An old educational reformer, dr. Andrew Bell

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DE ANDREW BELL

AN OLD EDUCATIONAL KEFORMER

DR ANDREW BELL

BY

J. M. D. MEIKLEJOHN M.A.

PROFESSOR OF THE THEORY, HISTORY, AND FRACTlfE

OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY

OF ST ANDREWS

.^\OT/y;^

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXXXI

(210 . 'm . aiL .

1

AU RigkU reserved

TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

THE EAEL OF LEVEN AND MELVILLE, K.T.

AND

JOHN COOK, ESQUIRE,

WRITER TO H.M. MIONET

SP^e STrustteest of ISr Beirut Wiill

AND THE FOUNDERS OF

THE TWO CHAIRS OF EDUCATION IN THE

UNIVERSITIES OF EDINBURGH AND ST ANDREWS,

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED.

CONTENTS.

CHAP.

I. 8T ANDREWS, ....

II. AMERICA,

III. LONDON — ST ANDREWS — AND LEITH,

IV. INDIA,

V. HOME AGAIN, ....

VI. DR BELL AS A COUNTRY PARSON,
VII. ANDREW BELL AND JOSEPH LANCASTER,
VIII. THE SYSTEM SPREADS,
IX. DR BELL IN DURHAM,

X. PROGRESS,
XI. GROWING FAME,
XIL DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT,
XIII. HEREFORD AND SHERBURN,
XrV. THE LAST DAYS,
XV. DR bell's CORRESPONDENCE,
XVI. DR bell's character AND SYSTEM,

PAOK
I

14
16
22
29
34
40
47
52
58
68
72
78
85
96
120

LECTURE ON DR BELL,

EXTRACTS PROM DR BELL'S WORKS,

141
173

LIFE OF DE BELL

CHAPTER L

ST ANDREWS.

Andrew Bell was bom in the city of St Andrews on
the 27th of March 1753.

St Andrews is a place so full of contrasts between
new and old, town and country, barbarism and Chris-
tianity, that one or two words may be useful about it.
The traveller on reaching it sees at once that he has
fallen out of the ordinaiy track — has gone away from
the common world, and that he has come into an out-
lying place, — which cannot be judged by the usual
standards we apply to villages, and towns, and cities.
Such a cold stony hideousness of street, such a glory
of sky, alternately chills and depresses, or lifts and in-
spires him. Old ruins, rising up bare and gaunt into
the heaven, long reaches of monotonous street, quiet
fields looking suddenly in upon the town, a bay of the
most changeful hues — sometimes black as night, at
other times of a blue as deep as the Mediterranean, or

A

2 UFE OF DB BELL.

white as molten silver, — steep cliffs, softly moulded
hills, and over all a sky of the most various and tran-
scendent beauty — a beauty that is new every few min-
utes, — these are the features that keep the new-comer in
a mixed condition of wonder and dissatisfaction. The
sky is most beautiful in winter; for in these high lati-
tudes the sun is low, even at high noon. He does not
send his rays down to the earth to enable work-people
to get through their work, but he flings them aU abroad
through the wide and open sky, to light it up with
richest gold, to sprinkle over it light traces of green and
grey; and, towards afternoon, when the barred clouds
lie in long stretches along the low sky, to touch with
deepest calm some narrow opening into the beyond. In
the evening, as the clouds meet towards the west over
the setting sun,^^ there are here and there rifts and open-
ings between them, like quiet lakes of soft light, in which
the calm is the visible expression — the true symbol to the
fleshly eye of " the peace that passes aU understanding."
The look of some of the streets, even now, is the
look of the fifteenth century. Knubbly and rough,
like the streets of a Continental town, they must have
been, as they still are, trying to the feet of the enthusi-
astic pilgrim. Perhaps a cart slowly rumbles through
one of them once an hour, and this serves to intensify
the silence. Winds from the sea push in vast body or
in sudden gusts along the wide avenues ; and when a
storm sends the waves dashing into the rocky coves
that line the Scores,-^ the white thready foam is carried

^ This word is a corruption of scar or scaurs, the old English
word for a steep cut-away cliff.

ST ANDREWS. 3

in large flakes, over house and churcli-stccplc, away to
the farthest end of the little wind-swept city. From the
west, too, wind-currents find their way easily through it ;
so that there is no stagnant air, and no close vapours,
but everywhere an openness, a skyey influence, and a
largeness of air all about

Approach it from the south — from the hills that
bound it — and the traveller sees it set in a framework
of river, and sea, and wood ; while the pilgrims of the
middle ages, surmounting their last hill, halted at an
iron cross which still stands on the Hill of the King,^
and, falling on their knees at sight of the sacred spires,
thanked God that it was at length given them to behold
the DiviNB with the eyes of flesh. Stand in the middle
of the Links : between the gaps of the sand-hills flashes
towards you the deep sunlit blue of the bay-waves ; you
feel on a platform ringed with deep-blue sea, which is
itself again ringed with an outer and infinite sky. Sky-
bom of the sky the whole region looks ; while the town
itself seems a heavenly Jerusalem let down upon the
nether earth to teach a higher doctrine to the sons of
men.

The people are notoriously long-lived. You meet
old men and women whom, from their experienced
looks, you might judge to be well over a hundred;
and exhausted constitutions of seventy come here, re-
new their youth, enjoy their lives, and hold on happily
till ninety. It is the strong dry air, the absorbing
exercise of golf, the play of social amenity, that hft
them out of depression and senility. For here there

^ Balr^mout.

4 LIFE OF DR BELL.

are traditions of culture and civility that have been
passed on from century to century, and the influeneB
of which leavens the social life and moulds the social
manners. Here are more than a thousand years of
Christianity; and the visible symbols of it, in tower
and steeple and window, catch the eye at innumerahla
points. There are three distinct layers — the Celtic, the
Eoman, and the modern Protestant Christianity. The
Celtic layer is represented by the leaning square tower
of St Eegulus, of the simplest form, but the most stem
and solid character. The Eoman layer is represented
by the ruins of the Abbey, and the lovely window of
the ancient monastery of the Blackfriars. While the
Protestant — not constructive or architectural in any way
— has raised for itself a number of the ugliest little
chapels that even a Scotch town can boast of. But
these traditions of Christianity and culture have left
their mark most deeply on the character of the inhabit-
ants. A sweet naivete permeates the place.

** One reverence still the untainted race inspires ;
God their first thought, and after God their sires ; —
These last discerned Astrsea's flying hem,
And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them."

Clergyman, soldier, professor, physician, landowner, chim-
ney-sweep, carpenter, ploughman, farmer, and tax-gatherer
mix upon equal and brotherly terms, and each is always
on the look-out to oblige his neighbour. Exclusiveness
is neither known nor understood. On this happy plateau
the schism of classes has never existed, but every man
walks in a kindly atmosphere of neighbourliness and
goodwill The clack of disputing tongues, the appeal

ST ANDBEWS. 5

to an unsympathetic and matter-of-fact law, the impu-
tation of evil motives, — these things, so common in the
sanaller towns of Scotland, are never heard of in St
Andrews. Here might Astrsea Eedux take lodgings for
the sea-bathing of the summer months, and send her
boys and girls to the schools and colleges for the winter.
It is true there are religious sects, but these exist chiefly
for the sake of friendly discussion, and the generous
rivalry of doing good. Episcopalian and Presbyte-
rian, Churchman and Dissenter, frequent each other's
churches, and " fiU " each other's pulpits, and are eager
for nothing but the promotion of the constant Gospel of
Christ Perhaps the old Eoman Catholic form of Chris-
tianity is most weakly represented here. It has only
one adherent, and he is a minor official of the town.
But then his chief is an archbishop, and this does a
great deal more than make up. Besides an archbishop,
I we have also a bishop — the distinguished nephew of the
' lasting poet Wordsworth. In addition to a bishop and
an archbishop, the Presbyterian part of the community
has also a city clergyman, who, to be in harmony with
the general quaintness of the place, is known to fame
and to both worlds as "the Country Parson."

Two great interests share the life of the place — the
University and Golf. The University is far from large,
but it can boast of more famous men in proportion to
its size than any other university in Great Britain.
The quadrangle of St Mary's College has a quiet love-
liness which attracts every one, and reminds the visitor
of the Clarendon Press quadrangle at Oxford ; and the
steeple of the United College Chapel is of a simple

6 LIFE OP DR BELL.

};eauty and perfect proportion unsurpassed — and not
often equalled — by that of any piece of architecture
cither in England or on the Continent The professors
live — when they can — an enviable life of quiet study ;
and between them and the students the pleasantest
relations subsist. Hundreds of men look back upon
their academic days at St Andrews as by far the
happiest in their lives. There they lie, far back in
the happy fields of memory, a part of heaven rather
than of earth, but every now and then carrying into
tlie noise and hurry of the crowded street a wave of
culm, a peace that hallows and soothes the fevered
nerves, tlie bounding emotions, or the surging brain.
Golf is, however, the more permanent staple of the
place. It is to golf that Andrew Bell most probably
owes his moral education. Statements we print, morali-
ti(5H we utter, which the child learns by " heart " and
njpcatH, have probably no effect whatever on the char-
acter; for thore is no tertium quid, no mediating in-
fluence}, by which they can cross over to the habitual
thoughts and daily actions of a person ; and it is these
thoughts and actions that go to mould the coming man.
liut golf is in itself an education. It is an education of
the highest value. It embodies and carries into practice
one of the noblest arts — tlie art of living a good and
luialthy life. It trains to attention, to concentration,
and to tranquillity. The player takes his stand in a
condition of perfect balance : every power of body and
mind, of nerve and muscle, is braced up, rallied to
point, under the guidance of a single eye ; the weapon is
swung easily at the full stretch of the arm ; it is slowly

ST ANDREWS. 7

lifted, describes the largest possible circle, and descends
with a concentration of sweep and force upon the ball,
the whole ball, and nothing but the balL The reflex
action upon the consciousness of the player of a good
stroke is probably more healthy and complete than
any sense of virtue to which human mortal can in this
life attain. The maxims : No zeal or hurry ; act upon
the largest circle; have a single eye; mind and body
in perfect balance and free swing ; the longest leverage
you can find in your favour; never take your eye off
your purpose, — these are surely as good maxims for
living as any moral philosopher has yet been able to
lay down. This presence of the maximum of thought
with the nn'TiinrmTn of anxiety, — this absolute freedom
from care — this absorbing tranquillity, — approaches more
nearly to the Greek idea of ataraxia than anything
we possess in modem times. It is therefore the best
preparation for the highest thinking— for that which
is not to be attained by importunity and improJnus
labor, but which comes, if it comes at all, as a
heaven-sent gift : —

** Und wer nicht denkt
Dem ist sie beschenkt
Er hat sie ohne Sorgen.''

That some golfers do not rise to the highest heights
of human perfection is no argument against the splendid
qualities of the game, but only a proof that these players
are men of arrested development — have been content
with a mean, have considered it as a finality, and have
never looked beyond. But in a world like this, the
chief object in self-education should be to connect all

8 LIFE OF DR BELL.

we do with the intellectual and moral growth of the

soul, and to remember with the pious Greorge Herbert,

how —

*' The man that looks on glass
On It may stay his eye ;
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy."

There are few more perfect systems of gymnastic for
mind and body than the game of golf.

Bell's father was a barber in the city. This noble
profession has dwindled much since the time when
Henry VIII. presented a charter to the barber-surgeons
of his day. The schism which is the fate of human
things, and which, on one side, is nowadays dignified
with the title of " division of labour " (whereas it should
bo called monotony and restriction of labour), has over-
taken the barber - surgeon. The surgeons have gone
inside the head, have penetrated into the inner secrets
of the human body ; the barbers have been content to
remain outside. Alexander Bell was, however, far more
than an ordinary barber of the present day. His was
an architectonic calling : he did not cut hair, he built
hair. He was often to be met in South Street — the
wide, tree-lined, and majestic street which stretches
from the West Port to the Priory, and worthily the
pride of St Andrews— carrying on each hand an elab-
orate and highly dressed wig, carefully apart, so that no
collision might disarrange their form or dispel their
powder. This was in the morning : and, after fitting
one professor with his wig, he would sit down and
breakfast with him, and then away to another professor

8T ANDBEWS. 9

with his wig, and he would sit down and breakfast
with Mm,— "his appetite" says Southey, "like his
mouth " (and his mind also) " being of remarkable and
well-known capacity." This extensive appetite, which
was moral as well as physical, his son Andrew seems to
have inherited. Alexander Bell belonged to what is
known as the higher classes. He and his wife were
the first persons in the city to introduce the drinking of
tea, — ^they possessed a tea-service of china ; he was him-
self bailie of the city (and in that capacity at one time
put down a furious meal -mob by his own personal
weight) ; and he was in the habit of assisting Dr
Walker, the professor of natural philosophy, in the pre-
paration of his experiments.

Dr Bell was descended, on the mother's side, from a
Captain Cavalie, of the Horse Grenadier Guards, who
came over to England with William of Orange, and
settled in St Andrews as a wine merchant. His mother
had in her blood a strain of insanity, which in later
years developed itself into mania and suicide. Andrew
was the second son. At the age of four some friend
gave the little boy a penny, upon receiving which he
seized on one of his brother's books, set off to school, and
offered his penny as his quarter's fee. Those were the
days when a large part of school education consisted of
flogging, and by far the greater majority of teachers be-
lieved and acted upon the dogma, " Nihil in intellectu
nisi prius in sensu." They were as thorough enemies
of the a jpriori as Locke himself : it was the contrary
method they preferred and employed ; it was the other
end of a child's being to which they appealed. Dr

10 LIFE OF DB BELL.

Bell himself used to say, " I never went to school with-
out trembling. I could not tell whether I should be
flogged or not." And Mr Southey adds: "Schools
were everywhere conducted in those days upon a
system of brutal severity, which never ought to have
existed except when the master happened to be a
man of singular humanity" — a sentence of curious
and extraordinary significance.

Little Bell did not know much, but what he knew,
he knew thoroughly, and never forgot. This he achieved
by not trusting to his memory — I mean to the will-
memory. His verbal memory was so weak that he
never could get correctly by heart a single rule in his
Latin syntax, but he could apply the rule with perfect
judgment. His reasoning and inquiring powers were
always active and at work ; and, while still a child, he
wrote a little book of arithmetic for himself. He left
school with a fair knowledge of Latin, and no Greek.

In the year 1769, Andrew Bell, then at the age of
sixteen, was matriculated as a student of the United
College of St Salvator and St Leonard's. Though the
youngest pupil in the mathematical class, he rose to
be the head of it; and he also distinguished himself
in several other classes in his college. He eked out
the bursary he held, and his other scanty resources, by
private teaching. He was ready to teach anything at a
few hours* notice, for he could always, as he said, pre-
pare over-night for the lesson of the next day; and thus
what he had to teach he acquired as he went along.
So simple is the art of teaching, so near does it lie to
every man who chooses to take it up. I remember

ST ANDREWS. 11

meeting in Washington the head of a famous American
college for ladies, who assured me she *' could teach
anything, if she had the hooks."

Of all his studies, mathematics and natural phil-
osophy were his favourites, and in the latter he even
rose to the st^e of original inquiry. To this he re-
mained true through life ; and his master, Dr Wilkie,
the Professor of Natural Philosophy, told him that he
" never knew a man fail of success in the world, if he
excelled in one thing."

This Dr Wilkie was a remarkable man. He was a
clergyman, a professor, a poet, an agriculturist of deep
insight, and a political economist He came of a family
so poor that, when his father died, he had to borrow
money to bury him ; and so hard, that when he asked
his uncle for a loan of £10 for the funeral expenses,
that gentleman declined. He was never able to rid
himself of a perpetual feeling and gruesome conscious-
ness of the horrors of poverty. He used to say, "I
have shaken hands with poverty up to the elbow, and
I don't want to see her face ever again." In agricul-
ture his rule was deep ploughing and plenty of manure,
clean ground, and rich feeding for it. He went about
the back streets of the town picking up, says Southey,
'* dead cats, dogs, and horses, for the purpose of giving
them, not decent burial, but profitable interment." He
studied the qualities of different soils, gave good wages
to his servants, and raised better crops than any of his
neighbours. But the thoughtful man, though rewarded
by nature, was overreached by his fellow-men, and he
was "always cheated in the market."

12 LIFE OF DB BELL.

Constantly fighting with poverty, but determined to
make his own way in the world, he came to the conclu-
sion, after long and careful thought, that the best way
of promoting his interests was to write an epic poem.
This would be fame, and fame was then the road to
wealth. Philosophy would find few readers ; theology
or a volume of sermons would either have roused bitter
suspicion, or have met with total neglect; a tragedy
from a minister of the Kirk would have been a scandal ;
a novel he would have liked to write, but he could
hardly found upon a novel a just claim to preferment :
an epic poem — and nothing else — it must be. Even
when this point had been settled, there came the
miseries of choice — he had to look out for a sub-
ject ; and he was again burdened with " the weight of
too much liberty." He at length chose the Second War
of Thebes as his subject, and he called his poem " The
Epigoniad."

While engaged in the " composition " of his epic, he
tilled the ground with his own hands, gave or found
employment for the poor, took care of his sisters (who
would have sunk into indigence but for him), preached
for neighbouring ministers— but always extempore—
and pursued his own physical studies. His adviser was
an old woman. Like Moli^re, he employed her as the
test of his verses ; and if any line displeased or failed
to strike her, he altered, retouched, and recast it, until
at length it succeeded in conquering her approbation.
This old woman, Margaret Paton, is probably the only
person who ever read the whole poem. He had many
other virtues and peculiarities. The potatoes he pro-

ST ANDREWS. 13

(luced were so good, that he was known as the potato-
minister; he generally preached with his hat on, and
often forgot to pronounce the blessing at the close of
the service; he chewed tobacco; he was fond of re-
ceiving medical advice — which he constantly disputed,
and generally rejected; he preferre<l to sleep under
four-and-twenty blankets; and he ardently longed for
the power of " iBrmly believing in all the doctrines of
Christianity."

14

CHAPTER II.

AXSRICA.

To return to Andrew Bell. He passed through the
classes of the coU^e with considerahle success; and,
seeing no prospect of remuneiatiYe labour in his native
city, he b^an to cast his eyes over the world. The
colonies attracted him most, and by accident an oflfer
came to him from Virginia. He accordingly went to
Glasgow, and embarked for America at the age of
twenty. He was there for seven years, of which there
is little or no record. In 1774 he was engaged as
private tutor, at a salary of £200 a-year (paid some-
times in money, sometimes in tobacco, and sometimes
not at all), in the family of a Mr Carter Braxton, a
merchant of West Point, Virginia. But in addition
to teaching, Andrew Bell found time to engage in com-
mercial transactions of various kinds — ^his dealings being
chiefly in American currency and tobacco.

He left Virginia in March 1781. Mr Braxton

thought 80 well of him, that he intrusted his two sons

to hia care, to be " taken to Europe,"— that is, to Great

Blitiin^ — and there "to be fixed at some genteel

^«njr." Bell had made, in the course of his seven

AMERICA. 15

years' residence, a sum between £800 and £900. ( )n
the day of sailing he was lucky enough to catch a sight
of the Marquis de la Fayette and his family, who,
he says, "had just arrived at York to command the
army destined to storm Portsmouth, where was Genenil
Arnold." He passed the English and French fleets,
who were just preparing to engage. His voyage was
miserable and unfortunate in every way; and before
it was over he suffered shipwreck. The ship ran
aground — was filling with water, when at daybreak
all of the passengers and crew managed to effect their
escape to land. It was still winter; the ground was
covered with snow ; the country (in lat. 45°) was un-
inhabited; the shipwrecked party had to sleep in
tents ; they were all wet to the skin night and day ;
and things looked so depressing, that Bell thought
it best to make his wilL He leaves 25,634 pounds
of tobacco, and £10 sterling, which Mr Braxton owes
him, to his father, Bailie Bell. To make things
worse, sixteen of the crew — sexdecim sceleratissimi^
says Bell — agree to rob and plunder the passengers,
and then to desert them. At last, however. Bell and
his friends get away in a boat and reach Halifax, where
they are well content — in spite of the fact that beef is
"9d. sterling per pound," and a turkey costs twenty-
one shillings. At length, on the 10th of May, BeU and
his pupils sail in the Adamant for London, and reach
Gravesend on the 6th of June.

16

CHAPTEE IIL

LONDON ST ANDREWS — AND LEITH.

Andrew Bell brouglit his pupils to London, and they
took lodgings in New Bond Street. What was then
called " quality " seems to have been their chief end in
life. Their eldest brother had had a run of eighteen
months on the Continent, and had, says Bell, " returned
quite the man of fashion, possessed of the graces.'' This
fashion, and these graces, were destined to give Bell a
good deal of trouble. What with the "unremitting
kindness," as regards money, of Mr Braxton, the idle-
ness and disobedience of the lads, Mr Bell was at
length obliged to give up the work, and to send in
his resignation to their guardians.

Turning his back upon London, he set his face
towards Scotland. He travelled sometimes on horse-
back, sometimes on foot, sometimes by stage, and some-
times by a local waggon. He seems to have kept a
journal of what he saw and heard, — fragments of which
still exist. Among other things, he mentions that at
(irantham he " supped at the Angel with an Israelite ; "
that in the county of Durham he found "monstrous
conversation, but savouring of Scottish, as in York-

LONDON — ST ANDREWS — AND LEITH. 17

shire ; " that he is always dropping things on the road
— " on the first day my penknife, on the second a hand-
kerchief, on the third a nightcap, and on the fourth
my glass;" that, when he arrived in Scotland, some
parts of some of the towns did not smell agreeably ;
and that at Fallowden, he got good green tea at break-
fast, which cost sixpence ; while " at Greenlaw it was
eightpence." At length he reached Edinburgh. He
sent his cards round to his friends ; and in the hyper-
bolical language of the period, Mr and Mrs Peter re-
turned "their most affectionate and friendly compli-
ments to their much esteemed Mr A. Bell," and were
"incapable of expressing their delight" that he was
in their neighbourhood again. After two days in
Edinburgh, he "arrived in the dark at St Andrews,
and was not known by mamma" (his mother).

His new stay at St Andrews was not uncheckered
by events. A quarrel arose between himself and a Mr
Crookenden, an English student at the University. A
challenge followed. The combatants met on the Witch
Hill, a rising ground which looks over the broad bay,
away to a long stretch of sands, a breadth of moorland,
and on to the lovely hills of Forfarshire ; and all pre-
liminaries had been duly arranged. Mr BeU was short-
sighted, and at the same time very eager, and when the
signal was given, he poured his fire into the seconds.
A burst of laughter followed. The seconds took advan-
tage of the good-humour to bring about a reconcilia-
tion, and a pleasant dinner followed.

Mr Bell thought as highly of a good dinner as Dr
Johnson. He stayed during Christmas with his father's

B

18 LIFE OF DB BELL.

friend, Mr Dempster of Dunnichen, and records in his
diary how he ate of an " eel three feet long, and nine
inches round;" and that the "daily fare is grouse, roast-
beef, giblets, tripe, soup, oysters, etc, etc. ; strong beer
by Hunter, twenty-two years old, most excellent. Three
wines — ^bravo ! "

Soon after this his two American pupils were sent
down to St Andrews by order of their father. Here
Mr Bell could take a firm hold of them ; and he entered
them at the United College, made them rise at five,
and forced them to work hard at languages and sciences.
He himself rose at four. In July 1783, the tutor and
his pupils were attacked with an endemic sore throat,
which had been travelling all over Europe. Bell was
much the worst; but he was tenderly nursed by his
friend Mr Berkeley (afterwards a prebendary of Can-
terbury), a son of the great Bishop Berkeley. For
three days Bell was unable to swallow anything ; but,
says Mr Berkeley, "under God, a poached egg saved
BeU's life."

