The great schools had no new rivals; all the modern public schools—Cheltenham, Clifton, Marlborough, and the like—have sprung into existence or into importance since the year 1837. Those who did not go to the public schools had their choice between small grammar schools and private schools. There were a vast number of private schools. It was, indeed, recognised that when a man could do nothing else and had failed in everything that he had tried, a private school was still possible for him. The sons of the lower middle-class had, as a rule, no choice but to go to a private school. At the grammar school they taught Greek and Latin—these boys wanted no Greek and no Latin; they wanted a good ‘commercial’ education; they wanted to learn bookkeeping and arithmetic, and to write a good hand. Nothing else was of much account. Again, all the grammar schools belonged to the Church of England; sons of Nonconformists were, therefore, excluded, and had to go to the private school.

The man who kept a private school was recommended for his cheapness as much as for his success in teaching. As for the latter, indeed, there were no local examinations held by the Universities, and no means of showing whether he taught well or ill. Probably, in the five or six years spent at his school, boys learned what their parents mostly desired for them, and left school to become clerks or shopmen. The school fees were sometimes as low as a guinea a quarter. The classes were taught by wretchedly paid ushers; there was no attention paid to ventilation or hygienic arrangements; the cane was freely used all day long. Everybody knows the kind of school; you can read about it in the earlier pages of ‘David Copperfield,’ and in a thousand books besides.

In the public schools, where the birch flourished rank and tall and in tropical luxuriance, Latin and Greek were the only subjects to which any serious attention was given. No science was taught; of modern languages, French was pretended; history and geography were neglected; mathematics were a mere farce. As regards the tone of the schools, perhaps we had better not inquire. Yet that the general life of the boys was healthy is apparent from the affection with which elderly men speak of their old schools. There were great Head Masters before Arnold; and there were public schools where manliness, truth, and purity were cultivated besides Rugby. One thing is very certain—that the schools turned out splendid scholars, and their powers of writing Latin and Greek verse were wonderful. A year ago we were startled by learning that a girl had taken a First Class in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge. This, to some who remembered the First Class of old, seemed a truly wonderful thing. Some even wanted to see her iambics. Alas! a First Class can now be got without Greek iambics. What would they have said at Westminster fifty years ago if they had learned that a First Class could be got at Cambridge without Greek or Latin verse? What is philology, which can be crammed, compared with a faultless copy of elegiacs, which no amount of cramming, even of the female brain, can succeed in producing?

The Universities were still wholly in the hands of the Church. No layman, with one or two exceptions, could be Head of a College; all the Fellowships—or very nearly all—were clerical; the country living was the natural end of the Fellowship; no Dissenters, Jews, or Catholics were admitted into any College unless they went through the form of conforming to the rules as regards Chapel; no one could be matriculated without signing the Thirty-nine Articles—nearly twenty years later I had, as a lad of seventeen, to sign that unrelenting definition of Faith on entering King’s College, London. Perhaps they do it still at that seat of orthodoxy. Tutors and lecturers were nearly all in orders. Most of the men intended to take orders, many of them in order to take family livings.

The number of undergraduates was about a third of that now standing on the College books. And the number of reading men—those who intended to make their University career a stepping-stone or a ladder—was far less in proportion to the number of ‘poll’ men than at the present day. The ordinary degree was obtained with even less difficulty than at present.

There were practically only two Triposes at Cambridge—the Mathematical and the Classical—instead of the round dozen or so which now offer their honours to the student. No one could get a Fellowship except through those two Triposes. As for the Fellowships and Scholarships, indeed, half of them were close—that is to say, confined to students from certain towns, or certain counties, or certain schools; while at one College, King’s, both Fellowships and Scholarships were confined to ‘collegers’ of Eton, and the students proceeded straight to Fellowships without passing through the ordeal of the Senate House.

Dinner was at four—a most ungodly hour, between lunch and the proper hour for dinner. For the men who read, it answered pretty well, because it gave them a long evening for work; for the men who did not read, it gave a long evening for play.

There was a great deal of solid drinking among the men, both Fellows and undergraduates. The former sat in Combination Room after Hall and drank the good old College port; the latter sat in each other’s rooms and drank the fiery port which they bought in the town. In the evening there were frequent suppers, with milk-punch and songs. I wonder if they have the milk-punch still; the supper I think they cannot have, because they all dine at seven or half-past seven, after which it is impossible to take supper.

In those days young noblemen went up more than they do at present, and they spread themselves over many colleges. Thus at Cambridge they were found at Trinity, John’s, and Magdalene. A certain Cabinet thirty years ago had half its members on the books of St. John’s. In these days all the noblemen who go to Cambridge flock like sheep to Trinity. There seems also to have been gathered at the University a larger proportion of county people than in these later years, when the Universities have not only been thrown open to men of all creeds, but when men of every class find in their rich endowments and prizes a legitimate and laudable way of rising in the world. ‘The recognised way of making a gentleman now,’ says Charles Kingsley in ‘Alton Locke,’ ‘is to send him to the University.’ I do not know how Charles Kingsley was made a gentleman, but it is certainly a very common method of advancing your son if he is clever. Formerly it meant ambition in the direction of the Church. Now it means many other things—the Bar—Journalism—Education—Science—ArchÆeology—a hundred ways in which a ‘gentleman’ may be made by first becoming a scholar. Nay, there are dozens of men in the City who have begun by taking their three years on the banks of the Cam or the Isis. For what purposes do the Universities exist but for the encouragement of learning? And if the country agree to call a scholar a gentleman—as it calls a solicitor a gentleman—by right of his profession, so much the better for the country. But Kingsley was born somewhere about the year 1820, which was still very much in the eighteenth century, when there were no gentlemen recognised except those who were gentlemen by birth.

With close Fellowships, tied to the Church of England, with little or no science, Art, archÆology, philology, Oriental learning, or any of the modern branches of learning, with a strong taste for port, and undergraduates drawn for the most part from the upper classes, the Universities were different indeed from those of the present day.

As for the education of women, it was like unto the serpents of Ireland. Wherefore we need not devote a chapter to this subject at all.