Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/151

 *molins, but what I should prefer to it even would be a third, not yet practised, by which youth might profit by the best in the English course of training and the best in the French; that is to say, a combination of the superior French intellectual education and the superior English moral training. If there were nothing between a well-brought-up fool and an intellectual cad, then, in Heaven's name, give us nothing but the sympathetic fool; but how much better if we could have the well-bred "intellectual" too! Some years ago a Greek minister, about to send his son to a public school either in France or England, did me the honour to take me for a wise and intelligent person,—which I have no pretension to be,—and asked my advice on the question of a choice of countries. I told him he would have to decide between knowledge and education. If he wished his son to be brought up in a healthy, virile fashion, taught to conduct himself on the lines of the British ideal, which for all practical purposes is about as fine a one as is to be found, though it, too, has limitations it were well to recognise and acknowledge—then let it be England, and Oxford or Cambridge. If, on the other hand, he wished to see his son a proficient scholar, well grounded in the classics, intellectually trained in the course of a couple of miserable years, his brain overworked in the depressing