The young men did very well at college. One of
them gained a prize for an essay on the " Immortality
of the Soul," a subject which, owing to its complete
freedom from data and exemption from the ordinary
rules of argument and methods of inquiry, is a stand-
ing favourite with Scottish students.

The father did not write much, and sent money still
seldomer. Mr Bell, who had only a salary of £40 a-
year — ^paid uncertainly — had to write often and again :
" It is scarcely possible for me to express my astonish-
ment at your silence." He goes on to say that he is

LONDON — ST ANDBEWS — ^AND LEITH. 19

employed " day and night in the service of your sons ; "
that he " takes from his usual hours of rest," and yet
his fees are ''not anything like the usual reward of
mere boys who are employed as tutors." Besides,
Mr Bell has to be " every hour in the day with them,"
to prevent their extravagance from ruining them. The
boys kept a " servant out of livery," but Mr Bell him-
seK was not paid.

Bell now began to take mathematical pupils. His
first pupil was a nephew of Mrs Dempster's; but
" the young man, going into the county of Angus, was
put into a damp bed," and died of rheumatic f^ver.
He, however, succeeded in at length collecting eight
pupils ; but the receipts were not satisfactory. He
now thought of returning to Virginia, and wrote to
Mr Braxton : " What prospects may I indulge " — this
was the epistolary manner of the period — " from
a revisitation to Virginia] Any academies erected]
Any encouragement in the line of the Church 1 Shall
I come out in holy orders ] What is now the mode of
obtaining them in America] Can they be come at
with you]" He was willing to do anything; but
" the line of the Church " and holy orders that are " to
be come at " strike one as a reminiscence of the days of
currency and tobacco.

An event now occurred which turned the whole
stream of his existence. A general election was at
hand. The St Andrews burghs had to return a
member to Parliament ; and the constituency consisted
entirely of the town -councillors of the burghs.^ The

^ Unlike the Spartan virtue of these modem days, the town-

20 LIFE OF DR BELL.

rival candidates were Mr Dempster of Dunnichen and
a Mr Campbell, of the family of Breadalbane. Every
engine of private and secret persuasion was put in
motion ; every kind of human weakness was appealed
to; and most of the voters had been got at through
their pockets. All the town-councillors had pledged
themselves to the one or to the other candidate with
one exception; and it so happened that an exactly
equal number had pledged themselves on both sides.
The councillor who had refused to give any promise
was Bailie Bell. With him virtually lay the whole
power of electing. He was approached in every pos-
sible way; and at length the Breadalbane candidate
went so far as to oflFer him £500 for his vote — a large
sum in those days. The honest bailie sternly declined,
and gave his vote for Mr Dempster. The new member
was profuse in his thanks, and promised to take a
fatherly interest in his son.

Bell now resolved to enter the Church of England.
By the aid of his friend Berkeley he obtained an intro-
duction to Dr Porteus, the Bishop of Chester, by whom
he was ordained. Soon after this, a vacancy occurred
in the Episcopal Chapel at Leith. Bell went there to
preach; the congregation was satisfied; and he was en-
gaged at a salary of fifty guineas a-year to act as curate.
This salary was afterwards raised to £70.

'Not long after this appointment, he was offered a
situation as tutor to a son of Lord Conyngham, who
was intended for Parliament or for diplomacy. He was

councillors were not impervious to argument, if conveyed in a
manner sufficiently weighty.

LONDON — ST ANDREWS — AND LEITH. 21

not only to teach the usual subjects, but also to direct
the political studies of the lad; and on this occasion
Mr Dempster wrote to him that " the old proverb,
Honesty is the best policy, is worth Montesquieu, Bol-
ingbroke, and De Lolme, all put together." There is
always a populous school of "political thinkers" who
deal largely in general statements and major premises ;
but they are not very happy or helpful in fitting every-
day circumstances and actual cases to their wide and
loose maxims. Honesty is not only the best policy, it
is the necessary condition of the most moderate success.
This agreement with Lord Conyngham was, however,
never carried out ; and Mr Dempster now urged Bell to
go to India, to lecture there on natural philosophy, and
to do work " in the way of tuition."

22

CHAPTER IV.

INDIA.

Andrew Bell, now Dr Bell (his University, with
thoughtful generosity, had given him an M.D.), sailed
from the Downs for India on the 21st of February
1787 with £128, 10s. in his pocket; and on the 2d
of June his ship reached Madras. His destination was
Calcutta ; but the committee for establishing a Military
Male Orphan Asylum at Madras, believing they saw in
Dr Bell "a person eminently qualified to superintend
the education of children," asked him to stay in that
city, and he accordingly cut short his journey.

Here promotion and appointments flowed in upon
him all at once. Between August and October of that
year he obtained one chaplainship to a regiment and
three deputy-chaplainships — all offices with little work
but certain pay ; and he began also to give courses of
lectures, which were very successful Those were the
days in India of the pagoda tree ; and his first course of
lectures brought him in the sum of 972 pagodas, or
£360. The lectures even became the rage with the
ladies of the town ; and one correspondent writes that
"the ladies are determined to encounter every incon-

INDIA. 23

venience for fashion's sake." He redelivered his lectures
in Calcutta, and there too with great success. Mean-
while another deputy-chaplainship came in, " being the
fifth appointment conferred upon him in little more
than a year and a half." Mr Southey goes on to point
out, that "at this time Dr Bell partook largely of the
blessings of pluralism. Besides five deputy-chaplain-
ships, he held two full chaplainships ; and he was also
superintendent of undertakers ; " and the poet com-
pares him to "Kehama, who was in eight places at
once." Most of these offices were sinecures, but all had
salaries attached to them; and the same absorbing
genius which had combined teaching with dealings in
tobacco and American currency, was here to push its
fortune in every possible or likely direction.

In 1789 he heard from St Andrews the news of his
father's death — "the death," he says, "of as good a
father, and as just and upright a man, as ever lived."

The impaid American tobacco began now to trouble
him. He wanted to provide for his orphaned sisters,
and it was advisable to look up every resource in his
power. He wrote to Mr Braxton and other friends the
most earnest letters, pointing out "the many sacrifices
made of everything dear and valuable, — of youth, health,
and fortune," to his pupils ; but no answer ever came
from any one. The fact is, the Braxtons had been
ruined by the Kevolution ; all their property in Virginia
was lost, and Bell's along with it. In spite of this, his
success in India was so rapid and so great that he soon
felt himself able to settle an annual allowance upon his
only unmarried sister. As " the chaplain was the per-

24 LIFE OF DK BELL.

son by whom funerals were furnished, and the under-
taker was his functionary," the death of Europeans in
Madras was a source of considerable gain to him. He
had an allowance of one pagoda " on every scarf -funeral
of twelve scarves, two of twenty, and three of fifty," —
whatever a scarf - funeral may mean. But these are
mysteries, known only to undertakers. Dr Bell, how-
ever, very soon, says Southey, "gave up this branch of
business."

He went on with his lectures, which were always
successful He showed original power, too, in natural
philosophy, and was the first man who ever made ice
in India, as well as the first to make and float a balloon.

The Orphan Asylum in Madras now began to take
visible form and existence. A deserted fort, called
Egmore Eedoubt, in an open and healthy situation, was
selected for the purposes of the Asylum, and fitted up
for the reception of the children. Dr Bell, whose heart
was in this work, declined to receive any salary as
superintendent, though the duties of this ofi&ce were
much heavier than those of all his chaplainships put
together. The Asylum was supported not only by
voluntary subscriptions, but also by the fines imposed
for drunkenness in the army. The boys — known as
" blue boys " — were the sons chiefly of European fathers
and Indian mothers ; and they were to be instructed in
reading, writing, and arithmetic. They were not allowed
to have any intercourse with their " maternal relations."
All seemed to be going well, except that the teachers in
the Asylum had no knowledge of their duties, and no
very great love for them ; and to add to Dr Bell's diffi-

INDU. 25

culties, as soon as an assistant had grown qualified for
his work in school, he very soon discovered that he
had also become qualified for situations where the salary
was much higher and the work far less irksome. Dr
Bell's temper was quick and even rampant ; and in all
his attempts to introduce improvements, he was met by
the silent unsympathy, or by the quiet opposition, of
every one of the masters. He was much discouraged.

One morning, in the course of his early ride along
the surf-beaten shore of Madras, he happened to pass
a Malabar school, which, as was usual with Indian
schools, was held in the open air. He saw the little
children writing with their fingers on sand,^ which, after
the fashion of such schools, had been strewn before
them for that purpose. He turned his horse, galloped
home, shouting, " Heureka ! Heureka ! " and now be-
lieved that he at length saw his way straight before
him. He at once gave orders to the usher of the
lowest classes to procure a board and some fine sand,
and to teach the alphabet to the youngest children
with this apparatus. The usher declared it was im-
possible. Here was a dead wall ; but Dr Bell had as
great a contempt for the word " impossible " as I^apo-
leon himself. A difficulty with him was simply a call
for new resource ; an impossibility was a sign that he
was just about to break into a rich vein of ore. The
despair of the usher — ^the " impossibility " of his task,
in fact — was the means of driving Dr Bell upon what
he caUed his « great discovery " in education. Finding
that nothing was to be expected from any of his assist-

^ See John viii. 6.

26 LIFE OF DR BELL.

ants, lie resolved to employ a little boy to carry out
his plans. He had long noticed a bright little fellow
called Johnnie Frisken, the son of a private soldier;
and it is this little boy who is the comer-stone of a
"system" which seemed at one time destined to edu-
cate the children of the three kingdoms. Little Frisken
carried out with the greatest ease the impossibility that
had been too much for the powers of the usher. Other
boys were soon selected : and very soon John Frisken
was appointed superintendent of these monitors and then-
classes — superintendent, in fact, of the lower part of
the school " His little friends " were both eager and
faithful; and they were amply rewarded by a smile
from the Doctor, or sufficiently punished by a frown
from his bushy black eyebrows. The plan of making
one boy teach others gradually spread throughout the
the school: and the result was progress, contentment,
and happiness. Gradually the whole of the teaching
work fell into the hands of the boys; and, so far as
instruction went, the master and his assistants were
practically superseded. Every boy was either a master
or a scholar, and "generally both;" and the utmost
harmony reigned among the white and the blue boys.
The blue boys learned to be straightforward, and to
give up the tricks and wiles which they had acquired
from their native mothers ; and Dr Bell conceived the
large ambition "to alter the character of a race of
men."

Dr Bell now started an orderly book, and, most
characteristically, the first entry made in it " conveyed
a reprimand to the schoolmaster." Mr Harvey was

INDIA. 27

desired to pay more attention ; and Mr Harvey did not
like it. Every usher, in every part of his work, was
admonished in a similar manner. The ushers did not
relish it any more than the head-master. One usher
was particularly vicious. He bit the fingers and
pinched the ears of the little boys: and another had
even dared to speak rudely to Dr Bell in the presence
of the boys themselves.

At length the head-master resigned. He gave as his
reason that he found himself incapable of executing the
duties, or supporting the fatigues, of his office of school-
master. " What duties do you speak of 1 " " Almost
every duty," was the reply. "What fatigues]" con-
tinued Dr BelL "The fatigues of the mind." His
resignation was accepted. Frisken was now eleven
years of age, and had a third of the whole school
under his care.

It was not easy to fill Mr Harvey's place. There
was no great choice of teachers in Madras. Mr Holmes,
a clerk in the Adjutant-General's Office, applied for it ;
and in his letter of application to Dr Bell, mentions
that he had heard " that you was a very odd kind of a
gentleman, and very fond of abusing and quarrelling
with the teachers, when they were not even in the least
fault imaginable." Dr Bell turned his eye upon another
candidate, the Kev. Charles William Piezold, from the
University of Wittenberg. But Mr Piezold was just as
naif as Mr Holmes. His wife stood in the way. He
writes to Dr Bell that, as " a man of family, he must
absolutely accommodate himself to the humours and
dispositions of Mrs Piezold, to her liking and disliking.

28 LIFE OF DB BELL.

pleasing and not pleasing ; " and he goes on to say that
he "showed Dr Bell yesterday the most perspicuous
marks of my being entirely incapable to succeed in the
room of Mr Harvey." " You see, dear sir, this is sin-
cerity, this is open-heartedness."

But now at length Dr Bell, whose health, owing to
worry and the climate, was not so good, began to think
of returning to Europe. The climate, the dryness and
clearness of which he at first enjoyed, began to aflPect
his health in 1794. He had been very happy in India ;
and he had rendered his " system " complete in all its
details. IMr Dempster writes to him to "bring back
a good constitution and £10,000;" and, tiring of the
eternal fine weather and the sultry sun, his thoughts
turned to the cooler air, the more varied climate, Mid
the clouds and mists of his native country. He felt,
too, that he had made his mark in India. " I think,"
he says, " I have made great progress in a very diffi-
cult attempt, and almost wrought a complete change in
the morals and character of a generation of boys." This
was much. But his health would not permit him to
remain ; and he wrote to a friend to find him a landed
estate, " the purchase of which would bring him in two
or three hundred pounds a-year."

29

CHAPTER V.

HOME AGAIN.

Dr Bell left India on the 20tli of August 1796,
followed by the praises, the regards, and the regrets
of everybody who knew him ; and he had, in addition,
£25,935, 16s. 5d. in his pocket. In his head he carried
a new idea which he thought was destined to change
the face of English society, to mould the rising genera-
tion, to raise the Church to new and greater heights of
power, and to promote the interests of the whole nation.
On his voyage home his ship called at the Cape, and Dr
Bell climbed Table Mountain, admired " the moss over
the table, soft and moist as a sponge," and visited Con-
stantia, where he found in the Calvinistic chapel " the
candlestick and the sand-glass, like a Presbyterian
Church." The sand-glass is forgotten, and its use has
utterly perished. He called at St Helena, too, and "ate
conger -eels at the Governor's garden — a rich fish."
On the 28th of December he "took up a bucket of
water and found it highly luminous when agitated ; saw
distinctly the fiery particles, and poured them on the
deck, where they shone for some time as well as in your
hand." He arrived in London on the 7 th of February

30 LIFE OF DB BELL.

1797, after a voyage of nearly six months. We can
go round the world now in three.

"Kever was I so charmed with an English spring,"
he writes to his friend General Floyd : " Scotland has
no spring, and the daughters of the spring are so
enchanting." He goes on to say that he fears his sus-
ceptibility to beauty is not so quick as it once was.
The English world was now his oyster, and the sword
with which he was about to open it was his " Report
on the Madras Asylum." This Report he made up his
mind to publish under the title of * An Experiment in
Education, made at the Male Asylum at Madras, sug-
gesting a System by which a School or Family may
Teach itself under the Superintendence of the Master or
Parent.

This Report was. in his belief, to be the seed of a
slow-growing and mighty tree, from which generation
after generation was to be fed, and under which they
were to find shelter and shade ; and Dr Bell hoped that
" by the end of next century it would be generally
practised in Europe." In one of his letters to the
printer, he says, " You will mark me for an enthusiast ;
but if you and I live a thousand years, we shall see
this system of education spread over the world." In
the meantime, however, his "humble essay" is "not
to be advertised in the London newspapers oftener than
thrice in all ; " and these three advertisements were tQ^|
distributed over the * Times,' the * Sun,' and the * Sta?
newspapers, the two latter of which have been long
sunk in endless night. He sent copies of his Report to
the most influential persons in the kingdom — dukes.

HOME AGAIN. 31

archbishops, bishops, and a large number of otlier
peers.

Meanwhile he bought some land in Dumfriesshire,
which brought him in a rental of £610 a-year.

His plans very soon began to make way in London.
A Mr Watts, one of the trustees of St Botolph's, Aid-
gate, " the oldest Protestant parochial school in London,"
handed the Eeport to Samuel Nichols (the Mr in the case
of teachers was always omitted at that period) the head-
master, who reported to the trustees that the System
" instructs the younger ones with more rapidity, because
to the monitor they can read and spell twice or thrice
in the morning and afternoon, when to the master not
more than once." This was a beginning. The plan
was accordingly adopted in this school in 1798; and
in 1803 Mr Nichols writes to Mr Watts in praise of
another " idea" of Dr Bell's — ^the use of sand. He says :
" The sand I continue to use, it being the most facili-
tating as well as the most saving method that ever was
conceived." And he gives as an instance of its efficacy
the following case : " I had a boy, who is the dullest,
heaviest, and the least inclined to learning I ever had,
who, having for six months past wrote upon sand, and
read alternately and constantly while at school, is now
able not only to spell every word, but can tell me many
words, let me ask him where I will ; and he appears
mar to have an inclination to learning, to which, when
ne first came, he had an utter aversion." The value of
this as an educational fact clearly lies in this: that
whereas the boy had before this time been called upon
merely to imitate another person by threats and by

32 LIFE OF DR BELL.

coercion, his self-activity was now agreeably roused into
free play, and the movements of his mind and finger
were accompanied by their natural modicum of pleasure.
The little boy, in shorter words, liked "writing with
a pen upon damp sand."

The System travelled down to Kendal, and was taken
up with enthusiasm by Dr Briggs, the mayor of the
town. He started a school on the Madras System, and
most thoughtfully attached to it " a penny ordinary."
" The experiment of giving the children occasional les-
sons in geography was also made here, a set of maps
having been presented to the school ; and with admirable
results." Nearly eighty years after, the present writer
has found schools, both in London and Glasgow, where
lessons in geography were given, but where a map was
never either shown or seen.

Dr Bell spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister
at Dumfries, so as to be near his lately acquired pur-
chases. He seems to have mixed a good deal in the so-
ciety of the place, and, " towards the end of his sojourn
there, to have kept a carriage and horses, together with
a coachman and footman." In August of 1799 he went
to Edinburgh, and officiated at the English Episcopal
Chapel there — services which the congregation rewarded
with a quantity of plate.

His friends now began to think that Dr Bell had
some intention of marrjring. And Mr Dempster wrote
him, that " it is the general opinion of all my female
friends, that you could only hire so dear a house, and
keep a carriage, with a view to fascinate some coy
damsel." Major Wight, another friend, wrote to

HOME AGAIN. 33

warn him against what he calls 'Mearncd ladies."
"They are" in Major Wight's opinion, "most gen-
erally deficient in that delicacy and correctness which
render a woman most truly amiable." Those specula-
tions and suggestions were, however, soon brought to
a close by Dr Bell's marrying a Miss Agnes Barclay,
the daughter of the minister of Middleton. The same
ponderous and infallible Major Wight thus describes,
in the epistolary manner of the period, the new condi-
tion of Dr Bell : " You are now placed in your native
country, in the midst of your friends, in unembarrassed
affluence, and married to the wife of your choice, aided
by science, and by an ample acquaintance with practical
matters."

Dr Bell married at the not immature age of forty-
seven.

34

CHAPTER VL

DR BELL AS A COUNTRY PARSON.

In the year 1801, Dr Bell was presented to the Rectory
of Swanage in Dorsetshire — a living of more than
jC600 a-year. The parish was a very small one. It
contained about three hundred families ; and there were
three Roman Catholics and twenty Methodists within
its bounds. They were a quiet, simple, primitive,
kindly jH^ople. Among the more notable inhabitants
>V}\s Thomtvs Maxwell, a retired quarryman, a great
j^tudout of books, and the founder of a musical society
iu the place. He was the author of several books— one
oil umthomatictU geography; and his tombstone states
that ho ** broke through the barrier to literature, and
acquired a degree of knowledge which might have ranked
him witli the first philosophers of the age." The reason,
given farther on, why he was not in the first rank of
phiU^ophers, is that he was a " child of solitude." He
is thus to be classed with those village Hampdens,
nuite inglorious Miltons, and others whom an unkind
fate or " the force of circumstances " has prevented from
iloing very much either for mankind or for themselves.
Another noteworthy family consisted also of quarry-

DR BELL AS A COUNTRY PARSON. 35

men. They were called Stickland; and several mem-
bers of this family were employed as teachers in
the Sunday-school "imder the new system." The
salary for each of the two teachers in the Sunday-
school was only fifteen shillings a-year ; this was. after-
wards raised to twenty-six shillings : hut in the course
of time the subscriptions to the schools fell away en-
tirely. In spite of the complete disappearance of his
salary, John Stickland stuck to his post, and was not
to be discouraged. He even provided the children
with books at his own expense; and he instructed
them in sacred music. Dr Bell became a constant
visitor at the Sunday-school, and was in the habit of
going from class to class, asking questions, throwing in
hints, explaining passages, and in general making him-
self an element of stir and revolution. The children
looked a great deal more at the burly eager black-
browed Scotchman than at their books ; and Mr Stick-
land had now and then to request the doctor to " be
pleased to pitch himself." In 1802, Dr Bell intro-
duced his System; and his energetic efforts to make
the little scholars imderstand and appropriate every
even the minutest detail, are still a memory in the
parish. "He hammered it into them," Mr Stickland
used to say, "like a blacksmith on an anviL"

Education, under the enthusiastic fostering of Bell,
spread in the parish, until there were no fewer than
thirteen day-schools in it, and three Sunday-schools.
The introduction of his plans into one of the disorderly
local schools was, he says, " like magic ; order and regu-
larity started up all at once. In half an hour more was

36 LIFE OF DR BELL.

learned, and far better, titan liad been done the wbole
day before. A class which could only get one line
to a lesson a fortnight ago, now gets eight : and all
say their lessons well, and come on in like proportion.
. • , They quit the school at dismissal with reluc-
tance ; and they return before their time to renew the
competition."

But, while a bright day seemed to be rising for the
new system, there were clouds and tempests in Dr
Bell's life which were destroying his domestic peace.
N'othing is known of the nature of these "unhappy
dissensions." No paper exists to lead or to mislead
us on the subject. We do not know whether Dr Bell
or his wife were " in fault," who was most to blame,
or whether a fundamental incompatibility of dispo-
sition prevented all chance of a kindly arrangement.
A youthful bridegroom of forty-seven, who has had
it all his own way in India for twenty years, was not
very likely to alter his habits, or to tone down his
somewhat combustible disposition, after he had passed
the age of fifty. The two separated finally in April
1806, before they had been married six years. His-
tory — this and others — knows nothing of Agnes Bar-
clay, her looks, her ways, her character, her hopes, her
fears, or her aims — nothing at' all except her name.
And so Mrs Bell disappears entirely from the scene with-
out leaving behind her a single trace of her existence.^

^ De Quincey appends the following note to his essay on S. T.
Oolerldge : " Most men hare their enemies and calumniators ;
Dr Bell had his, who happened, rather indecorously, to be his wife
— from whom he was legally separated, or (as in Scotch law it is

DR BELL AS A COUNTBT PARSON. 37

In addition to being an innovator in education, Dr
Bell was a vigorous revolutionary in other matters.
He did not reserve his pulpit for vague shadowy state-
called) divorced; not, of course, divorced d vinculo matrimonii
which only amounts to a divorce in the English sense (such a
divorce as enables the parties to contract another marriage), but
simply divorced d mensd et thoro. This legal separation, however,
did not prevent the lady from persecuting the unhappy Doctor
with everlasting letters, indorsed outside with records of her en-
mity and spite. Sometimes she addressed her epistles thus : * To
that supreme of rogues, who looks like the hangdog that he is.
Doctor (such a doctor !) Andrew Bell.' Or, again : ' To the ape
of apes, and the knave of knaves, who is recorded to have once
paid a debt, but a small one you may be sure it was that he
selected for this wonderful experiment — in fact, it was Hd, Had
it been on the other side of 6d. he must have died before he could
have achieved so dreadful a sacrifice.' Many others, most ingeni-
ously varied in the style of abuse, I have heard rehearsed by Cole-
ridge, Southey, Lloyd, &c. ; and one, in particular, addressed to
the. Doctor, when spending a summer in the cottage of Robert
Newton, an old soldier, in Grasmere, presented on the back two
separate adjurations, one specially addressed to Robert himself,
pathetically urging him to look sharply after the rent of his lodg-
ings ; and the other more generally addressed to the unfortunate
person as yet undisclosed to the British public (and in this case
turning out to be myself), who might be incautious enough to pay
the postage at Ambleside. ' Don't grant him an hour's credit,'
she urged upon the person unknown, * if I had any regard to my
family.' * Cash doum/* ahe wrote tv^ice over, "Why the Doctor
submitted to these annoyances, nobody knew. Some said it was
mere indolence; but others held it to be a cunning compromise
with her inexorable malice. The letters were certainly open to
the * public ' eye ; but meantime the * public ' was a very narrow
one ; the clerks in the post-office had little time for digesting such
amenities of conjugal affection ; and the chance bearer of the let-
ters to the Doctor would naturally solve the mystery by supposing
an eactra portion of madness in the writer, rather than an eactra
poition of knavery in the reverend receiver."

