again, " The last point that will never be neglected in a great 

 school . . . the necessity of trusting the boys, and allowing 

 them liberty to do anything that a wise father would wish his 

 son to do." I do not of course mean a blind and lazy trust such 

 as that apparently referred to and so properly anathematised in 

 the chapter on " School-boy Honour " in Dr. Hime's Home Edu- 

 cation. Where there is the proper sympathy between teachers 

 and boys the former will feel instinctively where anything is 

 wrong, and such mal-practices as Dr. Hime describes will be 

 impossible. Such sympathy is not by any means incompatible 

 with a feeling on the boys' part that the teachers are quite able 

 for any black sheep among them if need should arise ; a feeling 

 that requires with the average boy to be strengthened by 

 swiftness of resource in circumventing by clever and unexpected 

 means any wrong-doing on the part of the more ignorant. 

 An incident from Rawnsley's little book Edward Taring as 

 Teacher and Poet illustrates this. " He often, as boys phrase 

 it, " scored so." Thus on the occasion of a school row the whole 

 school had been gated, and up the Big School walked the Head- 

 master with a look of triumph, and serve-you-fellows-well-right 

 upon his face. A slight hiss — a thing unheard of before — 

 escaped the lips of some few of the imprisoned malcontents. 

 Thring stopped, faced round defiantly, and said—' That's 

 right ; there are only two animals on earth that make that noise, 

 the viper and the goose ; hiss away ! ' The boys were hard hit, 

 and the whole of Big School broke into a loud cheer." 



Are we likely to find men of this stamp among those who 

 spend their youth pot-hunting for scholarships and prizes ; who 

 regard learning as a beast of burden on which they may ride 

 to place and power, and who are compelled so low as to make a 

 study of the petty failings and idiosyncracies of individual 

 examiners, so as to wriggle to success through some of their 

 foibles ? 



Yet boys, like other ignorant or half-formed people, can only 

 be led where there is this true power of mind and quickness of 

 resource, and the tone of secure strength in him who possesses 

 it. From these they cannot withhold allegiance, and they admire 



