Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/876

836 possess an almost Shandian humor. "It all at once struck me," he says, "that the British public had no work about boys. We have books upon mathematics, hydrostatics, dynamics, and metaphysics; books upon theology, philology, and meteorology; books upon history, biography, and geography; books about fact that are full of fiction, and books of fiction that are sad facts; books inculcating the observance, and books illustrating the breach, of all the Commandments; books about gorillas, elephants, and Emperors of Abyssinia; books about men, women, girls, and babies; but not, so far as I know, a single book about boys."

To this fact, then, we owe our good fortune, inasmuch as it was reserved for Mr. Hope to fill the vacancy in our literature, and his book is a real treasure to all who love this unruly and turbulent tribe of torments. He explains his subject, plays with it, apologizes for it, eulogizes it, and all but apotheosizes it; and he produces at last a perfectly charming work, although one to which he fears the young Miss may indeed prefer "The Benighted Bigamist," or any of those novels of Mrs. Henry Wood's, which somewhere else he quietly mentions as "written in a peculiar language based upon English."

It is indeed delightful to meet with a book in which there is nowhere a strain or an exertion visible, for Mr. Hope is full of his subject. He cannot say enough; he asks whether, if a post-diluvian scholar be allowed a lifetime for the examination of Greek particles, the study of boys may not demand the labors of a literary Methusaleh; he does not pause for a word until reaching the chapter concerning the Manners of Boys; and if he constitutes himself their champion and vindicator, he is never mawkish—for call a composition an imposition, as he may, he believes fully in the virtues of the raw hide, and balances any sentimental weakness by confession of faith in the healthy stimulant of an occasional flogging. In some respects this treatise of his upon the natural history of boys is superior even to "Tom Brown's Schooldays at Rugby," for the author of that book, delightful as it is, must be one of those whom Mr. Hope himself classifies as giving forth a very uncertain sound as to whether they consider cricket or Christianity the loftier virtue; and he extends, moreover, a certain patronage to that idea of public-school morality which obtains at present, in most English schools, under which the stronger ones tyrannize over the weak, and the weak submissively await their turn to tyrannize over fags yet unconsciously growing up toward that destiny—a system still allowed, if not encouraged, because supposed to represent the world's life in miniature, and to prepare boys presently for the generation of struggle that awaits them. "But I know of another system of morality," declares Mr. Hope, "said to be approved by most English educationists, which, while as fully recognizing the existence of these evils, bids us fight to the death against them in our own hearts and in the world, that in due time they may be rooted up and cast down."

Of all the schoolmasters that ever swayed a birch, Mr. Hope must be the one to be chosen. Yet his ideas are slightly heretical in a land overshadowed by the spires and towers of Oxford, and half-undermined by Latin radicals and Greek roots; but, if listened to, they will go far toward rendering education utilitarian, toward making boys ready for the part they are best fitted to play, and toward inculcating a kindly sympathy between man and man, which last seems better to him, he avers, than much Latin and more Greek. He cannot, however, be alone in his views, for, in relation to this same question of utility and fitness in the selected studies, and over the prostrate form of the English boy, we are told that a great fight is now raging. "From my quiet corner I can