38 LIFE OF DB BELL.

ments of abstract doctrmes, but attiEicked Satan wher-
ever he found him, and with most vigour and success
in his fleshly strongholds; and on the 15th of June
1806, "preached twice, and the same sermon, both fore-
noon and afternoon, on cow-pock." But he not merely
preached, he vaccinated everybody, "from seventy-
eight years of age to twelve months ; " and he set every
body vaccinating, his own wife (before she left him),
old women, and schoolmistresses, in all the parishes
round about : and so thorough and successful was
his treatment, that there was not a single instance
of any of his patients being attacked by small-pox,
which was at that time a periodical epidemic of the
most fatal nature in every part of Great Britain. It
appears that, as there were poets before Homer, and
novelists before Cervantes, there was also a vaccinator
before Dr Jenner. This was Benjamin Jesty, of Downs-
hay, near Swanage. He lived to be seventy-nine, and
was, says his veracious tombstone, "particularly noted
for having been the first person (known) who intro-
duced the cow-pox by inoculation, and who, from his
great strength of mind, made the experiment from the
cow on his wife and two sons, in the year 1774."
The historic tombstone is silent as to whether his great
strength of mind induced him to try the experiment
upon himself.

Dr Bell also introduced the manufacture of straw-
plait into Swanage. This was at best a doubtful ad-
vantage. The persons who purchased the straw-plait
did not pay the workers in money, but in truck, — ^thus
earning a profit at both ends. The health of the work-

DB BELL AS A COUNTRT PARSON. 39

ers was impaired by long sitting ; and as soft delicate
hands were necessary, they were not allowed to do any
household work.

In fact, Dr Bell did everything he could. There
was no limit to his energy and versatility. Benefit
societies, schools, friendly meetings, clubs, visiting from
house to house, advising with farmers, — ^nothing came
amiss to him ; his large, fiery, friendly nature had an
infection ia it which few could resist. He was hospit-
able to the extent of keeping open house ; and under
his influence the social spirit flowed and spread like a
strong tide all over the neighbourhood.

40

CHAPTEE VII.

ANDREW BELL AND JOSEPH LANCASTER.

These are the dioscuri of modern popular education.
Like other great and small " discoverers," they hated
each other with a perfect hatred; they accused each
other of stealing each other's " ideas ; " they did their
utmost to fence in the sky for the benefit of their own
separate and separating " Churches ; " and they taught
their followers to cultivate a mutual detestation, which
has no parallel outside of science or theology. Soldiers,
who have to make war on other nations, frequently
form the most lasting friendships among the men they
take prisoner ; but to men engaged in the war of words,
there is no custom of capture, and little opportunity of
turning hatred into affection. How many wakeful nights
has this unchristian spirit cost the present biographer !
Bell and Lancaster were as jealous of each other as two
women in love with the same man ; and even the common
love of children and education could not bring them into
one mind. Must human affairs always progress by the
method of antagonism — " madman or slave, must man be
one 1 " George the Third, in an interview with Lancaster,
said to him : " It is my will that every child in my king-

ANDBEW BELL AND JOSEPH LANCA8TEB. 41

dom should be able to read the Bible." The wish never
went an inch beyond the expression ; the words remain-
ed mere words ; no step was taken to carry the royal will
into the cottages of the poor. Here were two seemingly
heaven-sent men who could have done it ; but instead
of doing it, they set to work and quarrelled. They were
men eager to label their names across the education
of the people, and to turn their systems into banners
for the marshalling of hostile camps. They were also
both Christians, followers of the eternal Peace-maker,
of the Divine Son, who asked His Father to forgive
the very men who were nailing Him to the cross. But
religion is too good for everyday concerns; it must
not be mixed up with the secular — it must be kept ex-
clusively for Sunday wear. It lends itself beautifully
to hymns and prayers, and is not out of place in compo-
sitions called " sermons ; " but it is a foreign leaven in
everyday intercourse between man and man — between
Lancaster and Bell, — that must be regulated, like other
pieces of business, by the multiplication-table. Thus,
and thus only, is " civilisation" to be advanced. Besides,
if religion is good, it is good chiefly for others.

Joseph Lancaster had a message ; and his story of it
is not without pathos. " I was walking," he says, " from
Deptf ord to Greenwich, when my attention was attracted
by this inscription : * To the glory of God, and to the
benefit of poor children ; ' and while I was pleasantly
meditating upon the founder giving glory to God, the
children burst forth into singing His praises. My heart
was melted; and it pleased God to implant within me
a fervent wish and desire that I might one day thus

42 LITE OP DR BELL.

honour Him; and through all the vicissitudes of the
intervening period, my hope was seldom long clouded.
I knew not how it was to be accomplished ; but, being
assured that it was a divine impression, my mind was
constantly endeavouring to find out a way. In 1798
I proposed something of this kind to a number of gen-
tlemen, but it failed. I had not long entered into the
straw-hat business ; but I was persuaded this was the
channel to accomplish my wish."

Here, surely, in the deadest time of England's reli-
gious feeling, was a manifestation, in the dull streets
of Deptford, of the divine. Lancaster, at the age of
eighteen, opened a school in his father's house; and
not long after he happened to possess himself of a copy
of Dr Bell's celebrated Report. In the year 1804, he
wrote to Dr Bell from the "Free School, Borough
Road," on the "21st of 11th month," enumerating his
difficulties, and asking for advice. He mentions, as
one of the " obstacles to the diffusion " of popular edu-
cation, " the price of sand in London — 9s. the load ; "
and he asks for " further information on the use of the
sand, — whether dry or wet, and how the boys were first
taught their letters." Lancaster further offers to travel
down and talk with Dr BelL The meeting between
these two celebrated personages took place in 1805.

Dr Bell's account of their meeting is full of preju-
dice. His feelings were, no doubt, much influenced by
Church considerations ; and as he was writing to Mrs
Trimmer — ^a buttress, if not a pillar, of the Church —
he was more likely to show these feelings and their in-
fluences with perfect openness. He says that Lancaster

ANDREW BELL AND JOSEPH LAKCASTEB. 43

" seemed disposed to copy him on every point," except
on that of the training of teachers. And the good Doc-
tor, with his eager practical mind, is filled with scorn
at the notions of Lancaster upon this subject Lan-
caster^ with the 'Adive simpleness of an inquiring mind,
had expressed his opinion that it was as well for a
teacher to know something of the nature and growth of
the mind and soul upon which he had to operate. Dr
Bell calls this " forming his teachers by lectures on the
passions;" and thunders out, "Nothing was ever so
burlesque!" And he goes on, — seeing with perfect
truth, as far as he does see — " It is by attending the
school, seeing what is going on there, and taking a share
in the office of tuition, that teachers are to be formed,
and not by lectures and abstract instruction." Most
true; but "it takes all sorts to make up a world.'*
How to train a teacher is a problem which still remains
to be solved ; and at the present time there are many
good ajid true minds hard at work upon it But to
put the question upon its lowest ground, it is plain that
the teacher, who has intrusted to him a veryldifficult
task, ought to know something, be it more or less, of
growing human nature,— of the laws according to which
human knowledge is acquired, and of the chief hindrances
to the production of strong minds and healthy souls, —
just as the carpenter is the better for knowing the grain
and fibre of woods, and the farmer for learning the
chemical components of soil and manure.

If Dr Bell ever had any kindly feeling for, or
sympathy with, Lancaster and his labours, the notable
Mrs Trimmer, who — according to her own account — ^had

44 LIFE OF DR BELL.

'' long been engaged in striving to promote the interests
of the Church," very soon put all that out of his head.
She made two great discoveries: one, that Lancaster
was "building on the foundation of Dr Bell;" and
the other, that " there was something* in his plan that
was inimical to the interests of the Established Church."
Here was the ecclesiastical trumpet clearly blown. Dr
Bell would have been unfaithful to his Church had
he forborne to treat and to describe Mr Lancaster as an
impostor and a plagiarist. And so the armoury of evil
names is ransacked. " Quackery, conceit, ignorance,
a consummate front " (whatever that may mean), a
"plausible and ostentatious guise" — these and many
other accusations are thrown vigorously about. Li the
case of Dr Bell, all this only meant that he was jealous
of Lancaster, and looked upon him as a kind of poacher.
But Mrs Trimmer saw farther. She saw that Lancaster
was an incendiary and a conspirator. "Of all the
plans," she says in one of her letters to Dr Bell, " that
have appeared in this kingdom likely to supplant the
Churchy Mr Lancaster's seem to me the most formid-
able." And she mixes him up with Jacobins, Ulum-
inati, PhUanthropinists, sectarists, and infidels, and is
determined to erase him and his works from the face
of England. Here is a quiet straw - plaiting Quaker,
who tries to teach large numbers of poor children, and
he is spoken of as a kind of spiritual and diabolic Guy
Fawkes. Joseph Lancaster, on the other hand, wrote
nothing in reply, but quietly said to his neighbour
Friends, "Sarah Trimmer is a bigot; and having set
up to herself that golden image, the Church, she wants

ANDREW BELL AND JOSEPH LANCASTEB. 45

every knee to bow down to it." But Mrs Trimmer will
not let Lancaster alone even in his private life. ** It is
a curious facty" she says, " that he was not originally a
Quaker, but an Anabaptist, intended by his father (who
is a preacher himself) for what they call a minister}
Whether he changed for the love of a pretty Quaker,
whom he married, or whether the broad brim was the
best cover for his scheme, I cannot say." Had all this
taken place at the present day, one would say that ^Irs
Trimmer was suffering from the spreti injuria amoria ;
but in the early part of this century, all good Church-
men believed that they, and they alone, held the patent
for the Christian rehgion, and this kind of language
was employed to deter aU persons from interference
with their exclusive rights.

Dr Bell is more kind, if at the same time a little
too patronising. ''In his (Mr Lancaster's) hands this
beautiful system has the advantage of being conducted
with admirable temper, ingenuity, and ability ; and he
discovers much contrivance, and even wit, iu the rami-
fications of its application." But in another letter,
written at a later date, he describes the simple child-
like man as "illiterate and ignorant, with a brazen
front, consummate assurance, and the most artful and
plausible address, not without ability and ingenuity,
heightened in its effects under the Quaker's guise."
His family, too, were anything but what they ought to
be. ** His account of his family in unguarded moments
—Dissenters, Roman Catholics, infidels — is most ex-
traordinary." In another letter, Mrs Trimmer flatters

^ The italics and the scorn are Mrs Trimmer's.

46 LIFE OF DR BELL.

Dr Bell by describing Lancaster's procedure as " a per-
version of your excellent plan for purposes deeper than
meet the eye." This is one of the very oldest methods
of abuse, and one of the most efltective. You do not
know anything about the intentions of the other man,
and you are therefore free to conjecture the very worst.
The King was going to help Lancaster ; and a school was
about to be opened at Windsor on his plan, to be called
the King*8 School. But a zealous ally of Mrs Trimmer's,
the Rev. Mr Plimley, rector of Windsor, defeated this
philanthropic " attempt of the arrogant Quaker." Mrs
Trimmer even succeeded in disturbing the repose of the
higher orders of the clergy. " The dignitaries of the
Church," she says, "even the highest^ are fully con-
vinced of the danger of the plan of forming the chil-
dren of the lower orders into one organised body?- , . .
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge are
desirous to take an active part against him. ... In
short, his wings will be clipped in some degree." Such
wrath disturbs celestial minds — such passions ruffle the
quiet bosoms even of the sage barn-door fowL

^ Mrs Trimmer's italics.

47

CHAPTER VIIL

THE BTSTBM SPREADS.

The trustee of a charity school in Whitechapel had
fallen in love with the System, and was anxious to have
it introduced. Mrs Trimmer was also contemplating a
girls' school at Brentford. Accordingly Dr Bell came
up to town. In commencing the organisation of the
school at Whitechapel, " he first chose about twenty of
the best and cleanest boys, and having tried them in
reading, etc., he selected ten or twelve of the best of
them as teachers and assistants for the different classes.
He then selected, by further trials, the two best of them
for the first class, and the two next for the second ; and
so on, till he had five or six sets of teachers." He told
all the boys present that he was going to help the
scholars to teach themselves, and at the same time he
"was also going to seek instruction at their hands."
When Dr Bell, soon after, left for Swanage, some
obstacles arose; and his excitement and determination
rose with the emergency. " By — meaning through and
under — God ! " he exclaimed, " the work will go on, and
flourish and spread far and near."

Mr Davis, the trustee of the Whitechapel school, was

48 LIFE OF DB BELL.

80 well satisfied with what he saw there, that he deter-
mined to found and endow a school at Gower's Walk —
which should be a school of industry as well for instruc-
tion in the ordinary subjects. In the school shoemaking
was tried, but this did not succeed. Printing was then
introduced, and the boys took to it with immense eager-
ness. They " composed, distributed, and worked off to
admiration," and found the labour " highly amusing."

Lord Radstock, a great admirer of the System, sug-
gested in 1807 to the then Archbishop of Canterbury,
that he should establish a school for two hundred boys
at Lambeth ; and in the beginning of May, Dr Bell ob-
tained a licence from his bishop " to be absent from his
benefice of Swanage for two years."

The System was introduced into the female orphan
asylum at Lambeth; and in 1808 Dr Bell was ap-
pointed "perpetual guardian" of the institution, in
order that he might have every facility for the carrying
out of his plan. He was also invited to remodel the
Royal Military Asylum at Chelsea. In explaining his
System to the Duke of York, then Commander-in-chief,
he said that his '^ teachers and assistant teachers were
his sergeants and corporals, his reports their orderly
books ; " and that it was in the school of the army that
he had learned his own lesson.

About this time — the beginning of 1807 — Lancaster
inserted in the 'Star' newspaper an advertisement which
produced in Dr BeU's mind a considerable amount of
excitement In this advertisement, he stated that he
had "invented, under the blessing of Divine Providence,
a new and mechanical system of education for the use of

THE SYSTEM SPREADS. 49

schools ; " and that, '* hy this system, paradoxical as it
may appear, above one thousand children may be taught
and governed by one master only. . . . Any boy who
can read, can teach arithmetic with the certainty of
a mathematician, although he knows nothing about it
himself." This claim to teach a subject that the teacher
does not himself know is constantly making its appear-
ance ; and it is one of the diseases that accompany the
low feyerish habit of mind which demands a method,
but cares little for the knowledge which must accompany
the method — which looks for a panacea, and overleaps
the need for first-hand knowledge. This constantly
cropping-up demand impeded for a long time the science
of medicine ; and it even now impedes, to a large extent,
the possible science of education.

Mr Whitbread, the eminent brewer and member of
Parliament, was at this time engaged on an attempt to
remodel the poor-laws, and to introduce a system of
national education. The differences between Dr Bell
and Mr Lancaster were submitted to him, and he
settled, or appeared to settle, them in an amicable way.
He stated that "Dr BeU unquestionably preceded Mr
Lancaster, and to him the world is first indebted for
one of the most useful discoveries which has ever been
submitted to society. , . . Mr Lancaster at the same
time asserts that many of the very useful methods
practised at his school are exclusively his own." Who
knows ? Who needs to know ? Who cares to know ?
Lancaster hardly knew himself. But he gave a noble life
to popular education, and no doubt he has his reward.

Another school on Dr Bell's system was begun in

D

50 LIFB OF DB BELL.

East Maiylebone in 1807. It opened with three boys,
and in a short time niunbered two hundred and fifty.
The success of this school suggested the formation of a
society for the promotion of education and the training
of teachers; but nothing came of this movement till
several years after. It was, however, very cheering to
Dr Bell to find letters pouring in upon him from all
parts of the kingdom — from correspondents who asked
to be provided with teachers trained upon the famous
Madras Sptem. From Ireland, too, came an application
from Eichard Lovell Edgeworth, who wanted "some
hints on the subject of education." The art of instruc-
tion was at this time very backward in Ireland; and
the ideas of discipline very rudimentary. " The boy who
had written the best copy was ordered by the master to
pull the other^s hair, and so to do till they arrived at
their seats in the school again."

A petition from the West Indies — from Barbadoes —
also came to Dr Bell. It asked for a " well-instructed
boy," to be sent out immediately ; and a young jprotSgS
of Bell^ Lewis Warren " was sent out. The Bishop of
London was very enthusiastic about Warren, and wrote
of him : " Ho will make his fortune and immortalise
his name. He will be ranked among the greatest bene-
factors to mankind, and (although it is a bold thing to
say) he will be doing as much good in the Atlantic
Ocean as Bonaparte is doing mischief on the continent
of Europe." This contrast between oceans and conti-
nents, Warrens and Bonapartes, is very pleasing. But
Warren very soon withdrew his light from education,
and gave it to the more lucrative subject of blacking.

THE STSTEM SPBEADS. 51

The West India planters were, however, up in arms.
They deprecated Dr Bell's introducing education among
their negroes. They looked upon education as something
akin to small-pox or yellow fever. They ask whether
there " is nothing further to be done in Great Britain
and Ireland in the instruction and civilisation of the
lowest classes, that he must adventure the fruits of his
imagination to our side of the Atlantic ? " If England
is fully educated and civilised, there is Ireland ; and a
Scotch gentleman, " who is now at the right hand " of
the correspondent, suggests that even in Scotland the
lower classes are not so highly polished as they might
be. The planter goes on to complain that England
never thinks of her colonies, except to tax or to edu-
cate them ; that they are the corpora villa for experi-
ment ; and to " entreat the Doctor to contemplate the
miseries of St Domingo," and to give up a scheme that
would "make him answerable in another world for
so wanton and cruel a misapplication of his talents."
And the writer concludes by stating that, on the Day of
Judgment, Dr Bell would not be able to plead "as a
justification for the injury done us, the benefits to our
slaves, who are, I sincerely believe, better off in their
present condition than instruction in letters would make
them."

52

CHAPTER IX.

DR BBLL IN DURHAM.

In the beginning of the year 1808, Dr Bell was trying
to find a living near London, in exchange for his rectory
at Swanage, in order that he might be able to give per-
sonal aid and superintendence to the schools which were
rising up under his system on every side. In one of
these applications for an ecclesiastical position, he de-
scribes himself as " more than fifty, and a bad life ; "
and points to " the zeal with which I have devoted
myself to the King and Church." The motivation, by
aid of " the bad life " and " the King," — who takes
pi^ocodonce of the Church, — sounds to our modem ears
somewhat odd. About this time he became acquainted
with the Bishop of Durham, who appointed him one of
his chaplains, and presented him with the Mastership of
Shorburn Hospital

A long triangular correspondence, about dilapidations,
between the Bishop of Durham, the Bishop of Ely (the
late Master), and Dr Bell, followed, with which the pres-
ent reader need not be detained. The Hospital, which is
near Durham, had been founded by Hugh Pudsey, " the
joly By shop of Durham," for sixty-five lepers ; and the

DR BELL IN DUBHAM. 53

original endowment dated from before 1181. The lepers
were well treated. Their daily allowance was " a loaf
weighing five marks, and a gallon of ale to each, and
betwixt every two a mess or commons of flesh three
days in the week ; and of fish, cheese, or butter on the
remaining four ; on high festivals, a double mess ; and
in particular, on the feast of St Cuthbert, in Lent,
fresh salmon, if it could be had, — if not, other fresh
fish; and on Michaelmas-day four messed on a goose,
with fresh fish, flesh, or eggs," — and so on. The sick
leper had fire and candles, and all necessaries, till he
should get better or die, — dcmec melioretur vel moriatur.
In the seventeenth century, maimed seamen and soldiers
were substituted for lepers.

Dr BeU wished to hold this office along with his
living at Swanage ; but this was found to be against the
conditions of the Mastership. The bishop accordingly
requested Dr BeU to write to his patron, Mr Calcraft,
and beg him to present the living to a Mr Gale, the
bishop's nominee. Mr Gale was not beloved by Swan-
age ; and this lack of aflfection was ardently returned.
He writes in the plainest terms to Dr Bell : " My good
cousin, you begin yours with saying you hope I am
in love with Swanage. I told you the moment I saw
it, and even before we arrived at it, my idea of it.
You talk of summer. The fault is in winter, as you
too well know. You are up to the neck in puddle and
mire; and in summer you are smothered with the
dust, and roasted in those parts where the houses are,
by the burning sun. The very sight of the country
gave poor Mr Saunders (the curate) the horrors. . . •

54 LIFE OF DB BELL.

I have told the bishop that, instead of doing me a
service, the expense of this place will be the ruin of
me; and I am most truly sorry that I was so great
a fool as to come to it without having first seen it ;
and well for me had it been at the bottom of the sea
before I ever arrived at it." And yet Mr Gale's
living in Yorkshire was only £150 a-year, while the
Swanage rectory amounted to £600.

Applications for teachers trained on the Madras
System, came in almost daily — from London, Twicken-
ham, Plymouth, and many other places. As early as
1805, Dr Bell had recommended the establishment
of a Board of Education for the whole country ; and
in 1808 he published a ' Sketch of a National Institu-
tion for Training up the Children of the Poor in Moral
and Religious Principles, and in Habits of Useful Indus-
try.' And this was the beginning of the present National
Society, which is still strong and prosperous.

The clergy of the diocese of Durham formed them-
selves in 1811 into "A Society for the Education of
the Children of the Poor, according to the System
invented by Dr BeUj" and another society of the
same kind was founded in Devonshire by Sir Thomas
Acland. The formation of this Devonshire society
was much quickened by the expressed intention of
Mr Lancaster "to visit this county in October;" by
a report that he came " with royal authority ; " and by
his statement that " he will teach the people of Devon-
shire a lesson that will surprise them, and such as
they have not been used to."
. The System had been also adopted in the Preparatory

PR BELL m DURHAM. 55

School of Christ's Hospital at Hertford ; and Mr Davis,
on visiting it, tells Dr Bell that " I and my wife were
delighted almost to tears. An intelligent, weU-disposed,
unobtrusive master — able, active, diligent, correct, cheer-
ful teachers — Chappy boys, all employed — the hum of in-
dustry — marked books — registers beautifully kept —
reading and ciphering after your own heart, — all bespoke
the carefulness and attention which had been paid to
the directions given." And their success seems to have
fired Dr BeU with the ambition of applying the Madras
System to classical education.

