful and exact a scholar as 

 the historian Gibbon. If the Jansenist schools had 

 been suffered to exist, they might have profound- 

 ly affected not only the course of study in France, 

 but the minds and characters of Frenchmen. 

 European nations, in following the French models 

 of excellence which reigned v\'ithout dispute be- 

 fore the French revolution, might have had a 

 more masculine type held up for their admira- 

 tion. This, however, was not to be ; and French 

 literature, impregnated with Ciceronianism, had 

 been but slightly touched with the chastening in- 

 fluences of Hellenic studies or of logical precision. 

 Humanism has undergone many changes in the 

 last generation, and it is difiicult to forecast its 

 future. The position which it held in education 

 after the revival of learning was due to two 

 opinions about it, which were believed very gener- 

 ally, but not always very consistently. On the 

 one hand, it was thought to be the best gymnastic 

 for the mind, the best mechanical exercise which 

 the human faculties could be put through. On 

 the other hand, the literatures of Greece and 

 Rome, which were the subject-matter of human- 

 ism, were regarded as absolutely the things best 

 worth study, not only from their intrinsic merit. 



