Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848
Various
Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 391, May, 1848
THE CAXTONS. – PART II
CHAPTER VII
When I had reached the age of twelve, I had got to the head of the preparatory school to which I had been sent. And having thus exhausted all the oxygen of learning in that little receiver, my parents looked out for a wider range for my inspirations. During the last two years in which I had been at school, my love for study had returned; but it was a vigorous, wakeful, undreamy love, stimulated by competition, and animated by the practical desire to excel.
My father no longer sought to curb my intellectual aspirings. He had too great a reverence for scholarship not to wish me to become a scholar if possible; though he more than once said to me somewhat sadly, "Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read. One slave of the lamp is enough for a household; my servitude must not be a hereditary bondage."
My father looked round for a suitable academy; and the fame of Dr Herman's "Philhellenic Institute" came to his ears.
Now, this Dr Herman was the son of a German music-master, who had settled in England. He had completed his own education at the university of Bonn; but, finding learning too common a drug in that market to bring the high price at which he valued his own, and having some theories as to political freedom which attached him to England, he resolved upon setting up a school, which he designed as an "era in the history of the human mind." Dr Herman was one of the earliest of those new-fashioned authorities in education, who have, more lately, spread pretty numerously amongst us, and would have given, perhaps, a dangerous shake to the foundations of our great classical seminaries, if those last had not very wisely, though very cautiously, borrowed some of the more sensible principles which lay mixed and adulterated amongst the crotchets and chimeras of their innovating rivals and assailants.
Dr Herman had written a great many learned works against every pre-existing method of instruction: that which had made the greatest noise was upon the infamous fiction of Spelling-Books: "A more lying, roundabout, puzzle-headed delusion than that by which we CONFUSE the clear instincts of truth in our accursed systems of spelling, was never concocted by the father of falsehood." Such was the exordium of this famous treatise. "For instance, take the monosyllable Cat. What brazen forehead you must have, when you say to an infant C, A, T, – spell CAT: that is, three sounds, forming a totally opposite compound – opposite in every detail, opposite in the whole – compose a poor little monosyllable, which, if you would but say the simple truth, the child will learn to spell merely by looking at it! How can three sounds, which run thus to the ear, see—eh—tee, compose the sound cat? Don't they rather compose the sound see-eh-té, or ceaty? How can a system of education flourish that begins by so monstrous a falsehood, which the sense of hearing suffices to contradict? No wonder that the horn-book is the despair of mothers!" From this instance, the reader will perceive that Dr Herman, in his theory of education, began at the beginning! – he took the bull fairly by the horns. As for the rest, upon a broad principle of eclecticism, he had combined together every new patent invention for youthful idea-shooting. He had taken his trigger from Hofwyl; he had bought his wadding from Hamilton; he had got his copper-caps from Bell and Lancaster. The youthful idea! he had rammed it tight! he had rammed it loose! he had rammed it with pictorial illustrations! he had rammed it with the monitorial system! he had rammed in every conceivable way, and with every imaginable ramrod; but I have mournful doubts whether he shot the youthful idea an inch farther than it did under the old mechanism of flint and steel! Nevertheless, as Dr Herman really did teach a great many things too much neglected at schools; as, besides Latin and