In the autumn of 1811, the controversy between the
partisans of BeU and Lancaster broke out again, and
with increased virulence. Lord Radstock, an admirer
of Dr BeU's, sent to the * Morning Post' an "eirtra-
ordinary rhapsody," to which he gave the title of
" The Sleepers Awakened : a Vision." Li this paper, the
writer dreams that he saw " the whole bench of bishops
dressed in their robes, their mitres on their heads, aad
all of them seemingly in a most profound sleep." Then
there appeared " a chubby-faced little man, in an entire
drab-coloured suit and a broad-brimmed hat," who " ex-
claimed in a slow and sonorous tone of voice — *Ye
slothful and mouldering puny dignitaries, have ye not
slumbered your fiU ? ' " The bishops were frightened ;
and " the whole of them rushed out of the hall together,
in no less apparent agony than with precipitation." The
chubby-faced little man had " dashed a scroll to the
floor," and on the scroll was written "Joseph Lan-
caster, the inventor of the Lancasterian System" Then
Lord Eadstock, feeling " a gentle tap on the shoulder,"

56 LIFE OF DB BELL.

turned and saw " a lovely youth standing by my side,
clad in white, and of heavenly mien." (The lovely
youth was Dr Bell, who had a heavy, fleshy, fiery-red
face, — ^was fifty-eight, and, as he himself said, " a had
lifa") The youth " spoke as follows : * Be of good
cheer, thou friend to the Established Church, and
fear not' " The editor of the * Morning Post * appended
the following note to the end of the paper : " The above
subject being of considerable importance to the public,
it is scarcely necessary for us to state that we shall
leave our colunms open to the free and liberal discus-
sion of it"

The lists were now ready, and the challenge had been
sounded. Mr Lancaster at once thought it necessary to
address a series of letters to the "British Public," in
which he changed his attitude, became the attacking
party, drew his sword, and threw away the scabbard.
It was a pity. For whereas Lancaster had before
thought only of his children, his work, and the wants
of the country, he now descended into an arena of
personalities, where the line of another man's con-
sciousness is constantly crossed, and where motives and
meannesses are lavishly and loudly imputed. He said
that the King had sent for'him; "unsolicited and un-
expectedly," had honoured him with his name and
patronage; and that then, and only then, "Dr Bell
was dragged out of his retirement to claim a plan, the
merit of which I assert is not his." He accuses the
reverend Doctor of having for years kept " the benefit of
his boasted system " even from the children of his own
parish; and adds that, had it not been "for the glitter

DB BELL IN DUBHAM. 57

and sound of the royal patronage," he would never have
left his solitude or his occupation "of planting cab-
bages." He taunts Dr Bell with being an advocate for
"the universal limitation of knowledge," and quotes
from one of Dr Bell's pamphlets the fatal words — " The
children of the poor should not even be taught to write
or to cipher." Professor Marsh, who had the mis-
fortune to preach a sermon in St Paul's to seven
thousand charity children, in which he attacked Lan-
caster, joined in the controversy. The controversy
quickly rose into higher regions; and, as was to be
expected, the * Edinburgh Review ' took the side of Mr
Lancaster, while Southey in the * Quarterly ' appeared as
an ally of Dr BelL

58

CHAPTER X.

PBOQBESS.

The friends of Dr Bell and the Madras System were
desirous of establishing a " National Institution ^ which
should extend the benefits of the new ideas to all parts
of the three kingdoms. They were also bent upon estab-
lishing — ^what was a very minor matter, about which
not a soul cares a straw nowadays — " the priority of Dr
Bell's claim." One of the very first discussions which
arose at the preliminary meetings was, whether it was
advisable to convert the present schoolmasters to Dr
Bell's ideas, or to create a new set of teachers by found-
ing a seminary for training them. A third course sug-
gested was " to have one school in perfect order in
the metropolis, where masters may be trained, and to
which they may be referred." In the course of time,
it was resolved to foimd a society, "to be called the
Metropolitan Society for Promoting the Education of
the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church,
according to the System invented and practised by the
Bev. Dr BelL" Part of the plan of the society was
also " to show the danger of Lancaster's proceedings."
But Mr Bouger, one of the most powerful prota-

PR06BESS. 59

gonists in this moyement, had a larger plan in lus
head. His plan was " to establish not a metropolitan,
but a national, society, for the education of the poor."
Everybody that was anybody was ready to give his
support to either plan. " The Prince Regent approves ;
that wisest and best of men, Mr Perceval, will give it
his best support " (Mr Perceval was the unhappy Prime
Minister of the day) ; and these ceremonial and offi-
cial heads of the State were followed by a crowd of
peers and bishops. But the movement was in some
danger. The new society got mixed up with a " Bart-
lett's Boys' Society," and several of its best supporters
refused to join it under this restriction. At length
the ship was fairly afloat : and the name was by gen-
eral consent altered to " The National Society for Pro-
moting the Education of the Poor in the Principles
of the Established Church, throughout England and
Wales." The President of the Committee was the
Archbishop of Canterbury: and the vice-presidents
numbered among them the Archbishop of York, several
bishops, the Lord High Chancellor, the Speaker of the
House of Commons, and a number of peers.

A sub-committee was also appointed; and its first
work was to recommend that a central school for the
education of a thousand children should be established
near the city of Westminster, and that a similar school
should be established in or near the city of London.
Temporary rooms were meanwhile adapted to the pur-
poses of a school in Gray's Inn Lane.

Some doubt was felt by several members of the com-
mittee as to the part that should be taken by Dr Bell

1 .>•

• * .

• ■ •

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::ji of dr bell

-:.:.:> ul'm; fln«I the Ei<liop of London

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: .:: : !:.:-'•' --' -T-rritt, an entlmsias-

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PROGBESS. 61

fact is, that Dr Bell wrote a terribly lumbering and pain-
ful style, and no one now can read Mb books ; but then
no one can speak for another as well as the man himself
— ^however clumsily and stupidly he may speak.

Dr Bell's introduction to Mr Bamford at Grasmere
gives a not uninteresting glimpse of the state of teaching
in the begining of this century. Mr Bamford was the
head -boy of the grammar-school at Ambleside; and
when Mr Johnson went to London, he was sent to take
charge of the school at Grasmera " I was sitting one
day," he says, "reading Baptista Mantuates, while a
little brat was squeaking his letters before me, when an
elderly venerable-looking gentleman entered the school."
The custom in Grasmere school was for the master to do
as much reading of his own in the school as he could,
and to " hear the lessons " of the children, who came
up separately four times a-day to " say " them. This
ancient superstition still lingers in some parts of the
country, under the name of "the individual system."
Mr Bamford gives a bright and pleasant picture of
Hartley Coleridga " Hartley was very irregular in his
time of attending school He used to run in about ten
o'clock, with his hat on his head, chewing a slate-pencil
in his moutL * Where have you been 1 ' Hartley,
laughing, * I really don't know.' * You are a strange
fellow. Hartley, to go on in this way. Get me forty
lines of Homer in such a book.* 'Shall I say them
now, sir*?'"

The System was now spreading itself over the country.
Mr Marriott tells him that, near Lutterworth, he wiU
" find several parishes rendered comparatively a heaven

62 UFE OF DB BELL.

upon earth by teaching." And Mr Justice Park wrote to
Mr Marriott that Dr Bell's *' plan is one of the most
stupendous engines that ever have been wielded, since
the days of our Saviour and His apostles, for the ad-
vancement of God's true religion upon earth."

The Central School was now beginning to do good
work, but also to be a source of some trouble The
** masters and mistresses " who had come to be trained
as teachers were, in many instances, '^ imable to write, and
in some even to read ; " and what was worse, they seem
to have shown themselves quite indifferent to the merits
of the System- In the Charterhouse, however, where it
had been introduced, the System seems to have been
successful; and the Archbishop of Canterbury enter-
tained Dr Bell "for an hour with eulogiums on the
effects produced in this school by the Madras System."

During this period, young Bamford seems to have
been his private secretary and amanuensis. Of Bamford
he took possession body and souL He would have .him
in attendance at six in the morning ; and sometimes till
eleven at night. His chief work was transcribing,
''from little scraps of paper and backs of letters, the
chaotic effusions of Dr Bell's ardent mind." Young
Bamford hardly dared to speak to a friend or to call
upon an acquaintance ; and he " looked upon all others
who spoke kindly to me, or wished me to seek some
relaxation, as insidious enemies." " He exacted of me,"
Mr Bamford goes on to say, "the prostration of the
intellect, the affections, and the actions." For all this
absolute devotion of time and soul, Bamford was paid
chiefly with promises. Dr Bell also represented to him

PBOGRESS. 63

that the copying and recopying of the notions, ideas,
plans, and suggestions which day by day he committed
to odd scraps of paper was " real training, far better
than being at the University." And Mr Bamford adds,
with half-Tinconscious humour, " nobody knew where it
might end, or what you may come to, if you give your-
self Tip to this thing."

The Central School was in the meantime prospering
more and more. It was introducing into England not
only a new type, but a new tone, in school-work. The
Keport of 1812 says, among other things : " The pleas-
ure and delight children take in their school, wherever
the Madras System of education is introduced, is a
well-known and gratifying fact. . . . Children who
had acquired, at their admission, the most disorderly
habits and ungovernable conduct, have actually been
reformed. This is not only visible in the school, but
it has been observed by the parents at home, many of
whom have not been backward in confessing the same
with tears of joy and gratitude. ... Flagellation
has not once been resorted to, . . . which shows that
self -discipline, as well as self -instruction, is produced by
the new system of education."

The National Society was also prospering, and widen-
ing its hospitable borders with great rapidity. In 1812
it had 62 schools, with 8620 children, under its care;
in 1813 their numbers had grown to 230 schools, and
40,484 children.

About this time, Dr Bell, who was always travelling
up and down the country inspecting schools, visiting
patrons, and in every way " prosecuting his discovery,*'

y

"- :.:7E ■■? DB BELL.

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PHOGBESS. 65

on to descant upon "the advantages which the in-
brethren enjoy." These advantages seem to have con-
sisted of one suit of clothes a-year, an allowance of
beer, an apothecary, a tip now and then, and food.
" Each brother," says Dr Bell, " has also a small gratu-
ity on signing a lease. Their diet and allowance are
set forth in the accompanying paper, on which I observe
that some of them use no beer, and none of them, I
believe, small-beer, — the table-beer alone being suffi-
cient for their daily beverage; cheese they find un-
necessary. Their meat, milk, and other allowances
are much more than they can consume. They sell a
part, and some of them lay up the money. Several die
possessed of considerable funds; others give to their
relations and friends; and others spend the money, to
the injury of their morals and their health, at the pub-
lic-house, or elsewhere." The bishop appears to have
been satisfied with the Doctor's explanation; and he
was now free to go to and fro in the country, and to
give all his time to the pursuit in which his whole heart
was engaged, while the old men went on vegetating,
and wending their slow way towards the grave.

In 1814, Dr Bell "added an important addition to
his invaluable system." It illustrates the permanent
condition of wonder and admiration of himseK in which
the Doctor lived, — a wonder not " the seed of know-
ledge," as Lord Bacon calls it, but the fruit of ignorance,
that " this important addition to his invaluable system "
consisted of making " the children stand while they are
learning their lessons;" and the humane persons in-
trusted with the execution of this new idea state " that

£

66 . LIFE OF DB BELL.

no mconvenience whatever has heen obseirved from the
children lemaining at continued lessons, even two or
three hours together." To keep young children stand-
ing for two or three hours together was surely some-
thing very like cruelty.

Mr Johnson, the head-master of the Central School,
was obliged to give up a great deal of his time to show-
ing visitors over the school, to explaining the system,
and to the training of teachers (among whom was a
young Persian) ; and Dr BeU thought it advisable that
he should be relieved of his duties as master. . Accord-
ingly he one morning fell upon Mr Bamford with the
sudden intimation that he was to be the master of the
Central School Mr Bamford was dumfounded. " I
received the intelligence," he says, " with real grief. . . .
I shed tears ; but go I must, and that very morning."

London was, in the year 1814, "crowded with for-
eigners, among whom were the Emperor Alexander and
his sister, the Grand Duchess of Eussia, — the latter of
whom had expressed her intention of visiting the Cen-
tral School" Dr Bell wrote several times to the
Grand Duchess, sent her copies of his reports and
works ; and in one of his letters he asks permission
" to lay his books at the feet of his Imperial Majesty,
at any hour, as he goes out or returns, so as not to
occupy a moment of that time which was so fully em-
ployed." The Emperor of Eussia was not so scrupu-
lous about his time, — ^which surely was also of some
value. Dr BeU achieved the interview he sought ; but
he had to wait five hours in an ante-room for it. '' The
Grand Duchess," he says, " soon " (this must mean soon

PB06RESS. 67

after the five hours of waiting) ''brought in the Em-
peror, and after a while left us. After a time" (Dr
Bell's notions of time are singularly illogical and self-
inconsistent) " the Emperor and myself were left alone^
and I acquitted myself, on the whole, very badly, but
had a very gracious reception, and very gracious leave."
After a short time spent at Eyde, to recruit from the
hard work of the London season, Dr Bell paid a visit
to Ireland. In a letter to the Speaker, asking for
introductions to persons of position in Ireland, he
delivers himseK of a neat and compendious theory of
education : '' Teach the Irish to read, write, cipher, and
train them in the principles of morality and religion,
as the Scots, Swiss, and Swedes are thiined, and they
will resemble in character and conduct the Scots, Swiss,
and Swedes." In this year of grace 1881, it is interesting
to compare this theory of Dr Bell's with the actual state
of that unhappy country. He also quotes from Hume
that the Irish " had all the vices of a nation not tamed
by education." At the root of Dr Bell's theory there
lay two fundamental blunders. The'first was, that civil-
iaation meant conformity to the type in the mind and
conduct of Dr Bell himself, whereas civilisation is as
multiform and as rich in types as IN'ature herself ; the
second was, that what has not been done by the great
unconscious powers in thousands of years can be done
by one conscious man in a few months or years. Hu-
manity is not so shallow, nor are civilising processes
so short and hurried. Let us do aU we can, but let us
not try to interrupt or to anticipate the work of vast
cyclical currents.

68

CHAPTER Xt

GBOWINO FAMU.

The fame of Dr Bell had now spread over England,
Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and letteis poured in
upon him every day requesting advice or assistance in
the foundation Of new schools. His mind was filled
with the System — possessed by it through and through.
He could think of nothing else ; he spoke of nothing
else ; he wrote about nothing else. He was devoured
by this single aim; he had become in every respect
a one-ideaed man. Everything, both external and
internal — every trait in the characters or minds of
other men — ^was submitted to the standard of the ^S^^-
tern and approved or condemned by that. A teacher
was looked upon as lost to his profession and to good-
ness if he thought of anything else at all ; and there
were no lights or shades in Dr Bell's appreciation of a
character. ''The Moorfields School insufferably bad;
the Irish school bad ; the master president of a debat-
ing society; what better can be expected of such a
mani" The "discovery" he had made was of infinite
value to the human race. He scolds his friend Mr
Watts for thinking that his books were a little too

GROWING FAME. 69

dear. " A discovery is made," lie says, " and is given
without patent, and at an incredible expense to the
author, and it is too dear to those who profit by it
at four shillings and twelve shillings ! It should have
been published in quarto, and sold for five guineas —
this has sense in it. . . . You will not soon be
reconciled by me." The ebullient Doctor's idea of
patenting the plan of asking one boy to teach another,
and selling the description of his plan for five guineas,
is very characteristic. But in all ages there are to
be found men who would like to patent the Atlantic
Ocean or to bottle up the English language.

Dr Bell not only went about the country himself,
to direct or to organise, but he had several assistants
in this work— among others, Mr Grover, who organised,
on the Madras System, schools at Manchester, -Salford,
Leeds, Bolton, York, and Sheffield.

At the close of the memorable year of 1815, Dr
Bell revisited, after an absence of more than thirty
years, his native city of St Andrews. Scenery did not
interest him; the progress of towns he did not care
to watch; hardly a trace of politics is to be found
in his letters; schools and the System absorb all his
thoughts. " Nothing," he writes to a friend, " is curi-
ous, or interesting, or beautiful in my eyes, but the
faces of children, but the infant mind, but the spiritual
creation." He loved children ; he believed in children ;
he believed in the System ; he believed in every detail
of it. " If the master do not immediately," he writes,
'' adopt the new system in all the departments of his
school, especially by teaching every letter, monosyllable,

70 LIFE OF DB BELL.

and tlie syllabic lessons of the spelling-book, by writ-
ing tbem on the slate, I shall entertain no good hope.
Let him talk to me for ever of diMculties, want of
room, etc etc., — ^he will talk in vain. I mil not lis-
ten to him. . . . Difficulties in the instruction and
discipline of a school are created by the master, or
often handed down to him."

There were, of course, enormous advantages in this
enthusiasm. Bu^ it had its drawbacks. Dr Bell was
constantly making alterations in the details; and he
expected the teachers to be as loyal to, and as fond
of, every new alteration as they had been of the old
plans. " Besides," says Mr Southey, " his manner of
Condemning trifling inaccuracies in those schools which
he visited in his travels, was often unnecessarily harsh
and violent; and while the slightest omission called
forth unlimited blame, it required a very high state of
perfection to obtain his commendations."

Every cult has its mysteries; and the worship of
the System very soon developed several. One of the
chief mysteries was I L T 0. Dr Bell is " glad Davis
is so jealous about I L T 0. . . . It is beautiful
to see its effects. ... I fear I shall not sleep
soundly till I hear from you, or see it producing the
same fruits in Baldwin's Gardens as in Bishop Auck-
land. . . • Wherever it is attended to as it ought,
and duly understood, it will do all that can be done
for a school I have gone to the full length of my
tether. I can go no further. It leaves nothing more
for me to do. All the world will in time learn every
lesson by writing it. . . . Believe you have not

GROWING FAME. 71

done it as it ouglit to be done, till you are delighted
and charmed as all are, where it is performed rightly.
. . It is completely done at the Harrington School ;
and all there think it all in all. I think it consum-
mates my labours and leaves nothing more for me to
do. . . ." Dr Bell, then, had come to the Her-
cules Pillars of Elementary Education ; and there were
no more worlds for him to conquer. Everything that
the human intellect could do had been done ; the bright
consummate flower of his thought was I L T ; and
the coping-stone had been placed upon the immortal
edifice of Primary Instruction. What was this I L T 1
It was nothing more than that children should write
their letters as soon as they had learnt them ; and
these four letters were learned first, as the easiest to
write. It was a small anticipation, a slight instal-
ment, of the well-known Schreib-Lese-Methode of (Jer-
many.

72

CHAPTER XIL

DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT.

Soon after the battle of Waterloo, the English began to
resume their old habit of making the grand tour. The
Continent had long been closed to them by ^Napoleon ;
and they were now glad to get back to their old playing-
fields — their former holiday-making places — ^and to travel
about under a brighter sky and in clearer air than are
generally found in London. Dr EeU was among the
number. He left London on the 18th of June 1816,
and arrived at Paris on the 21st. He found, on his
arrival at Paris, that the Society for Elementary Listruc-
tion had nominated him an honorary member. But he
very much feared, in fact he "knew, that the beautiful
simplicity of the new system is ill adapted to the genius
of the French nation.** Among other places which he
visited, he went to the school of the Duchesse de Drevas.
There he found "about seventy boys, in bad order,
noisy, with all the Lancasterian nonsense, loss of time,
and dreadful clattering of hands and slates;" and he
found his friend, the Abb^ Gualtier, "most bigoted
and prejudiced : he contends that they do already as
to emulation, etc., as I propose, and advocates even the

DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT. 73

noise." "No discoverer likes to hear tliat his "discovery "
has been found, and found out, before : " Pereant isti qui
ante noa nostra dixerint" He soon left Paris and travelled
soutL Somewhere between Dijon and Dole, on the
1 6th of July, he " conceived the idea of abridging my
works into one volume perpetual {sic)"

He comes at length to Yverdun, and at last meets
Pestalozzi But he mentions the meeting with no em-
phasis whatever. He does not seem to understand the
greatness or the significance of the man. He mentions
him quite incidentally — mixes him up with people that
no one ever heard of. This is the way he is introduced :
"July 30th at Yverdun, Mr and Mrs Langton, Pestalozzi,
Mr Akerman. . . . An explanation from the vener-
able chief of his principles. The development of the
faculties — the mind, the heart, and the body — sum up,
I think, what he said. Erom the principles he derived
his art. I explained that mine arose from experience."
It had come to this that Dr BeU was so fully absorbed
by the System that he could understand or sympathise
with nothing else. " Sum up, I think, what he said ! "
As if Pestalozzi's explanations were like the passing gos-
sip on a staircase of a world-hardened dowager. Why,
Pestalozzi had given his fortune, his time, his labour,
to the education of the poor, and had received nothing
in return; Dr Bell, whose merits are unquestionably
great, had received just as much from society as he had
given to it, Dr Bell grew complimentary and solemn,
and Pestalozzi turned it off. " When I said that Pes-
talozzi was the father, friend, and companion of his
pupils, he replied, * And the fool who takes them by the

ft mm est im jams.

licMQ^' taking <me of tlieiiQ who was in the compaiqr'by
tluB noBe.** Ho doobt Dr BeiQ was shocked. He goes
<iBi: ''F^ataloid has twenty mastecs for one hundzed
idiQlaiB; • • • a mnltipliication of masteis to attend^
^UxmAtdf and insfaniGt the childzeii fdvd voce, to pierent
enndation, and to tell whenerer a mistake is made,
wiBuNift itc^^ping.'' ]^ sow^ and then he breaks into
admiratjon: ^ISbe gymnastic exercises are incompar-
tdble.**

In a letter from Yverdnn to his friend Mr Moms,
Dr Bell points out that '^eyery -ptoieBoox must have a
prejudice against an innoTation which would expose tiie
whole tenor of th^air system, or want of system. There
is also a natural jealoxusy in tiieir republic of letters :
why should not we on the Continent improve as well
as they in England t It will be long before the new
system is sufiGiciently understood to put an end to such
speculations. Every one wants to remake a discovery
which has only been made after the world had existed
almost 6000 years." But that is just the beauty of
the " world ! " The world is perfectly new to the new
human being.

'* Und alio deine holieii Werke
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag ! *'

Dr Bell had got it into his head that the world had
" waited " for his " discovery " for six thousand years ;
and that then there was to be nothing after but rehears-
ing the wonderful discovery. But the good and warm
heart of the Doctor often got the better of his crotchet.
Further on in the letter he says of Pestalom : ^ The

DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT. 75

chief I am clianned with : he has much that is original,
much that is excellent ... I love the man. . . .
He is a man of genius, benevolence, and enthusiasm.''

Eetuming home from Switzerland, he made his way
by Holland, and had the new and rare pleasure of going
down a large part of the Ehine on a raft.

Soon after his return home, his thoughts went out
towards America. " I often think," he writes to Lord
Kenyon, "what a field America presents for the new
system. The low state of education there ; but, far above
all, no institutions, no prejudices, to encounter. The
impulse thither appears irresistible." But Lord Kenyon
cannot bring himseK to approve of America. He thinks
that young nation is " hollow and unsound." He thinks
it has no principles. He does not even believe it ever
will have any. " I fear," he writes in reply, " there is
not, and never will be (would there might !) principle
enough in America to work upon to do good, even by
your almost all-powerful System."

Li 1817, the Crown Prince of Sweden sends over a
Mr Swensson " to take notice of the principles and the
method of learning, for which not only England, but
aU Europe, is indebted to you ; " and Dr Bell replies
that Mr Swensson "shall receive every instruction
which can be given him in the knowledge and use of
the new organ of the human mind for the multiplica-
tion of power and division of labour in the moral and
intellectual world." The Novum Organon of educa-
tion — that was now Dr Bell's way of talking about the
Madras System.

We now find Dr Bell, at the age of sixty-four, work

P LTFE Ot DB BBLL.

