Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/261

Rh the old social barriers were partially broken down. The trading classes, we are told by a contemporary, are "the best Body in the Nation, generous, sober, and charitable. So that while the People are so immersed in their own affairs, there is a better spirit stirring in our cities, more knowledge, more zeal, and more charity, with a great deal more of Devotion." But amid all classes the ignorance was lamentable. A finished education for a boy of this period consisted in a "little Latin and less Greek," beaten into him either at one of the public schools or at home by the French tutor who had replaced the domestic chaplain of long ago. Having been whipped through a little grammar and arithmetic, he was taught to dance, as also "how to enter a room, how to carry the head and hands and to turn out the toes." Fencing and the use of one stringed instrument, such as the lute, guitar, or violin, completed education at an early age. If a boy went to the University, he entered it at fifteen or sixteen. It was eminently an unhappy age for schoolboys, and this advertisement is by no means uncommon in the papers of the day: "A gentleman's only Child is run from School;