Page:Books and men.djvu/27

 Rh Anselm, a broken-down little wreck, was returned to his mother's hands, to be slowly nursed back to health and reason. "Ah, me! I have lost my child!" sighed Ermenberg, when she found that not all that he had suffered could shake the boy's determination to return; and the mother of Guibert de Nogent must have echoed the sentiment when her little son, his back purple with stripes, looked her in the face, and answered steadily to her lamentations, "If I die of my whippings, I still mean to be whipped."

The step from the monastic schools to Eton and Westminster is a long one, but the gain not so apparent at first sight as might be supposed. It is hard for the luxurious Etonian of to-day to realize that for many years his predecessors suffered enough from cold, hunger, and barbarous ill-treatment to make life a burden on their hands. The system, while it hardened some into the desired manliness, must have killed many whose feebler constitutions could ill support its rigor. Even as late as 1834, we are told by one who had ample opportunity to study the subject carefully that "the inmates of a workhouse or a jail were