"ing aivfiy as indefatigably as ever on bis I L T and
A E C. "I have Batiafied my mind that then ia no
difficulty in teaching the al{diabef; I haTe applied a
tutor to every child — made copying to be done Siei,
the tutor helping as much as poeaible — repeating, and
requiring to be repeated, the letter on which the diild
ia employed — registering each letter taught — reading
aloud, and taking places for every possible superiority,
and writing afterwards fi'om dictation on the opposite
side of their slates." What B great deal of miaeiy
— dov, nnmbing mind-destroyii^ misery— ^laa been
inflicted on children for want of a little previons in-
qoiry — of a simple, open-eyed pfeliminaiy examination
into the matter they were asked to leam I The ABC
is the proverbial b^innii^ of eveiytiiing; and so it is
made the beginnit^ — and in many places still is the
beginning — of what is called education. But to " know "
the A B C is simply to be able to attach a number of
meaningless sounds to a number of meaningleaa and
uninteresting marks ; and the child is not one whit the
better — ^rather the worse — for having had to pat his
mind through an arbitrary drilL Even now, the snper-
atition, that it helps a child to make him eAj douUeyou-
aitch-eye-see-aitch before he says which, and that tea-
aiteh-ee-why is an " account," both rational and philo-
logical, of they, still survives in some of the darker
parts of educational Ei^land,

In September 1817, Mr Johnson wrote Dr Bell that
the Central School was " never in bo flourishing a con-
dition as at present" There were 62 masters and 21
mistresses under training, and more than 1000 scholars

DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT. 77

in the scHooL But in the same letter he infonns Dr

Bell that the famous I L T has been "tried and

condemned by the Committee as worse than useless,

and ordered to be struck out of the type." But the

strong-hearted Doctor was quite equal to the occasion.

** It may be buried for a while," he writes in reply, " or

in a comer, by the hand of power; but it will rise

again, and spread over the world, and live for ever. It

were then vain to take up arms against eternal truths."

Meanwhile, after a little further correspondence, the

alarm proved to be vain. It was merely the term, the

heading, that the !N'ational Society wished to abolisL

The practice itself, designated by the term — that is,

simultaneous instruction in reading and writing —

became a permanent practice in all the schools with

which Dr Bell had to do. It is significant, however,

that about this time we find that the Madras System

had more difl&culties to contend with at St Andrews

than at almost any other place where it had been

introduced.

78

CHAPTEK XIIL

HEREFORD AND SHERBURN.

While in St Andrews on a visit, in the beginning of
1818, he was delighted and surprised by an offer, from the
Archbishop of Canterbury, of a stall in Hereford Cathe-
dral, " of good value." He had expected that the duties
would be light, and that, holding this post along with
his Mastership of Sherbum, he might still be able to
give the larger part of his time to the promotion of his
System and the foundation of new schools. But he
found that the post was not without its duties. He
had to preach four English and four Latin sermons ; he
had to sit for forty days in a prebendal stall, without
any duty to perform (surely the hardest kind of work
for his active brain), thrice every Sunday and Saint's-
day, and twice every ordinary week-day ; and all this
time he was not allowed to ride or walk outside the
walls of the city.

While residing at Hereford, he, of course, lost no
time in setting to work on the schools of the place —
the Grammar and the iN'ational Schools. For the latter
he preached a charity sermon at St Peter's. His sub-
ject was The System. It was not a short sermon. The

HEB^OBD AND 8HEBBURN. 79

Doctor was in his element, and could have discoursed
for days on the Novum Organon. He kept his aman-
uensis up night and day copying and recopying it;
and he entered into a long and detailed history of the
discovery of the System, of its progress in this and
other countries, and of the reasonable expectations that
might be formed regarding its future. The eager
preacher went on reading for an hour, then made a
short pause to wipe his spectacles. The congregation,
who had sat on with considerable patience, now thought
the sermon over and rose to go. But, " Dr Bell, sud-
denly recollecting himself, exclaimed *God bless me!*
and instantly recommencing, went on for half an hour
longer."

A new idea now came into Dr Bell's head. He had
noticed, and rightly noticed, the great wrong and in-
justice done to children in the mode of bringing them
up and teaching them. He accordingly wrote a little
book on the subject and gave it the title, * The Wrongs
of Children.' The difficulty was to find a publisher.
Lord Kenyon, in a letter to the Doctor about this time,
remarks, — "Murray, I presume, like other booksellers,
considers chiefly the likelihood of a sale, as I remember
my revered friend Mr Jones told Eivington once, he
believed if the d — 1 was to write a book they would
publish it ; and Eivington said, * To be sure, if it was
a good thing.'"

He was now sixty-six years of age, but with that in-
domitable freshness and eternal youth ^ that were his
characteristics aU through life, he became extremely desir-
^ ** Whom the gods love die young" because they live youDg.

80 LIFE OF DK BELL.

ous of correcting his Scotch accent. Dr Johnson once
remarked that much might be done with a Scotchman
" if he were caught young ; " but surely he woidd never
have tried to induce him to alter his way of speaking
when he was nearly seventy. However, the Doctor set
manfully to work. He requested his secretary, Mr
Davies, to note down during sermon those words in
which his Scotch accent most evidently appeared ; and,
when he returned home, he practised the art of pro-
nouncing them in Mr Davies's English fashion. He
was also very anxious to be able to speak so as to be
heard in every part of the Abbey; and for this pur-
pose, Mr Davies would take his seat in different distant
parts of the building and report. But the voice of
the enthusiastic Doctor, though of great volume, was
never clear enough or articulate enough to be distinctly
heard in the more distant parts of the cathedral In
fact, he did not speak — ^he roared.

There had been murmurs of complaint arising from
Sherbum Hospital, to the visitor, the Bishop of Dur-
ham, in 1813; and now, in 1818, again stronger com-
plaints were uttered by the ancient brethren. It was
the beer. Dr Bell, assisted by his chaplain and the
agent, set to work at once to inquire into the causes of
these complaints. The brethren were examined individ-
ually and collectively, and their answers were written
down. The result of the inquiry was that Dr Bell
appointed two of the brethren to inspect the meat, and
two to inspect the brewing, and to see that five bushels
of malt went duly to the hogshead of beer. " But," says
Mr Southey, ''the flame, which had but slumbered,

HEREFOKD AND SHERBURN. 81

burst out anew" in 1819. The flame was stirred up
"by a designing person called Michael Angelo Taylor ;
and this gentleman at length succeeded in inducing the
bishop to appoint a commission. This commission dis-
covered that only Is. 6d. was allowed for the weekly
allowance of bread, beer, and two poimds of cheese. On
the other hand, it appeared that Dr Bell spent £35 a-year
on each of the in-brethren; and that he provided each of
the old men with greatcoats, to be worn in chapel in
cold weather. The fact is that, though it was not the
fault of Dr Bell, but of the traditional system, the
hospital was farmed^ and nothing was more likely than
that an absentee master should get into all kinds of
trouble.

In the beginning of 1819, Dr Bell was so fortunate
as to obtain a stall in Westminster Abbey, in exchange
for that at Hereford ; and he was installed by the Dean
of Westminster in the end of January.

As Prebendary of Westminster, Dr Bell had to attend
the coronation of George the Fourth in 1821 ; and here
he was very nearly taking an unwilling part in a terrible
socio-political scandal The Queen had been refused
admittance to the Abbey, and was waiting at a side-
door, apparently for the purpose of effecting an entrance
should an opportunity present itself. On approaching
the door, some one announced him to the Queen — " Dr
Bell, your Majesty," — and alarm seized the reverend
Doctor lest the Queen should ask him to allow her to
enter the Abbey. He was too loyal a man to take a
side in these disputes ; but he showed himself equal to
the occasion. He hurried on, bowed to the Queen, and

F

82 LIFE OF DR BELL.

rushed past her through the door, " leaving her outside,"
It appears that, after the coronation, certain of the pro-
perties were distributed among the prebendaries and
other officials who took part in the ceremony. Dr Bell's
share was a piece of carpet, some lamps, the gold cloth
laid upon the coronation -chair, and one or two other
things; and these he used long after to exhibit as
"valuable relics."

It will be remembered that the Madras System had
been introduced into the Charterhouse schools. In
regard to the success of this experiment, it may be use-
ful to quote part of a letter from Lord Kenyon, an old
and stanch friend of Dr Bell's : " I maintained that the
examinations at the Charterhouse were very striking;
that the whole of Horace's odes, or a whole book of
Homer, might be examined upon ; and that no boy ^ in
a cla^s would be found deficient, either in the repetition,
being called upon to go on after a few words were re-
cited to him, or to render it straightforwards by mem-
ory into English, if required so to do. I mentioned
also that every other matter connected with the subject,
whether historical, geographical, mythological (or, if con-
nected with the Sacred Scriptures, doctrinal), was to be
explained by any boy who might be called on to do so.
I added, likewise, the fact, that Dr Eussell found 100
or 150 boys, and now had above 450; was quite over-
done with his labours, and now found everything easy
to him. I forgot to mention that he had now no cor-
poral punishment, but did not forget to insist that no
such was necessary, which, with respect to the Madras

^ The italics are mine.

HEREFOED AND SHEKBURN. 83

schools, the bishop and ladies also maintaiiu I said
you never did pretend that your System would super-
sede the necessity of able masters, and carry on the
whole matter mechanically, which they all seemed to
conceive had been advanced."

Perhaps the most important duty that Dr Bell per-
formed at Westminster Abbey was to read the funeral
service over the body of Mrs Garrick. She was buried
in her husband's grave ; and when it was opened, a copy
of Shakespeare's plays was found resting on his coffin.

Dr Bell was^ at no time of his life, a clear or
methodical writer. He said the same thing — ^he had
only one or two ideas altogether in his head — over and
over again in different ways, in long lumbering sentences,
and with a ponderosity of manner that repelled and
disenchanted. For the last twenty years his anxiety
about what he called his " style " had been growing
upon him to such a degree, that in 1823 it had become
a disease. Mr Davies, his amanuensis, was the chief
victim of this habit of anxiety. The too anxious Doctor
rendered his manuscripts almost totally illegible by
interlineations, erasures, and corrections ; the proofs of
his books were as bad; the revises were very little better.
He sat up himself at these corrections till one or two
o'clock in the morning, and when the time for getting
up came, his mind was ready with a fresh batch of
alterations. These altered and corrected manuscripts
Mr Davies had to copy out on large paper in a fair hand;
and he had to be ready to do the same for the altera-
tions of the next morning. Thus he seldom got more
than two or three hours' sleep, and sometimes none at

84 LIFE OF DR BELL.

alL He was kept up the whole night. But even this was
not enougL The Doctor used to send the proof-sheets
of his works to his friends Lord Kenyon, Mr and Mrs
Johnson, Mr Southey, Sir James Langham, and others ;
and then, when they came full of corrections, he simply
tossed them aside. The work he was now engaged in
was his 'Manual of Instructions' for conducting schools
on the Madras System ; and the work upon it was so
hard that Mr Davies at length broke utterly down. The
book appeared in 1823.

But Dr Bell must go on writing and saying the same
thing over and over again and again. He accordingly set
to work on an abridgment of this Manual He went on
with it — it was to be only a little book of forty-eight
pages — year after year. In 1 8 2 7 he writes to Mr Southey :
" Advanced years, growing infirmities, and decay of
mind and memory, together with the difficulty of com-
pressing within forty-eight pages what was before a
hundred and forty-eight, and leaving nothing out, are
the causes to whicli I ascribe my slow progress, in the
course of which I often turned my eyes towards you ;
but with so small a matter as a sixpenny or shilling
tract for common use, I could not bring myself to break
in on your time, occupied as I always know it to be."

85

CHAPTEE XIV.

THE LAST DAYS.

In the end of the year 1830, Dr Bell had fixed his
residence at Cheltenham, which he never again quitted.
He was now seventy-seven years of age ; his voice and
throat had hecome affected, and he was unable to
articulate without considerable difficulty. He had also
great difficulty in swaUowing; and his breathing was
hard and much impeded, especially in the morning.
What the doctors feared was ossification of the upper
part of the windpipa

He was now becoming very anxious about his works
— both the present and the posthumous editions ; and,
among other plans, he formed one of a complete edi-
tion of all he had written and published, to be edited
conjointly by Mr Southey and Mr WordswortL Mrs
Wordsworth went down to Cheltenham to see him
about this project ; but Dr Bell was both ill and irri-
table — full of anxiety about the disposal of his property,
and the future fate of his " ideas " — and Mrs Words-
worth cannot be said to have enjoyed her visit. !N"oth-
ing, in any case, came of the proposal.

His money, in fact, had become a terrible burden to

86 LIFE OF DR BELL.

him. He had laboured — both by saving and by enterprise
— ^to make money ; and his success had been very re-
markable. His chief anxiety now was that the money
that was going to be left behind him should go to the
promotion and immortalisation of his own educational
ideas. One of his chief occupations and amusements in
his latter days had been the making, unmaking, and re-
making of wills ; and a large part of Mr Davies's work
had consisted of copying and recopying these wills, and
the endless interlineations upon them. Now, however,
as things began to look serious, he thought it was time
to employ a lawyer. iN'ay, more, a great fear and haste
seized upon him; and "make all despatch — no time
must be lost," became the everlasting burden — the
monotonous refrain at the close of all his messages and
letters.

On the 11th of May 1831, without consulting any
person whatever, he gave orders for £120,000 to be
transferred to the care of four gentlemen in St Andrews,
who were to act as trustees.

4

His sister. Miss Bell, had expressed a strong wish to
go down to Cheltenham and pay a visit to her brother ;
and with some reluctance he gave his consent to this,
and forwarded to her an invitation. No sooner had he
given this consent, than he wrote her another letter to
recaU it. But she had set off before this second letter
came ; and, on her arrival at Cheltenham, was received
with warm affection by her brother. He made her a
present of his cottage and grounds, of furniture, goods,
and chattels, and also of '^ the carpet, and the covering
of the coronation-chair which fell to me at the coronation

THE LAST DAYS. 87

of King George the Fourth." Most unfortunately, how-
ever, Miss Bell had taken it into her head that her
brother was not in a fit state to make a will, or to
manage his own affairs; and his odd ways, his sud-
den bursts of irritability, and his apparently causeless
anxiety, seemed to give strength to this opinion. Upon
these phenomena Miss Bell meditated much, until at
length she went so far as to say to other persons in the
course of conversation, that "he was not in his right
mind." Dr Bell had always been a shrewd man ; and
a few strange signs very soon put him upon the track
of her intentions. He was unable to speak; but he
silently placed a paper in her hands, requesting her to
leave the house immediately, and offering her a choice
of residence at St Andrews, at London, or at Malvern.

In his last will, dated the 13th of August 1831, he
named as trustees of the whole of his property the Earl
of Leven and Melville, Walter Cook, Esquire, Writer to
H.M Signet, Lord Kenyon, the Lord Justice - Clerk
of Scotland, and Bishop Walker of Edinburgh. The
trustees of the money intended for St Andrews were
now to be the subject of unceasing interpellations.
He wrote to them " to engage at any expense an agent
to inform him, day by day, what was going forward."
" My solicitude distresses me much. Excuse my anxiety.
There is danger in the delay of a day." These trustees
were to erect a building in harmony with the style of
Blackfriars Chapel — one of the most beautiful remains
in a city full of ecclesiastical fragments — ^to appoint
four teachers, and also a rector of the Institution. A
paper, containing his own suggestions, was drawn up

88 LIFE OF DR BELL.

by Professor Alexander; but, when the paper was
concluded, he himself drew up another in reply to his
own ideas. " I am, indeed," he wrote, " reduced to a
sad dilemma. ... It afflicts me beyond measure to
think that the funds laid up for giving full effect to a
system of education, the object of which is the health,
the happiness, the moral, religious, intellectual, and liter-
ary improvement of the young (to a degree impracticable
before) by a new and stupendous engine, may, by mis-
take or otherwise, be directed to different purposes. . . .
The only remedy that occurs to me is to desire that the
funds be put into Chancery." Such was the utterly
hopeless condition of Dr Bell's mind — such was the
faithless outlook that presented itself as he la^ at the
door of death.

He was afraid that some of his money would go to
the support of a number of ancient nuisances — such as
" charity schools, hospitals, asylums, colleges, and uni-
versities." He lumped them all up together, and took
no note of any distinctions that might be made, or dif-
ferences that might possibly exist. Nothing was to be
done except for the "Madras (or, as it is often called,
the monitorial) system of education." Before that sys-
tem, education did not exist. " Do not talk to me of
your colleges and your universities. They are asylums
for the maimed, the halt, and the blind ; more, they are
receptacles for the dead, who cannot hear the new word
of life which I have spoken, and who must sleep on."

While Dr Bell was in this anxious state of mind —
drawn hither and thither by every new suggestion, driven
hither and thither by every new letter he received from

THE LAST DAYS. 89

his correspondents — splitting up his money into portions
of £10,000, and distrusting the very men to whom he
proposed to intrust these portions, a paragraph in the
newspapers met his eye about the establishment of a
Koyal Naval School near London. " This is a godsend ! "
he muttered; and a letter is immediately sent to Sir
Henry Blackwood the chairman, to offer him one of his
sets of £10,000. He was duly thanked; and Captain
M'Konochie was despatched to Cheltenham to converse
with him about the constitution and purposes of the
new school Captain M'Konochie found that Dr Bell
had totally lost the power of articulation, and could
communicate with others only by writing on a slate.
He sat with his head sunk on his breast, raising it
quickly now and then when he was excited. When
he agreed with the speaker, he pointed to his eye;
when he dissented, a strong grunt was heard in his
throat. He wrote question after question on his slate
with the same impulsive eagerness that had marked his
whole life. " What do you think of my offer 1 " " Do
you know my system?" Captain M*Konochie had
established a school on his system in Scotland. " But
where did you learn it ? Have you read my books ? "
"Some, not alL" Davies is sent off for the last pro-
duction. "Have you seen that?" "m." "Then
take soma" "Where have you seen my system at
work?" "In Edinburgh and in Chelsea." "Good!
Where is the plan of your I^aval School ? " " Oh ! we
have not got the funds yet." "But my £10,000 — that
will give you funds at once." " True : but we have just
learned your kind intention, and have not had time,"

LIFE OF DE BELL.

"Well; but you have time now. I rniist liave a plan.
"When will you have it? Can you hring it to me to-
night at eight, or to-morrow morning 1 A plan we must
have." Captain M'Koaoehie, seeing no way of escape,
undertook tn bring him a plan in the morning. Dr
Bell stuck to his own views — in small things aa well
as in greats He asked advice from everybody; he
always rejected it. It was pleasant to liim to see how
I many roads he need not go; and how little those who
) ad\Tsing him knew of what they were talking
about But he liked the escitement — he was fond of
keeping up the discussion, and had "some reluctance
finally to conclude, because then the business which
was by this time almost necessary to him {the ac-
tivity of his mind having become morbid) would he

On Captain M'Konochio's next visit to Cheltenham,
he met the trustees from St Andrews. These gentle-
men had been presented with £120,000 for the good
of their city ; and they were now called upon to give
up half of this splendid donation. There is no doubt
they could have legally held Dt Bell to hia transfer ;
but thia would have been ungracious. The old man
was afraid they would. They, too, were asked for " a
plan ; " but they did not even know the rudiments of
the System, They were not even willing to try to make
a plan ; they were afraid Dr Bell would disapprove of
it "They were methodical in their way of doing
business ; he was capricious and vehement. They were
slow ; he was quick. They were very patient ; he was,
at times, very violent. Fire and water would have

THE LAST DAYS. 91

combined more easily." Such, are the trials of donors
and trustees.

And now an epistolary dispute arose between Dr Bell
and his St Andrews trustees. The letters — some of
them — extend to ten printed pages. He accuses Provost
Haig, a perfectly honourable man, of using some of his
money, on the eve of an election, to bring a fresh supply
of water to the city. Mr Haig replies : " I beg to say
that I never fingered a shilling of your money, nor did
I ever make use of it in any way to serve a political
purpose." Dr Bell heaps letter upon letter and accusa-
tion upon accusation. He pours red-hot shot into the
defences of the St Andrews trustees — quiet honest
gentlemen, who were quite willing to help him in every
way. He accuses them of having " kept him in a state
of incessant agitation and excitement;" of availing
themselves of " my loss of voice to convert a large portion
of my property to objects and purposes at entire vari-
ance with those to which I had proposed to devote
them;" of "denying my last days the comfort which
I sought for from an epistolary participation of your
doings" (this only meant that they should write him by
every post); "of concealment;" of writing "declamations
to give a death-blow to my debilitated constitution, or
for a posthumous epistle to the grave, which tells no
tales ; " and of " trying whether I was so much alive as
to be able to discriminate between sophistry and pre-
varication and sound reasoning and good sense." Thus,
in the first part of his long and fiery letter, he com-
plains that they do not write enough; while, in the after
part, he complains that they want to write him to

92 LIFE OF DR BELL.

death, in order that they may have perfect freedom to
do as they like. And he concludes in the most char-
acteristic way : " Finally, I adjure you, by the living
Grod, to forward copies of this letter immediately " to
certain legal authorities in Edinburgh. The trustees
replied in the meekest and mildest manner. But the
volcanic soul was in full action ; and he at once wrote
off to the other Principal in the University and three
other professors a short note, asking " what immediate
and brief additional measure can be taken to enforce
compliance with all my requisitions and injunctions,
that will lose no time, require no formal deed on my
part ? What can be done — what can you do — ^what can
I do, in one moment 1 Write by return of post and
by every post , . . Excuse haste. Late for post, and
not one must be lost." Poor old gentleman I he asks
several excellent men to be his trustees, and then h9
appeals to others whom he hardly knows to tell him
what to do, what can be done, what they can do.
Boundless suspicion; infinite isolation.

Another long epistle followed, in which, among other
flowers of a luxuriant rhetoric, he says that " Dr Bell's
little finger, when put to the work, will do more than
the whole of St Andrews." He had forgotten the quiet
idyllic life there — how, in transcendent and sky-like
repose — the academic inhabitants refused to believe
that they had left the fifteenth century. Dr Bell had
got into his head an insatiable desire to see ''extra-
ordinary visitors " appointed, who were to be a check
on the ordinary trustees. But this the trustees demurred
to, on the common-sense ground that the " extraordinary

THE LAST DAYS. 93

visitors" might themselves want "extraordinary visitors"
to watch themy and — as is so often the case in Scotland
— all the power needed to create these new Madras
Institutions would disappear in friction.

The trustees did their hest to mollify Dr BelL They
took advantage of the opportunity of the first quarterly
examination to write a flowery and laudatory report of
the two new schools, in which they state that they
carried in their hands (as if it were a foot-rule) Dr
Bell's * Manual ' to apply to the English school, and his
*Ludus Literarius' to the classical school; that every-
thing was done as Dr Bell would have it ; and that the
" proficiency of Andrew Bell Morrison " (a relation of
the Doctor's) was " sufficiently attested hy the unexcep-
tional evidence of the paidometer ; " that " Mr Waugh
has adopted the Novum Organon ;^^ and that Virgil,
with the happy anticipation of true prophecy, had
some time previously described in his verses a Madras
school: —

'* Ac yeluti in pratis, ubi apes aestate seren^
Floribus insidunt variis, et Candida circum
Lilia fanduntnr : strepit omnia marmure campus,
Fervet opus."

But this appeal to his literary and pedagogic vanity,
to his family love, and to his weakness for well-worn
classical quotations, utterly failed. Dr Bell could not
be moved. He therefore executed " a holograph deed,
which may or must be my ultimatum." In this deed
he appointed a large number of miscellaneous gentle-
men as patrons, and another number as " supplementary
trustees." The central idea of lus holograph deed was

94 LIFE OF DE BELL.

that the St Andrews Trust should be managed, not by
local persons, but from Edinburgh. But, only a few
days after, Dr Bell writes: "Since writing the holo-
graph deed, dated 21st December 1831, I have exe-
cuted a deed, dated 29th December 1831, which per-
haps supersedes it." Perhaps : he was not quite sure.
And, further on, he launches out into another denuncia-
tion of his own trustees — whom he calls "ostensible
advocates and insidious patrons;" and he enumerates
the "studied embarrassments, machinations, devices,
distortions, and perversion of the propositions of a dy-
ing, speechless, and insulated man, with funds undis-
posed of."

In the beginning of 1832, Dr Bell grew worse, but
his mind was as active as ever. Mr Davies's bedroom
was next his own, and he could call him whenever he
awoke. This "he now generally did at three, four,
five, or six o'clock ; " and Mr Davies had to get up at
once, read his own manuscripts to him, receive his
corrections and recorrections, transfer them from slate
to paper, read the manuscripts over again, and correct
and recorrect them once more. Up to Thursday the
26th of January 1832, his intellect was vigorous and
hi8 memory imimpaired. The day after lie w« very
weak j and it was plain that the end was not far off.
His friends went to see him. " He was sitting in his
chair, his head inclined forward, his breathing short."
When Mr Allen came in, he just looked up, and then
dropped his eyes again. At half -past ten he was
asleep, but still in his chair. Mr Davies and his two
women-servants knelt round him, holding the hand of

THE LAST DATS. 95

the master whom they loved so well, in spite of his pas-
sionate manners and exactingness. His breathing became
softer and gentler, and, when they next looked up, he
was dead. So passed upon a quiet wave of sleep into
the unknown world the soul of the fiery eager Scotch-
man, who had fought a good fight, kept faith with God
and man, and who had also been the lover of, and
beloved by, children. He was seventy-nine ; and, as a
prebendary, his body was buried in Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER SV.

D8 bell's C0REE3F0N1)BNCB.

Dr Bell's correspondents -were of all kinds, ranks,
and nationalities ; and one might have expected to find
a, good deal of interesting matter — a good many
characteristic remarks, unconscious revelations, curious
national traits, and piquant anecdotes— in them. But
it is not so. Dr Eell kept every note, letter, paper,
and pamphlet he received during sixty years; and it is
only astonishing how barren the mass turns out to be.
Everybody, with one or two exceptions, writes in the
most ponderous and sesquipedalian style — it is plain
that Dr Johnson ivas still all abroad in the air ; and
everybody pays everybody else the most elaborate com-
plimenta The end of last century was the period of
the minuet; and Geoi^e III.'s sons and daughters danced
that slow and elaborate dance for entire evenings —
hours at a time — with each other. The personages in
Dr Bell's letters walk and talk as if they were dressed
in the stifTest pasteboard or brocade, as if life might be
Bpent in writing and in reading letters, as if the old
antediluvian span had come into existence once more.
Dr Bell writes of his two young American pupils :

DR bell's correspondence. 97

" To London they owe several very genteel accomplish-
ments. . . . They keep no company, but that in
the very first line of life. . . . Your sons have,
among their con-disciples and most intimate friends at
St Andrews, an earl, the son of an earl, the son of
a bishop, the grandson of a bishop, and the sons of
knights in great number." Thus people talked in pedi-
grees, and arranged their conversation according to pre-
cedence. And these two young gentlemen themselves,
going home to Virginia rather unexpectedly, cannot
say that their father 'and mother were both glad and
surprised to see them, but must put their facts and feel-
ings in this eighteenth century fashion : " Our meeting
with papa and mamma was joyful beyond description.
The engine of paternal affection was conjoined with
that of surprise, by no means weak, you will allow.
We announced our arrivals with our own persons."

And we find a Mr Sikes opening a correspondence
with Dr Bell after this wise : " My acquaintance with
you has indeed been short ; but it has served to per-
suade me that you possess those respectable qualities
of head and heart which ought to make me desirous of
improving it." In fact, one might just as well take to
reading the * Polite Letter-Writer.'

The few women who write to him are by far the
best of his correspondents. They say what they have
to say in fewer and simpler words than the men, some
of whom write in the most long-drawn, ponderous, and
dreary style. Mrs Berkeley, the wife of the then
Dean of Canterbury, is one of these correspondents.
She thanks Dr Bell for "half-a-dozen elegant dried

O

98 LIFE OF DR BELL.

bottle bonnets " (history has forgotten to give any de-
scription of these), and advises all young men "who
mean to succeed, ever to plough with the heifer, if they
mean to rise; for, whether the lords of the creation know
it or not, or are too proud to own it, we females, one
way or another, openly, or, as the French say, sourde-
ment, whether we be wife, mistress, sister, or daughter,
guide the world." And she goes on to volunteer to Dr
Bell, who must have known the climate of St Andrews
very well, a description of a St Andrews winter, which
is perfectly accurate. "Alas! we" (in Canterbury)
" have not had a St Andrews winter. I wished myself
there aU the vile frosty severe weather. If I had a
good safe balloon, Mrs Finsham, who is now with us
on a visit, and I both declare we would set off in it in
the beginning of November, and stay till May, then up
again to England. My neighbours used to provoke me
by saying, * Well, madam, this can be nothing to you
who have been in Scotland.' I rave at them. I can
conceive that an Edinburgh winter may be bad enough,
but in London I never suffered so little cold as I did
in St Andrews in winter : no, they were pleasant in-
deed." The present writer thoroughly agrees with Mrs
Berkeley. Dry, mild, genial winters are the rule at St
Andrews; and there is also at aU seasons the most
blithe, light, inspiriting, and uplifting air in the whole
of Great Britain.

Another female correspondent, Mrs Cleghom, is more
sentimental, and not so sensible as Mrs Berkeley. When
Dr Bell writes her that he is going to India, she replies :
"Your letter, my dear sir, I read over with a mixed

DR bell's correspondence, 99

pleasure, and could not forbear shedding tears of
mingled pleasure and pain when I considered," — and
so on.

The hard worldly wisdom which marked the latter
half of the eighteenth century shows itself without the
smallest particle of shame or shyness in these letters.
Mr Dempster sets forth the then art of rising in the
Church : " Orders taken by a man who has only one
patron is a dangerous experiment. But, if that one pa-
tron has one prior engagement, the danger is quadrupled;
the danger, indeed, is converted into a certainty of
starving, and not alone ; for among the fine girls in Eng-
land even a curate cannot resist matrimony ; and then
God have mercy on the poor curate, his poor wife, and
poorer children ! It is not to be done. But orders, to
return to America, in the clerical line, is not so bad."

The oddest people appear in the correspondence at
wide intervals. Among odd people those who continue
to discover perpetual motion must always be reckoned.
Dr Lucas is among this number. He writes, in 1789
" I shall cheerfully communicate to you, that my asser-
tions of having discovered the Perpetuum mobile dur-
ante materid, are not without foundation." Fortunately,
no squarer of the circle attacked the sympathetic Doctor.
But it is astonishing what hundreds of pages of tempo-
rary rubbish Southey thought it right to print in the
correspondence of and with Dr BelL Here is an
average example : " When you are at leisure, ascertain
the component parts and proportions of the best plaster
used at your settlement, with the mode of preparing it,
and favour me with a memorandum on the subject,"

100 LIFE OP DE BELL.

Mr Millingchamp, when on a visit to Canton, sent
Dr Bell a pleasant account of the Chinese theory of the
weather. Mr Millingchamp had raised the astonish-
ment of the Chinese at his learning, and they " tell me
I have very cunning inside, . . . According to Lan-
ing-tyen, there are two species of air ; or, as the Ynking
more pointedly expresses it, the air has two sexes. When
they agree, the seasons are regular, the weather favour-
able, com grows ; when they disagree, and the she-air
will not permit the he-air to approach her, the conse-
quences are terrible. He flies round her in a whirlwind,
or typhoon. Earthquakes are caused by the male air
enclosed in the bowels of the earth, and struggling to
make its escape. The souls of good men after death
take up their residence in the he-air, and become josses
or semi-gods ; the souls of bad men pass into the she-
air, and become so many devils. ... Of the seven
causes which authorise a divorce, the first is a woman's
talking too much."

"We catch a good many glimpses of Lord Comwallis's
campaign with Tippoo Saib ; but there is very little of
the smallest interest. Colonel Floyd writes: "I felt
the consequence of my corps at Sattimangulum, and
knew the loss of it would entail the loss of all I was
anxious in the extreme; but, I thank God, felt per-
fectly collected and greatly animated. I was struck
with the remark of a respectable sepoy of the 25th
battalion. He had a large white beard. During the
cannonade on the 13th I went along the front, and
spoke to the men. I looked as I really felt, perfectly
serene. Every man met my eye with a smile. I

DR bell's correspondence. ' 101

stopped to hear something a sepoy said, and was
addressed by the venerable beard I have mentioned
thus : * Sardar, on these occasions General Smith al-
ways led ns to the enemy's guns.'" — It is Colonel
Floyd also who sends Dr Bell Goethe's piece of
worldly wisdom —

** Lasset den Narren eben zum Narren sejn, wie sichs gehort."

Turned into plain English : " For God's sake never
give yourself the least trouble about ill-tempered and
foolish people, but consider it a great honour and a
blessing to be hated by them." From one of his letters,
too, we obtain a glimpse of the state of Europe in
1792 : "The era is singularly eventful towards crowned
heads. Sweden assassinated; Denmark insane; Bri-
tain has known her misfortunes and accidents ; Orange,
though no cro^vned head, chief of a great country, nearly
expelled, but restored by armed force ; France dethroned,
imprisoned, and liable to further misfortunes ; Empire ^
said to be poisoned ; Portugal insane ; Spain not very
wise. I see none but Prussia, who reigns in full,
personal prosperity; . . . Russia, though victorious,
gi'eatly reduced by her late war, and personally infirm.
I think there are no less than three sovereigns in Europe
liable to attempts on their persons, owing to the colour
of the times." All this might have been written again,
with considerable truth, in 1848, and again in this year
of grace 1880; only, instead of three sovereigns "liable
to attempts on their persons," there is now indeed not

^ Austria probably.

102 LIFE OF DB BELL.

one, unlesi? it be some of the minor sub-kings in the
south of Germany.

Colonel iloyd was also a practical philosopher, and
a man who, though he wrote clumsily enough, had a
broad bottom of common -sense. He had mentioned
some of his cares to Dr Bell, who had referred to them
again. Colonel Floyd replies from Pondicherry — a
French settlement in India — "When I name cares, it
would be unjust and ungrateful to fancy myself weighed
down by them. On the contrary, I feel and own, with a
heart full of piety and gratitude, that I have no cares
that grieve, but all the enjoyment a reasonable being
can weU have. My wife and myself have uninterrupted
health ; our children are all I can possibly wish them ;
my aflfairs clearly above board; my friends tried and
true; and I reckon it among my chief comforts that
there is no person living to whom I bear hatred: I
don't mean to say I have no enemies, but they are so
obscure, or so impotent, that I can neither fear nor
hate them. . . . All are on pretty good terms here.
Christmas Eve is a time of much religious performance.
The young Saviour of mankind is represented in wax,
after having been duly announced by the angel to the
shepherds, and great numbers of young angels fly about
like butterflies."

It is odd to find controversies which even now occupy
the time and thought of sensible and considerate people,
raging and getting discussed in the very same form and
almost in the very same phrases in the beginning of the
century. A landowner in the Highlands, a Mr Mac-
kenzie, is anxious to introduce the System. But he

DR bell's correspondence. 103

"found the Highland Society so enamoured of the
Gaelic language, that it would be in vain, at present
at least, to expect them to give up this favourite idea.
They are even thinking, I am told, of instituting isi Pro-
fessor of the Gaelic language at one of the Universities,
Ossian is the only inducement to this attempt" What
would Matthew Arnold and Professor Blackie say to
this 1 Mr Mackenzie goes on : " As a living language,
Gaelic clearly creates a barrier between the Highlander
and his fellow -subjects, which excludes improvement
of all kinds, and robs the country of the benefits it
would otherwise more completely derive from this part
of its population." This is the argument which Dr W.
Chambers has lately advanced, and treated with great
aptness and ability.

It strikes one with an odd feeling of old newness
and surprise when we find Dr Bell, in replying to Mr
Mackenzie, telling him that "the General Assembly of
the Kirk of Scotland, in the year 1806 — not much
unlike the French Convention — choose to debate on the
existence of God."

Dr Bell was always strong upon the point of learning
at first-hand from facts — from nature — from children
themselves. In a letter to Eichard L. Edgeworth, he
says : " There is only one book which I have studied,
and which I take the liberty to recommend to you. It
is a book in which I learned all I have taught, and in
which you will find all I have taught, and infinitely
more than I have taught It is a book open to all
alike, and level to every capacity. It only requires
time, patience, and perseverence, with a dash of zeal and

104 LIFE OF DB BELL.

enthusiasm in the pemsaL This hook you have filled
me with the hopes of seeing soon in your hands.

" In reading this hook my way is to suhmit every
hint which it suggests to the test of experience ; and
I have transcribed into my humble essay no observa-
tion till I had established its authenticity and demon-
strated its truth in the mode best adapted to my
capacity, most congenial to my habits, and most satis-
factory to my mind — namely, that of facts and ex-
perience." And Dr Bell was perfectly right. There
is an immense mass of second-hand and unauthenti-
cated "knowledge" afloat in society; there is a large
circulation of paper-notes with no bullion which they
represent ; and he is a benefactor who brings us back
to the truth of nature and the firm rock of fact.

Dr Bell goes on, always coming nearer and nearer to
life and truth : " Our Saviour tells us that if we would
enter into the kingdom of heaven, we must become as
little children. It is, then, that among children, and
from them, and by becoming one of them, we are to
learn those simple doctrines of nature and truth, in-
nate in them, or which readily occur to their minds, as
yet unbiassed by authority, prejudice, or custom. • • .
What remains to be done could be done by thousands
better than by me, if they could be brought to give
their mind to it and take pleasure in it; but it is a
drudgery to most men from which they seek only to
escape." This opinion of Dr Bell's that "teaching
is a drudgery " is still held by thousands of people —
and even by teachers themselves ; and it is probably in
looking for the true answer to the question — Why is

DR BELL'S CORRESPONDENCE. 105

teaching a drvdgeryl that a cure will be found for a
prevalent disease, and for much of the inalaise that
afflicts modem society. This question, of course, in-
cludes the two larger questions: What is the average
teaching just now ? and — What is the best teaching 1

Dr Bell's advice to Mr Edgeworth regarding the
spirit in which he should prosecute his inquiries is
also excellent: "You will grow," he says, "in the
necessary knowledge as you go along. Do not harass
yourself in pursuit of new information. Do not dis-
tract your mind by hunting for a variety of schemes.
Lose no time. In the course of your proceedings, you
will learn what you can nowhere else learn." He con-
tinues his advice into details : " Short lessons, short
books. . . , Nothing is so facile and. pleasant as to
teach ah initio; nothing so difficult and ungracious as
to unteach those who have been ill taught."

A few letters from S. T. Coleridge and Kobert
Southey appear in the correspondence; and these are
to some extent interesting. In one, written 15th April
1808, Coleridge makes the sensible remark that "ob-
jectors are far more pernicious than avowed antagonists.
Men who are actuated by fear and perpetual suspicion
of human nature, and who regard their poor brethren
as possible highwaymen, burglars, or Parisian revolu-
tionists (which includes all evil in one), and who, if
God gave them grace to know their own hearts, would
find that even the little good they are willing to assist
proceeds from fear,i from a momentary variation in the

^ Or like those persons mentioned by an old Scotch lady :
** They're like cats — all the good they do comes from ill-nature."

LIFB OF DB BELL.

balance of probabilitiea, which happened to he in
fftTOni of letting their brethren know just enough to
koBp them from the gallowa. Oh, dear Dr Bell, you
are a great man ! NoTer, never permit minds eo in-
ferior to your own, however high their artifical rank
may be, to induce you to pore away an atom of what
you know to be right . . . From fear, distrust, and
the apirit of compromise, proceeds all that is evil"
And he adds: "Be assured, while I have life and
power, I shall find a deep consolation in being your
zealouB apoetlo."

The following ia a good illustration of the fact that
many people still believe that human beings are made
to fit into aystems, and not that systems are invented
for human beings. Mr D. P. Watts writes to Dr Bell
in 1809, to tell him that a Simday-school is going to be
opened in Wt-yinouth ; "am!, as it commcnees about the
time of commemorating the entrance into the fiftieth
year of the reign of his Majesty, the new school is to
open with fifty boys and fifty girls'' No sympathy
can be felt for all or any of the boys and girls over that
number; and, when Mr Watts and his alhes were so
exact, why did they have the girls at all! That was to
put his Majesty's reign into its hundredth year.

The same Mr Watts happily hits another odd human
failing. A large proportion of civilised beings in these
islands are often much troubled with the ulterior conse-
quences of what they do, and are afraid — if they throw
their walnut-shells about — they may hit a genie in the
eye and blind him. They want to be miniature Pro-
vidences, and to " trammel up the consequence " whet-

DR bell's correspondence. 107

ever they can. A certain party in the earlier part
of the century, maintained that " education (by which
they meant reading and writing) abates the energy of
the lower orders, relaxes their laborious exertions, and
damps their ardour." Mr Watts, when at Weymouth,
sees a boat capsize. The young officer was drowned.
The two men clung to the boat The wind was blowing
a gale, and the waves were high. Three boats at once
set off to save the men, who were holding on to the
keel of their boat. " A thought occurred to me, that I
would examine if these brave boatmen could read and
write, and I took some pains to ascertain the facts ; and
it proved that, of the five first boat's crew, four could
read and write; and of the second crew, three could
read and write." Hence it is demonstrated that "educa-
tion " does not damp native ardour or freeze the genial
current of the souL Further on in his letter, Mr Watts
stated as an axiom what Stein was driven upon by hard
experience: "What has overwhelmed other states in
Europe — French superiority or their own moral in-
firmity] The stability of a country begins in the
schooL"

It is cheering to find a man writing in this way in
the year 1809.

" The Stability of a Country begins in the School."

That would not be a bad motto for a statesman to
bind between his eyes.

Mr Watts writes in another letter, of the year 1811,
of "a schoolmaster in Swabia, who had superintended
a seminary fifty-one years with severity. It had been

108 LIFE OP DE BELL.

inferred, from recorded observations, that he had given
911,500 canings, 124,000 floggings, 209,000 custodies,
136,000 tips with the ruler, 10,200 boxes on the ears,
22,700 tasks by heart, 700 stands on peas, 600 kneels
on a sharp edge, 500 fools' caps, 1700 holds of rods;
and the report closed with this quotation from Martial :

" FerulsB tristes, sceptra psedagogomm cessant"

"We have no means of ascertaining the truth or even the
probability of this terrible list of charges against this
unnamed and unknown schoolmaster; but he reminds one
of the famous German judge of the sixteenth century,
who is said to have sentenced 30,000 people to death.

Coleridge called Dr Bell " a great man " to his face ;
and, in another letter (in 1811), Southey couples him
with Clarkson, and is proud that he has " the honour of
numbering among my friends, the two greatest bene-
factors of the human race who have appeared since
Martin Luther." But nature provides a steady crop of
"great men" — especially in the United States; and
many of them are among the least known; for both
before and after Agamemnon, great and brave men
have lived and died and been forgotten. The better
for tliem.

The correspondence is full of advice from clergymen,
both to others and to men of their own profession. The
best piece of advice is contributed by Colonel, now
General, Floyd, in a letter to Dr BeU : " I never shall
forget the answer of one of our primates to a body of
clergy, who brought him an address, complaining of the
increase of sectarian and itinerant preachers, and asking

DR bell's correspondence. 109

his advice what they should do. " Gentlemen," said
the revered man, " out-preach them — out-live them ! " ^

Dr Bell's old friend, Mr Dempster, contributes a
description of the processes of Scotch law, which is not
without a modicum both of picturesqueness and of truth.
"The whole fraternity of agents," he says, writing in
1813, "those in the bailie's town courts, the sheriff's
county courts, the Admiralty and Commissary Courts,
the two Courts of Session, the Court of Exchequer in
Scotland, the Court of Appeal from them aU in England,
where indecision personified presides — all, all are now
incorporated in one great fraternity. They have a com-
mon seal; and their motto is procrastination. They
copy the rules of the fox -hunter. A cause is their
game. The chase is their sport. Covers are formed
to protect the animal, and prolong the sport. Worry-
ing at starting is penaL They give the game law in
both senses of the word. They glory in the length of
the chase, but seldom insert its duration in the news-
papers. Here the metaphor ends. They regularly
inform their client, they hope next session the cause
will make an important step. They submit patiently
to have the blame thrown on their shoulders, and
retaliate by throwing it off their own backs on the
adverse agents' shoulders ; and, God, have mercy on
the poor client ! He reminds me of a pool in summer.
Evaporation imperceptibly dries him up. Let the con-
stant copies for your scholars be — ^ Law is a bottom-
less pit' "

In a letter of 1814 to Mr Abbot, the then Speaker

^ Live better and longer— beat them at living.

110 LIFE OF DB BELL.

of the House of Commons, Dr Bell indicates a truth
which still has some value. for us of the present day.
He says: "Almost all the reformers terminate where
they begin, with Acts of Parliament, boards, secretaries,
treasurers, and salaries, for doing what they either do
not know how to do, or do not do what is most easy
to be done, and what now is the time to do — ^that we
are happily at peace with all the world." Dr Bell
means that people are too ready to rest content with
machinery. They elect school boards; they get able
men to sit upon them; they select a most intelligent
and vigilant clerk ; they give him a number of vigorous
assistants ; they invent books, and schedules, and reports
of all kinds, which are returnable and returned each day
and every day ; — ^but they often forget that the teacher
is the heart and brain of all this beautiful and well-
contrived machinery, and that, if he does not work as
a strong humanising power, all the rest may be merely
waste paper and soulless statistics. What are the in-
fluences that are actually at work to cultivate the young
soul and mind — by literature, by science, and by art ? —
that is the real question for school boards and for that
active and enthusiastic class that in these later times
go by the name of educationists. To build schools, to
put Hving and registering machinery inside of them,
is no more than to build depots, and enter the number
of cadres in the Army Department books, and then say
to the world, and to your country, that you have got an
army. These things one ought to have done, and not
leave the other undone.

Mr Dempster has peculiar and not unreasonable

DR bell's correspondence. Ill

views about Ireland and the mode of climbing to a
bishopric. He writes (27th August 1813), "Do you
never think of extending your labours to Ireland)
There is a field 1 The wittiest, sharpest, handsomest
people in Europe left in a ferocious state of barbarism,
between a learned Protestant clergy who do nothing,
and an ignorant, bigoted. Catholic priesthood who do
too much, because the Government does nothing for
them. . . . Don't moderate your ambition to Sher-
burn Hospital, but continue your progress to the mitre.
F(yr very little money you may he jparagraphed wp
to the episcopal throne, A few superficial essays on
chemistry, and an apology for the Bible, have made
bishops; flogging the Westminster schoolboys, arch-
bishops. What are their labours or merits compared
with yours? If well puffed, as it would admit of,
what wiU not the rising generation owe you % Plough-
men, between their yokings, reading the Old Testament ;
the New read by the milkmaids and dustmen : cobblers
solving proble J algebraicaUy, and girls drawing n.ps
of Europe on their samplers." It is plain that Mr
Dempster thought himself standing in the morning
light of a new millennium of education. His appor-
tionment of the Old Testament to ploughmen, and of
the New to dustmen, is more antithetic than correct.

A Mrs A has also some original ideas on educa-
tion — as, indeed, which of us has not? How good
education is, like religion, for other people; and how
easy and pleasant is the architecture of Spanish castles
for the benefit of mankind. In building these, the foot-
rule is not wanted ; all that is wanted is a metaphor, to

112 LIFE OF DR BELL.

which you stick wherever it carries you ; and it always
carries you into new and wonderful countries. Mrs

A 's metaphor is "the river of language." She

says, after other ebullient expressions of hopeful faith :
" It appears likewise to me, from the character of lan-
guages, that they might be more simplified, and made
more easy by bringing them from the source; that
carrying up the stream must always be the more diffi-
cult way. We learn that, in the time of the Reforma-
tion in Scotland, children of six or seven years of age
read the Hebrew and Greek Bibles. If the Hebrew
is the root of all language, and can be so easily at-
tained, would it not be the most fit to begin with 1 "
This is a delicious educational morsel The authen-
ticity of the facts, the insight into history and human
nature, the rapidity and cogency of the reasoning, all
make it well worthy of the attention of the Educa-
tion Department, the London School Board, and the
Association of Head-Masters.

A Monsieur Timueff writes from Yverdun on the
25th of May 1819, to Mr Johnson, the Head-Master
of the Central School, and gives a tolerably lucid
account of the thought and work of M PestalozzL It
may not be out of place to select a few sentences from
this long letter. M Timueff begins at the very be-
ginning. " Man," he says, " comes out of the bosom of
nature as an individual being^ — that is, he brings into
the world only as much as nature has given him. . . .
Those amongst whom he grows have a holy sacred
obligation to educate him- Kature herseK declares it
in the relations between the parents and their children.

J

DR bell's correspondence. 113

"Education can be perfect only in so far as we
follow the course nature points out The science of
human nature — so great that it may even be called
the knowledge of the world — is far from its perfection,
and, consequently, education also.

"Nature points out the means for every education.
The tender love and pure faithy animating all members
of a family, give us a most excellent opportunity to
observe and to imitate the means nature employs for
their development. But the time of such a pure and
exemplary family life is not yet come. Till that is the
case we are in want of schools. Now, you see, if the
school must properly be called the house of education,
it must be a perfect image of jpure natural relations.
By that the holy obligations of father or mother lies
upon the teacher or upon the mistress ; and, if they feel
the importance of their duty, as father and mother to
their children, then nature, by the voice of the heart,
will tell them what they must be to their scholars ; and
the scholars, by the same voice of nature, will be called
on to be what for their instructors they must and can
be. Recijprocal love and faith are the movers, if one
desires to obtain a tnte education,

"M. Pestalozzi's principles are: —

" (L) Give the things before the signs,

" (iL) The perfection of conclusions depends on the
perfection of instruction. That is, the more exact in-
tuitive impressions you can convey to the mind by
the way of the senses, the more perfect will the under-
standing be.

" (iii.) TJie child must he led from simple on to more

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DR bell's correspondence. 115

agrees with him : " Pestalozzi is, I daresay, a wise and
good man; but he seems to have invented nothing.
. . . If I understand the little I have seen of him,
while you by your new power enable one man of sense
to educate five hundred children, he will require about
a score of philosophers to educate one hundred. What
he does in the way of teaching, he does exactly as you
do, by means of the * Assiduous Exactor,' ^ always at his
pupil's elbow; but you have shown us how to create
these exactors by self-tuition ; but, if we are to follow
him, we must import them all, from whence I know
not."

A Sir James Langham sends to Dr Bell an extract
translated from a Pekin Gazette, and remarks that the
ideas of the Emperor of China and of Dr Bell jump
marvellously together : " His Majesty the Emperor has
also examined the progress made by his fourth son, a
lad of fourteen years of age, and is much disappointed
to find him quite unable to lorite verses. The emperor
remembers well that his august father, the late emperor,
examined him when he was thirteen years of age, at
which time verses were daily composed by him. His
Majesty attributes the present failure to the prince's
tutors, and has ordered a complete set of new masters."
This is distinctly imperial ; his Majesty orders " a com-
plete set of new masters" with as much ease as he
would a new suit of clothes or a new set of furniture
for the prince's room-
In 1831 Southey was making ready to write a general

1 A phrase of Quintilian's : ''Ne opus quidem erit hac casti-
gatione, si assiduus stiidiorum exactor adstiterit."

116 LIFE OF DR BELL.

survey of the state of education in England; and he
writes to Dr Bell from Keswick on the 15th of Janu-
ary : " What I have to show is that mischief is done,
not hy having too much education, but too little ; that,
if it were general, it would no more make the children
of the peasantry above their station than it has done in
Scotland ; that, of some kind or other, let Government
do what they will, it must become general, and is becom-
ing so ; and that, if they do not surround their estab-
lishments with a well-constructed outwork of national
schools, nothing can save them and their establishments
from destruction. It was no fault of yours that this
was not done many years ago ; and I have no sin of
omission to answer for upon this score." But what
was seen with perfect distinctness by Mr Southey
in 1831 is not even yet universaUy admitted in
1880.

In the same way. Professor Leslie of Edinburgh sends
Dr Bell some excellent remarks which still continue to
point the way to improvements that are not adopted,
and to sensible methods that are kept out by the pres-
sure of routine. '* Custom lies upon us like a weight,
heavy as frost, and deep almost as life." " Nothing,"
says Sir John Leslie, " can be more galling or prepos-
terous than the usual mode of loading the memory with
long, barbarous, and absurd grammar rules, which only
retard the acquisition of the language, destroy all its
beauties by tasteless mechanical associations, and are
forgotten as soon as by practice the language has be-
come familiar. ... A great desideratum in schools

BR bell's correspondence. 117

is a proper selection of specimens of composition. Be-
sides religious and moral subjects, passages from poets
or orators, we should have an extensive selection in
history, biography, natural history, the mechanical arts,
manufactures, navigation, and commerce. It would be
of national importance if men of higher talents would
lend their aid to this design. ... I should pro-
pose that these grammars and school selections should
be stereotyped, and furnished in such portions as should
be wanted, at a penny a sheet. A boy need not have
more at a time than would serve him half a year.
Nothing can be so wasteful or preposterous as to put
into a boy's hand a thick volume, which is generally
thumbed and useless before a score of pages have been
studied."

Mr Hugh Cleghom, at one time a Professor at St
Andrews, expresses in a letter of the 19th of October
1831, some very strong views as to the maintenance of
endowed institutions. His opinions are very like those
of Mr Eobert Lowe : " If these institutions," he says,
" cannot support themselves, no adventitious assistance
can render them useful Learned retirement and se-
cluded leisure for study is nonsense. The world is the
school of letters as well as of business. The political
agitations of Greece produced her poets and philosophers
as well as her statesmen, while the monkish establish-
ments of our fathers, with their seclusion and endow-
ments, produced only the jargon of technical language,
and fettered themselves and their disciples with the
impertinence of academic forms. They educate men most

118 LIFE OF DR BELL.

profoundly learned and most consummately ignorant;
and I am almost inclined to regard them as asylums for
opinions, which, like cast-off mistresses, have been
kicked out of every decent company." There is much
strong good sense here; but it is surely too absolute.
What are we to think of Chairs of Eesearch 1 And
Goethe speaks quite differently : —

** Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille
Sich ein Karakter in dem Strom der "Welt."

Mr Cleghom goes on to make some remarks which
are not without applicability to the year 1881: "If
the duration of human life is to be determined by the
only rational standard, the succession of great events
which have passed during its existence, we are the
longest-lived generation that ever appeared upon earth.
But, unhappily, man is the only brute who derives no
wisdom from experience. For nearly forty years we
have witnessed the wickedness and the calamities of
France; we have seen her, except during an interregnum
of despotism, possessed of a king without power, of
a nobility without privileges, of a jposse of legislators
and no law, and of the whole body of the people
swearing allegiance to a constitution which they, as yet,
have not formed ; and, to crown all, singing Te Deums
for the national confusion. This unhappy state, mer-
cifully held out to us as a beacon to shun, a branch
of our legislators wish to follow as a light to direct.
The great body of the people, too, commonly become
most outrageous when they have most reason to be
contented."

DR bell's CORRESPONDENCK 119

And he concludes his letter, an octogenarian writing
to an octogenarian : " Let ns all remember, in the lan-
guage of Socrates, that 'he who prays for long life, for
riches, or for health, prays for the throw of a dice, or
the chance of a battle/ "

120

CHAPTER XVL

DB bell's CHABACTEB AND ST8TEH.

If it were said that Dr Bell was a successful man in
the field which he set himself to cultivate, and that he
made a few warm friends in his passage through life,
— ^that would perhaps be aU that could be accurately
asserted of his career. He was not an interesting man ;
he was not a great man ; he had very little insight into
human nature, though here and there are to be found
glimpses of truth ; he was singularly narrow-minded ;
and he was in several respects a terrible bora There
is in his own mind hardly a trace of education — ^hardly
the smallest sign of literary culture. He had read
Cicero and Quintilian, Milton and Locke; but he had
read them only for the purpose of digging out of them
mottoes for the chapters of his works, or passages in
support of his own conclusions. There is no more trace
of literature or of literary culture in all his voluminous
writings than there is in the minutes of a corporation
or the report of a banking company. He remained to
the end of his days of the opinion which he expressed
when he was acting as tutor to his two American
pupils : " I thought that a good hand was better than

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 121

all the Greek and Latin in the universe." And, even
after he was a richly beneficed clergyman, he looks
upon grammar-schools and universities chiefly as places
where people " contract prejudices." His whole mind
and soul were absorbed in the one idea of extending to
the whole world the blessings and the peculiarities of
the Madras System.

But there is no doubt that his character is interesting
from its largeness, its massiveness, and simplicity; and
he always seems to have retained his power of attrac-
tion for children. It is clear all through his life that
he was determined "to have his own way;" but he
was not very careful to make that way smooth and
easy for others. When Mr Wilmont, one of his assist-
ants, spends two days with him in the country, the
time is almost entirely taken up with "lecturings and
scoldings." He marries a wife ; and he dismisses her.
That is all we know. She comes into his biography
like a shadow, and she goes out again like a shadow.
She is a name and nothing mora He no doubt treated
her to a perpetual course of " lecturings and scoldings : "
perhaps she was a woman of spirit and replied. This
would, in the Doctor's eyes, be high treason, and she
must go. We know nothing of her ; and the field is ab-
solutely open to every kind of conjecture. Then he was
himself very parsimonious ; and perhaps her allowances
wore smaU. His married life was not a success — as his
school life was.

He was eminently able in money -dealings; and if
he had gone into business, he would probably have
become a merchant-prince. When a tutor in America,

122 LIFE OF DR BELL.

he trades in CTirrency and tobacco ; when going out to
the East Indies, he manages to get a free passage —
" which will save him £200 " — and even to make money
on the way by having a class of officers on board. He
was the first man to apply to education the principle of
" payment by results." " He regarded money," says Mr
Bamford, "as the jprimum mobile and only efficient
stimulant in the world. He excited masters by a
negative kind of threat He did not say *Do this,
and you shall have so much beyond your regular and
fixed salary ' — which at best must be barely sufficient
to command the necessaries of life — but *Do this, or
you shall be mulcted, or lose your situation.* He
would have had all the masters under such an arbitrary
kind of control that, if the school did not weekly and
monthly increase in numbers, and order, and attendance,
and improve in progress, the masters should be subject
to weekly and monthly fines, and be paid according to
the periodical state of the school *I can do more,'
said he to the Archbishop of Canterbury, taking half-
a- crown out of his pocket — *I can do more with
this half-crown than you can do with all your fixed
salaries.'" "Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona;" and
Dr Bell is not the only man who has tried to fix
burdens on the shoulders of others, which they them-
selves touched with but one of their fingers. "Pay-
ment by results " is a divine thought ; and it is beyond
a doubt the ultimate test of the lives of all of us. But
then it should be applied with complete impartiality to
every profession — to the army, the navy, law, medicine,
and the Church, as well as to education. The fact is,

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 123

that many good people are still unwilling to look upon
education as anything but a process which may be
carried on by some kind of machinery or other — more
or less intelligent. They want to judge it, but to have
no hand in it; they do not see that it is the one
process in our social life the conductors of which must
be frankly and simply regarded as colleagues — as friends
and helpers, not as menials and serving-men.

Dr Bell's strength of will carried him from a humble
position to a stall in Westminster Abbey — ^lifted him
from the status of curate to be master of a hospital —
" a preferment which has heretofore fallen to the first
dignitaries of the Church." His strength of will — ^that
was the chief thing in Imn. It is an admirable and
a most necessary quality. But it is not so admirable
when unmixed. We do not accord it a large meed of
respect when we meet it in a Tropman or in a Tasman-
ian devil. It is seen to require other qualities to com-
mend it to our higher feelings. " He would have made,"
says Southey, " a good engineer, a good general, a good
statesman ; " but he hardly seems to have mounted to
the level of a good man, and he certainly was not an
adequate husband. He says of himself to Mr Southey :
"You know how strong-headed and wrong-headed I
am." And then he puts in a bar against his being con-
sidered "wrong-minded;" but no one would consider
that high praise. The fact is, he cared not a pin for
the feelings of other people, unless they happened to
be of higher rank or station than himself.

His character is faithfully mirrored in the style of
his writings. Cumbrous, clumsy, chaotic, dull even to

124 LIFE OF DB BELL.

heaviness, full of involutions, repetitions, misplaced lim-
itations, — it is a severe penance to be obliged to read a
page. He cannot speak ; he gets to say what he wants
the reader to know by the simple process of " pegging
away." Dr Southey, writing to Dr BeU, says : " A mad-
man, but of great genius, cast my nativity once, and
pronounced that I had ' a gloomy capability of walking
through desolation.' " If this meant that he had a capa-
city for wading through the desolation and monotony
of Dr BeU's papers, the madman was right. Extracts
from dull old pamphlets ; endless minutes of meetings ;
long series of motions — in which everything has been
moved except the reader's mind and feelings ; reports —
and reports on these reports; tables and columns of
statistics ; letters from boards and to boards about things
that every member of each board was glad to forget the
moment the letters had been signed ; endless repetition
of two or three fixed ideas; reading compared with
which the dullest Blue-book is lively : these form the
staple of the writings of this eager " educationist." Dr
Bell has at most only one or two things to say ; and he
contrives to hit all round the nail — and, among these
strokes one now and then hits the nail on the head.
Mutual Tuition — Accurate Preparation: — that is
almost the whole of the educational message he had to
deliver to the British nation.

Mutual tuition — this was his " discovery " — ^this was
to regenerate the world. There was nothing too strong
to say about it. " Like polarity in the magnet, it had
lain hid for ages;" it was ''an organ for the multi-
plication of power and division of labour^ in the intel-

DB BELL'S CHARACTER AND BTSTEH. 125 -

I, moral, and scientific world ; " it was the newest

I Organon ; it was the greateBt benefit that had

\ to mankind since the "Word was made flesh and

\ among us. Kay, Dr Bell and his friends wore

I upon the language of sacred poetry to express

r feelings about it; and in one of his letters he

I ittto an adjuration to this country : " Arise 1

! for thy hght is come ; for the glory of the Lord

[tiaen upon thee ! " But, if any one were to ask,

There is Dr Bell's System now 1 he would receive no

ept from echo. He is as forgotten as the

ite of the Pyramids ; his works are as little read as Mr

r /ilkie's " Epigoniad ; " hia memory has passed with the

Pnows of yester-year. Not even in the schools which

e founded and endowed, and which are hound, by the

Rspress terms of his will to use his System — not even

□ these schools is his name known or his System em-

►•ployed. Hia portrait looks down with heavy-browed

eagerness, and a certain bovine look of mildness, over

a scholastic procedure, every step in which he would

have condemned with fervour and asperity; and neither

man nor boy regards him. His works lie in the library;

and neither student nor teacher consults them. They

are hideous, amorphous, without form, with little light ;

tiiey are almost unreadable.

But let us look a little into his works and System,
and see whether there is not in them something that
may be of use for the present age — somethii^ that our
modem generation of teachers may learn from.

The central notion is that of Mututd Tuition; and the
piaotical corollary from it is Self-Selection. The children

126 LIFE OF DB BELL.

were to teach each other ; each child was to rise or fall
in his place in class according to his accuracy of repeti-
tion ; or even to fall or rise from class to class. Before
Dr Bell's plan, the master " heard " all the lessons ; and
forty-nine children were always more or less idle, while
the fiftieth was occupied in " saying " his lesson. But
now the little boys were arranged in divisions ; one of
the boys taught ; when one was reading, all the others
listened, and the next boy corrected when an error was
made. The lessons were always very short ; and each
child prepared what he had to prepare without a single
mistake. A register was kept by the monitors and
" teachers,*' and even by the boys themselves j and thus
the whole school became a scene of unceasing activity
and constant healthy emulation.

Dr Bell's ideas had a root in nature — ^in the nature
of the child. That was their merit. He says himself,
" The System has no parallel in scholastic history " —
(he means the histoi'y of teaching — ^if there be any such
history) — " it is essentially discriminated from aU others
by the inherent principle which constitutes its natural,
necessary, and never-to-be-confounded distinction." I^ow
in this and in many other passages, Dr Bell, like other
inventors and discoverers, piques himself most on that
which differentiates his " system " from others, while it
was what he had in common with others that gave it
its true value. For all its true value arose simply from
the digging down a little deeper into our common
nature. Again, like other inventors, he wanted to label
the education of this country with his name ; but the
label has long been shed — it fell off with the necessary

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 127

growth of the mighty tree of popular instruction ; and
his own eagerness made other people all the more ready
to disallow his claims.

The " discovery " of Dr Bell was not what he called
his system, but the carrying into practice and the school-
room of an old, old truth, which in the present day we
are all of us a Httle apt to forget. Learning is a social
ACT ; it is best carried on under social conditions. It
is one of the strongest bonds that knit society together ;
and, while it binds and strengthens, it lifts the whole
body of society to ever higher and stronger life. That
is what Dr Bell really meant. Thus his doctrine of
Mutual Instruction is valuable, not because it is new,
but because it is old — and eternal Teach that you may
learn ! has been uttered thousands of times by men in
all ages and in all countries. You will not have a firm
grip of any truth, or even of an external fact, until you
have tried to give it to others. This power, like aU the
highest powers in human nature, grows by spending;
and, in things of the mind b& weU as in things of the
soul, it is more blessed to give than to receive. But
the Jesuits — those old-fashioned instructors from whom
we have still to learn so much — imderstood this per-
fectly, and have enshrined the truth in their dog-
Latin —

<< Discere si quseris, doceas, sic ipse doceris ;
Nam studio tali tibi proficls atque sodali."

But in schools there are always great practical diffi-
culties in carrying out the principle. To set pupils to
teach each other requires an organisation which has

128 LIFE OF DK BELL.

entirely gone out of fashion in the present day. At
best, it could only be applied to those subjects, or parts
of subjects, in which memory and drill are alone con-
cerned ; but surely in such subjects it would be well to
employ it still. To employ it, I mean, as Professor
Pillans was wont to do, in small divisions of three or
four, coached by one a little ahead of the others. Each
member of these small divisions, by going over the
passage to be prepared again and again, had every fibre
of it worked slowly — ^slowly, for that is the method and
habit of nature (and in education we must reverence
and observe the Naturlangsamkeit), into the mental
marrow of him, so that he could always apply it after-
wards, — so that he never forgot it. Plans and methods
are subject, in education, as in every other human
sphere, to the ebb and flow of fashion; but a great
reward awaits that teacher who can, in some practical
and practicable maimer, reintroduce Dr Bell's central
idea of Mutual Tuition. !N'owadays we are eager to
bring every young and growing mind under the direct
influence of a powerful and mature mind ; and we de-
mand the Best for every little half-fledged creature who
enters our schools. The demand is a noble one; the
ambition is a splendid reaction from our old sluggish
satisfaction with anything — ^with the Worst. But,
while the best teaching is wanted for every child and
for every class of children where a method has to be
instilled, it is not necessary in those parts of instructions
where routine and the mastery of details are concerned.
In such cases the chief thing is mental companionship,
with an after reference to a higher court, to the stand-

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 129

ard of perfection in the head-master himself. I am
not here defending the "Pupil-Teacher System," or
any system. The pupil-teacher, as a teacher, is gener-
ally a failure. But social learning, where the memory
is chiefly concerned — where constant mental drill is
necessary, is a condition which ought to be present, to
some extent, in all our schools — secondary as well as
primary.

The phrase Social Learning may be interpreted in
many ways, and may be applied after very varying
fashions. The man who can hold the attention of one
pupil, so that the needle of his mind never fluctuates
from the attracting intellectual pole, is an artist. The
man who can hold for an hour the eyes and the atten-
tion of a whole class, not by threats but by the sheer
force of attraction, is a great artist. The man who can
invent business plans and carry them out — such that
the school shall be a home of perpetual cheerful work,
and that every child shall take delight in the pleasant
round of labour, is the next to these.

If I were asked in what part of England Dr Bell's
main ideas — the true and living germ of his thought —
stiU existed, I should point to a school in a valley on
the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire. It is there
that what is best and most Hving in his "system" stiU
lives and bears fruit for the present generation. It is
there that his two principles — Everything perfect from
the beginning, and Mutual Tuition, are carried into prac-
tice under the best conditions and in the f uUest measure.
Dr Bell is never tired of dwelling on the extreme satis-
faction that anses both to the teacher and to the pupil

I

130 LIFE OF DB BELL.

when, by giving short lessons, every part of every lesson
is known without error or hesitation. The perceptions
of the child are preserved in their healthy, natural, and
unerring state; his articulation is perfect; his concep-
tions are clear; his memory is free from confusion. In
this respect the school at Centre Vale -^ is a modem
presentment of the truth of Dr Bell's ideas. " Writers,
ancient and modem," says Dr Bell, " have observed, and
experience confirms their observation, that children do
not tire, like men, of perpetual attention to minute
points." In this school these small points not only do
not tire — the child seems to take a positive pleasure in
attending to them. But the most interesting feature in
Centre Vale school is a novel application of the principle
of Mutiuzl Tuition. The application is novel ; but it is
much more profound than anything Dr BeU meant, for
it goes deeper down into human nature, and employs
a larger number of human elements than have been
brought together for harmonious working within the
walls of a schoolroom. The application is to the learn-
ing of the best poems and passages in our English
literature. The precondition of perfect reading aloud
has been secured — an accurate, never-ceasing regard to
pauses, points, and stops ; a full outspokenness, and a
clear articulation. Then the parts or elements of the
poem are given out; and they are given out in such a
way as to interest almost every member of the class. I
remember being much struck with the reading of two
poems. One was Groldsmith's " Elegy on the Glory of

^ Near Todmorden.

DR bell's CHARACTEE AND SYSTEM. 131

her Sex, Mrs Mary Blaize;" and the other was Mr
Lushington's " Eoad to the Trenches." It would hardly
have struck any one that these poems were susceptible
of a dramatic cast — that they were capable of being
distributed, as it were, over the class, for full and com-
plete rendering. But assurance, mixed with a most
agreeable surprise, would have run into the mind of the
listener and spectator when he heard one pupil read
with a clear articulation and in teUing accents, —

** Good people all, with one accord,
Lament for Madam Blaize,
Who never wanted a good word —

and, in a distant part of the room, there rises unex-
pectedly a young head, who represents the cool detrac-
tion of the world, the cosmic care that " trees do not
grow into the sky," by quietly remarking —

" From those who spoke her praise."

The effect is wonderful ; it is wonderful because it is
so true. Another reader takes up the praise of the
lady ; and still another, from another part of the room,
quietly rises to take off the necessary discoimt. Still
another tells us in moving and eloquent words, —

** The needy seldom passed her door,
And always found her kind ;
She freely lent to all the poor —

when, from the unexpected comer, comes the inevitable
equation of the young Minos —

** Who left a pledge behind.

»>

132 LIFE OF DB BELL.

Again is her praise taken up ; again her good deeds find
a herald : —

** Her love was sought, I do aver.
By twenty beaux and more.
The king himself has followed her —

but the just interpreter again hands in the corrective —

** When she has walked before."

The same kind of treatment was applied to the
powerful and pathetic verses called " The Eoad to the
Trenches." In that poem there are several speakers;
and what they say may well be distributed among dif-
ferent readers. But more, there are several different
incidents and different situations ; and these, too, were
distributed among the class with singular appropriate-
ness. The soldier in the terrible winter of the Crimea
asks to be left alone; not even a man can be spared
from the work of the country to stay beside him. An
officer offers his cloak to keep him warm : " Wrap him
in this, I need it less." The company marches on to
the trenches; they say good-bye. When they return,
they find only a Httle mound of snow ; and their com-
rade lies beneath it dead. 'Now the lady who directs
this school gives all this a dramatic treatment; and
some may even blame her for this. £ut what does
dramatic treatment mean in this case? It simply
means that every feeling and act of the human mind,
which is naturally related to the incidents of the poem,
is called into play. This is to begin at the right end.
The ordinary " didactic " treatment of such a poem
begins at the wrong end. It begins with words; it

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 133

keeps to words ; and it explains words by other words,
which may or may not explain, which may be nothing
but an application of the ohscurum per ohscurius. But
this living treatment begins with feelings ; it creates the
right emotions ; the emotions create the thoughts ; the
thoughts create the words; and the words — even the
words of others — are plain from the first, because the
reader has risen to the same state of feeling as that
which in the author produced the words. Then every
thing is as sure, as simple, and as unerring as nature
herself. And this is what education has to do ; it has
to employ the methods of nature — ^if it is to have re-
sults as good and true. But education is an art. True ;
but every art that is a true art has its roots in nature.
" The art itself," says Shakespeare, ** is nature." There
are hundreds of excellent poems in our language that
would freely lend themselves to the same treatment.
But the best is still to say. The reading of the poem
unites the whole class into one corporate intellectual
whole ; it binds them all together " as with the bands
of a man ; " and the story of the " noble, nameless, Eng-
lish heart " makes all of them feel as one. And more,
the children, who have an honest and spontaneous liking
for what they have thus learned in school, recite their
poems to their parents and friends at home \ and thus
the best words of the best English minds are made seeds
of English patriotism and humanity — centres of true
ci\'ilisation in this far-withdrawn Yorkshire valley. Pil-
grimages to saints, processions of devout persons to kiss
the bones or other reHcs of some dead religious hero, —
these we have often heard of or seen^ marching to the

134 LIFE OF DB BELL.

music of hymns by the side of the broad Ehine, under
the shade of thick-planted walnut-trees. But a pilgrim-
age for teachers — a better pilgrimage than to the dead
— ^would be a pilgrimage to this living nursery of good
and true thought, of clear and frank expression, of the
application of natural feelings and natural methods to
the processes of school-education. From such a visit
teachers would return with new ideas and new strength.

Let us now look back for a few minutes at the dif-
ference between Bell and Lancaster. Both had struck
upon the same idea of mutual instruction ; and it does
not matter a straw to us now which of them happened
to be a few days in front of the other. The time in
which they lived was, in fact, the dawn of popular in-
struction ; and in a dark dawn even a farthing candle
is a wonder and a revealer. But now, this new light,
precious as it was, has faded into or mingled with the
light of common day. The plan of mutual instruction
was only a plan — ^it was far from being a method ; but
it was a plan which, under certain strict limitations and
clearly defined conditions, might still do some good work
for us. Among other benefits which it might bring, it
might spare the lungs and labour of the teacher, and
enable him to keep himself constantly fresh and in good
spirits. For a teacher, by allowing himself to become
jaded and weary, does as great a wrong to his pupils as
he does to himself.

Both sides had the support of statesmen and thought-
ful persons ; both were heart and soul in earnest, until
they began to quarrel, and to ask themselves the barren
and stupid questions : " Am I not better than he 1 Is

DR bell's CHARACTEE AND SYSTEM. 135

not my plan anterior to his 1 " Both believed in the
spontaneous and superabundant activity of the child;
and both felt that a school ought to be the home of
lively and cheerful learning. When Lancaster found a
mischievous boy, he made a monitor of him. Leaders
of men (and boys) have known of this homoeopathic
cure for long ages. Lancaster, like Jacotot, believed,
with all his heart, in the pregnant paradox, " A teacher
can teach what he does not know." For the teacher
sets the pupil's mind in motion, sets it to work on the
matter before him, questions and cross-questions, invites
him to repeat and re-repeat, asks new questions from
constantly new angles, asks about the inter-relations of
every part to every other part, makes him break up
every whole into its constituent fractions — ^recombine
them into one whole, and so works his mind to a high
pitch of free play on the matter imder discussion, that
it is turned over and over, and looked at from every
side, and becomes completely the possession of the mind.
The teacher does this by keeping before him one of the
chief guiding - stars of all good teaching — Kepetition
without Monotony !

Both were lauded to the skies for their " systems,"
and both have been forgotten — almost even to their
names. I have already mentioned the praises showered
upon Dr BelL Of Lancaster's system, the * Edinburgh
Eeview' of 1811 says: "This method may most truly
be pronounced a capital discovery. Printing is not
more capable of being applied to diffuse all truth and
all knowledge than the beautiful discovery of Mr Lan-
caster." Both had the patronage of the King, and both

136 LIFE OF DB BELL.

were not one whit the better for it. Both raised enor-
mous sums by subscription, founded scores of schools,
trained hundreds of teachers, taught thousands of chil-
dren; and thus both sowed in England that seed of
popular instruction, the large and happy fruits of which
we are now beginning to reap.

Both were good men, lavish of themselves, their time,
and their powers ; but Dr Bell was the more fortunate.
Lancaster was in danger of dying in a debtor's prison.
A story, which shows the character of the man and his
strong power of attraction, is told by Mr Corston, the
old and devoted friend of Lancaster : —

"I visited him to apologise for not going his bail,
because the number of writs which might be issued,
were the present ones satisfied, would only reduce two
families instead of one to want and suffering. After
my departure he rang for the sheriff's officer to take him
to the Bench (Court), but obtained leave to call at home
on their way. After being alone with his grief-stricken
family a little, he opened the parlour-door and said to
the man, ' Friend, when I am at home, I read the Scrip-
tures to my family: hast thou any objection to come
mV * "No, sir,' the man replied, and went in. He soon
became deeply affected, and joined in the common grief.
Soon after the worship was over, Joseph said to him,
' Now, friend, I am ready for thee.' They had not gone
many paces when the man said, ' Sir, have you got no
friend to be bound for you for this debtl' Joseph
replied, * I^o ; I have tried them alL' * Well,' replied the
man, 'then I'll be bound for you myself, for you are
an honest man, I know.' He surrendered him at the

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 137

King's Bench, and they took his security for the
debt."

Both tried to understand the nature of children, and
to enlist on their side and attach to their educational
efforts all the feelings and powers of nature that they
could find. In this regard we have still something to
learn from both of them.

Both had the habit of repeating themselves, of redis-
covering their old discoveries every morning, of saying
over again, in slightly varied words, or in differently
arranged sentences, the one idea round which their
minds revolved like satellites. They did not possess
the idea ; the idea possessed them. Hence they became,
for the sake of the poor, bores of the first magnitude.
There is one very amusing instance in the works of Dr
BelL When he was nearly seventy, he took it into his
head that he would write a book on the "Wrongs of
Children." Children were not imderstood; they were
badly taught ; they were ill-trained ; nature was flouted
and insulted in their persons ; much cruelty was prac-
tised upon them ; much of their lives — of the time they
could never get back — was wasted. Dr Bell would
blazon forth these wrongs, would show the remedy,
would right them with his own hands. Accordingly, he
writes a book, and looks out for a publisher. The book
is published. But there is not a single word about the
wrongs of children from the beginning to the end of the
book. It is the old story retold. It is once more the
" New Organ, or Intellectual Power, which had escaped
the research of every age and of every country," — and
so on. The one sole wrong mentioned in the book is

138 LIFE OP DE BELL.

the shadowy wrong done by La Bruyfere in an essay on
children, in which he calls them " hautains, dMaign&uXj
coUres, env^ietix" and a number of other unpleasant
things. And the book closes with the usual number
of "letters and documents" from eminent persons re-
garding the wonderful merits of the New System.

In spite of all this, we must not forget the valuable
truths preached by Dr Bell's tongue and pen, and still
more by his practice. The most valuable of these truths
are perhaps the three following : —

1. Let the principle of self -selection prevail in every
school ; and so arrange the life of the school that every
pupil seeks and finds his own place.

2. Learn by teaching.

3. Let there be no residuum in a class. Every pupil
has one kind of talent at least.

The modem danger in education — both secondary
and primary — is the predominance, and indeed the
absolute tyranny, of drill, and the high-pressure which,
in the hands of a hard-working master, compels aU the
pupils to advance in unbroken line. We are in danger
of forgetting the common-sense truth — that it is onlv
what a pupil does for himself that is truly educative ;
and that the mind unconsciously sheds much of what it
has unwillingly accepted, and also refuses to employ even
the things it has retained. It is not the best and most
powerful minds that have been made and built up in
school and by school-work. Sir Humphry Davy writes
to his mother and congratulates himself on the whole-
some neglect he met with at school. " I perhjips owe,"
he says, " to this circumstance the little talents I have,

DR bell's character AND SYSTEM. 139

and their peculiar application." Sir Walter Scott, who
was an omnivorous reader, but certainly not a bright
scholar according to the regulation pattern, thought that
" the best part of every man's mind is that which he
gives himseK." Leslie declares that it was Fuseli's
" wise neglect " of young Landseer that helped to make
him what he afterwards became. Turner's father sent
him to school to learn drawing; but it was not long
before his master, a thoroughly competent man, sent
young Turner back to his father with a note that lessons
were thrown away upon him, that it was of no use try-
ing to teach him, and that " the case was hopeless."

These are the commonplaces of educational controversy;
but they aU point to the important fact that spontaneous
activity is the most valuable power in the mind, and to
the duty of the wise teacher, who will endeavour to find
out what direction this activity is taking, and encourage
its growth. " People," says Eousseau, " do not under-
stand childhood. With the false notions we have of it,
the farther we go, the farther we go wrong. The wisest
lay stress on what it is important for men to know,
without considering what children are in a condition to
learn."

The problem for modern teachers is a very difficult
one. It is to reconcile the claims — the enormous claims
— of modem education, with a reverence for the indi-
vidual powers of each personality. Another aim —
another problem quite as important — is to eliminate
the didactic element from instruction, and so to make
it an art. Many able young men in secondary schools
are rising up to give practical solutions to these prob-

140 LIFE OF DR BELL.

lems. The able teachers in primary schools have — or
seem to have — even a more difficult task before them ;
but they, too, by faith and perseverance, will at long
and at last " beat their music out."

The * Life of Dr Bell ' may give them here and there
suggestions, may indicate some side-light which may
help them towards the performance of their task, or
may at least give some short but honest word of en-
couragement : —

** Es rufen von driiben
Die Stimmen der Meister
Die Stimmen der Geister :
' Yersanmt nicht zu iiben
Die Erafte des Guten !

Hier winden sich Kronen
In ewiger Stille
Die soUen mit Fiille
Die Thatigen lohnen,
Wir heissen ench hoffen ! ' "

But, whatever we who are elders and professional
teachers may say and discuss and resolve, there sounds
in our inner ear the cry of the children — a cry to which
the whole past history of education has been somewhat
deaf : " Take us with you ! "

141

LECTUKE ON DR BELL.

[The following lecture was delivered in the Greek Class-
room of St Andrews in 1877 ; and it is the sketch on which the
preceding * Life ' is based. It may perhaps be of use to print it
here as giving, in a very condensed form, the main facts regard-
ing the educational theories and doings of the founder of the
** Madras System of Education." That system is now forgotten ;
but what we must not forget is, that we owe to Dr Bell — through
his trustees, Mr John Cook and the Earl of Leven and Melville —
the founding of two Chairs of Education in the Universities of
Edinburgh and St Andrews,]

In the year 1844, John Murray brought out, in three
thick octavo volumes, the Life of the Eev. Dr Andrew
BelL This ' Life ' was begun by Eobert Southey, the
well-known reviewer, literary man, historian, and poet-
laureate. He died when the first volume was finished ;
and even this first volume had to be edited and carried
through the press by the loving care of his wife, Caro-
line Bowles. The two last volumes were written by
his son, the Eev. Charles Southey, of Queen's CoUege,
Oxford. These three large octavo volumes contain about
2000 pages; and they altogether form a mass of ex-
tremely duU and unattractive reading. This dulness
is not so much due to the subject — a man whose life
was very well worth writing — as to the extraordinarily

142 LECTUKE ON DE BELL.

chaotic form in which the materials are presented to
us. They are not presented, they are shot down at our
feet But for this one can hardly blame the reverend
gentleman. Dr Bell had kept every letter, note, paper,
pamphlet, or report he had received during a period
of sixty years ; and, as he knew almost everybody in
England, Scotland, and the other two hemispheres, one
can form some rude guess of the Chimborazo of rubbish
he had managed to accumulate around him. His amanu-
ensis, Mr Davies, toiled devotedly through this chaos,
and gradually worked the facts in it down to fourteen
octavo volumes. Eobert Southey undertook the task of
further reducing this, — he died in the process of the
work, and Charles Southey continued it. Sometimes
many hundred papers had to be searched for a single
fact or date; and the same papers, — ^many of them almost
illegible — ^would sometimes pass through Mr Davies's
hands some forty or fifty times. It took Mr Southey
a year only to mark the papers which he wished Mr
Davies to copy for him, and the result at last appeared
in these three thick volumes. The first is readable, as
everything Mr Southey wrote bears the marks of thought,
diHgence, Hterary form, and some grace ; but the two
last volumes could only be read under extraordinary
circumstances, — by the oflfer of a great reward — in a
country inn on a rainy day, after all the advertisements
of the local newspapers had been perused — or by a first-
class misdemeanant in prison. It is these three thick
volumes that I propose to lay before you a very short
view of.

Andrew Bell was an extraordinary man. I may even

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 143

go SO far as to say he was an extraordinary Seotchman.
In a country where every man has been framed in a
mould, which was afterwards broken and no copy kept,
it argues considerable force of mind or character to dis-
tinguish one's seK at all. The son of a barber, with no
fortune except the education he received at St Andrews,
he goes to Virginia as a tutor, and makes a small fortune
in tobacco ; he comes home, and — though short-sighted
— fights a duel in St Andrews, loses his money, takes
orders in the Church of England, and goes to Madras —
makes a large fortune in India — comes home, buys
estates, marries a wife, rises to be a dignitary in the
Church (and has a very near view of the mitre), writes
a large number of books, shakes hands with princes,
kings, and emperors, revolutionises education in the Old
and the New World, leaves £200,000, bullies and terrifies
his trustees before he dies, travels several hundred thou-
sand miles, and makes a large number of warm-hearted
friends, — surely this is experience enough to satisfy the
appetite or the ambition of any one man.

He was born at St Andrews in the year 1753. His
father was a barber in the city. He was a barber in
the golden age of barbers — in the time when they did
not cut hair, but built hair — built up enormous edifices
of horse-hair, grease, and flour, without which no pro-
fessor could lecture and no judge could try a case. But
he was more than a barber. He was also a clock and
watch maker, and something of an astronomer ; he kept
the University clock in order, and regulated it by ob-
servations ; and he also invented a plan of casting types,
which the great printers, Foulis of Glasgow, afterwards

LKmrBE OS DB Bell.

ployed. And he was much more than all this :
la also a bailie. Here one may be supposed to have
^hed the ftcmo of human climbing. But there is
■8 to come. Ho was the first man — or rather his
Je was the firet woman — in St Andrews to drink tea,
A to possess a china tea-service. About a hundred
id thirty years ago, he niiglit have been seen walking
down South Street, with two ample and architectoni-
oally-eonstructed wiga in front of him , one on each
band, well in front, lest by a collision they should spoil
each other's form and beauty. After trimming one
professor, he would sit down and breakfast with him ;
and then he would go off to another professor and trim,
and sit down and breakfast with him. In fact, it was
known that, in addition to his mental ability, he had
the biggest appetite and the widest mouth in St An-
drews, liesidea the indisputable advantage of having;
strong eager Scotch blood in hia veins, he had also a
supply of sturdy Dutch blood from his maternal grand-
father — a captain in the Dutch Guards of William of
Orange. Once, in a hard time of acarcenees approaching
to famine, a meal-mob broke out in this quiet fifteenth-
century University town ; and he alone went out, and,
with his Scoto-Dutch courage, put it down and sent the
people quietly back to theii homes.

This sturdy Scotchman had eight children, and
Andrew was the second son. At the age of four, some
one gave the child a penny, and he at once took up one
of his brother's books, marched off to school, and offered
the penny as his quarter's fee.

He matriculated at the University in 1769; and he

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 145

eked out his miserable bursary by private teaching.
" He has often said that he never refused to teach any-
thing, for he could always, by nightly study, prepare
himseK for giving the next day's lesson ; and thus, what
he had to teach, he acquired as he went along," I
remember the head of a large school in Washington
saying to me — "I can teach anything if I have the
books ; " but one recognises a prescientific flavour about
these intellectual marvels, and can only say with
Schiller —

*' Ach ! was haben die Herren doch fiir ein kurzes Gedann ! "

He was a special favourite of the Professor of ^Natural.
Philosophy, Dr Wilkie. Wilkie would stroke his head
and say — " Andrew, pursue your studies, and they will
make your fortune. I never knew a man fail of success
in the world, if he excelled in one thing." This Dr
Wilkie was also an excellent farmer, and his plan in
that was very similar — "to plough well and manure
weU ; to lay the earth open to the influences of the sky,
and return to it the remains and refuse of its own pro-
duce ; and to keep the ground clean," This great Dr
Wilkie, by the way, also wrote an epic on the Second
War of Thebes, which he caUed " The Epigoniad." It
may still be found in the University Library; but it
sleeps with the fathers and the schoolmen and the early
novels of the Delia Cruscan type, Dr Wilkie was also
very willing to oblige the neighbouring clergy, and to
preach for them — which he did extemporaneously. It
is said that, though " he never pursued the ordinary arts

K

of popn]arit7, yet he never failed to fix the attention ^
ioM beaPMB." He certainly did. For he was pectdiar,
Tirioos, and even wrcentiic in his sentiments and reason-
ing; and he "generally preached with his hat on." Hb
waa immoderately fond of chewing tobacco, and abhorred
nothing so much as clean sheets. When Lady Laudei-
dale asked him to stay all night, he suid ho could not
sleep out of his own heJ ; but that, " if her ladyship
would give him a pair of foul sheets, he would stay."
Once, when he was visiting a relation, the mistress of
the house put foui-and-twenty blankets on his bed for
the eake of the joke ; in the morning, they asked bjiii
how he had slept, and if he had bad plenty of clothes
on him ; and his reply was that he had had just enough
But let US leave the great Dr Wilkie, and return to
the great Dr Bell. He was only twenty when ho left
for Vij^inia to be tutor in the house of a merchant
there, at a salary of £200 a-year. This was in 1774.
In 1781 he came back to England with two of the sons
of his employer, and was shipwrecked on the way. They
escaped to land in the month of March, and were almost
frozen to death. In daily expectation of this end, he
made his will, and left his money and tobacco — he
had nearly 30,000 lb.— to his father. But, in spite of
hard frost and the thin walls of a tent, and rain and
dreadful nights in open boats, he and his pupils arrived
safe in London. He worked his way down to St
Andrews — reached that city in the dark, and was not
known by his own mother. It was at this time that he
fought his duel — with a Mr Crookenden, an English
student. Mr Boll was shortsighted and very eager; he

XECTURE ON DE BELL. 147

therefore wheeled round sharp upon the signal, and
delivered his fire before he had completed the wheeL
The consequence was that he fired at the seconds, who
first set up a shrill cry and then a great burst of laughter,
which ended in their becoming fast friends, and all din-
ing together with great hilarity.

He made friends wherever he went The friends he
made in Hertfordshire, for example, when they wished
to enforce anything by emphatic asseveration, were ready
to swear by the names of " Generosity and Honesty, or,
which was the same thing — Mr BeU." In 1783, he
brought his American pupils down to St Andrews ; they
attended the University, and he coached them. In the
vacations, they began to work at five in the morning.

Here comes in a small episode, highly honourable to
our friend — Bailie BeU. In 1784 there was an election;
and the two candidates were Mr Dempster and a member
of the Breadalbane family. As was usual in those times
everybody had promised his vote to one or the other
candidate, as political or other considerations weighed
with him. It so happened that the votes were equal ;
and thus, to the worthy and clear-headed bailie the
casting-vote fell, and, in fact, the election itseK. The
Breadalbane clan made this upright gentleman an offer
of £500 ; and, in consequence, Mr Bell voted for Mr
Dempster.

In the same year he was ordained in the Church of
England, and received an offer of the incumbency of an
Episcopal chapel at Leith. But Mr Dempster, who had
now become his best friend, put it into his head to go to
India, "that he might turn his talents and acquirements,

148 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

to good account as a philosophical lecturer ' — for he
was a good mathematician, and had learned much from
his guide, philosopher, and friend, Dr Wilkie. Accord-
ingly, he set off in 1787, with £128, 10s. in his pocket
His destination was Calcutta, but he stopped at Madras.
When he reached that port, measures were on foot to
establish a military orphan asylum for boys; and Dr
Bell — for St Andrews had made him M.D. — was
thought to be " a person eminently qualified to superin-
tend the education of children." He now began to give
short courses of lectures on natural philosophy ; and, by
the first course, he made £360. In 1789 he had to
undergo the set sorrow — the inevitable grief of losing
his father; and he speaks of this as 'Hhe death of as
good a father, and as just and upright a man, as ever
Uved."

The small fortune he had accumulated during his seven
years' stay in Virginia had been lost, for it was invested
in tobacco ; but his " great and rapid success " in India
enabled him to provide with ease for his sisters in Scot-
land. At this time he was constantly lecturing in
Calcutta, Madras, and elsewhere ; and he also held five
deputy- chaplainships, the duties of which could not
have been very arduous. A man of constantly stirring
and active mind, he was the first man to make ice ia
India, and also the first man to construct a balloon.
When war broke out, he was appointed chaplain to the
army before Pondicherry, at a handsome salary; and,
when the batteries were opened, he went into the
trenches— and came out again uninjured.

It is about this time that he begins to take a strong

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 149

interest in the Madras Asylum School The school was,
aptly enough, supported to a large extent by the fines
exacted for drunkenness from the men in the army.
The boys were mostly of mixed origin, — " blue boys "
they were called, — but their fathers were all Europeans.
They were to be taught only the three K's, and they
were to be kept as much as possible from their mothers
and their mothers' kin. When Dr Bell took the super-
intendence of the institution, he found the masters in a
condition of permanent mutiny. As soon as a master
had fitted himself for his work, he found out he could
get a higher salary for far less work — and he naturally
took it. Dr Bell was at his wits' end ; and he could
not get a single change or improvement in the school
carried out.

So things were, when he happened one morning early
to ride along the shore on the Malabar coast. He by
chance rode past a school, and stopped to look at the
children. They were writing with their fingers on the
sand. He galloped home, shouting to himself " Eureka/
Eureka I " and the Madras System was discovered. He
gave immediate orders to the usher of the lowest classes
to teach the alphabet in the same manner, with this
difference from the Malabar mode, that the sand was
strewn upon a board ! Most fortunately his orders
were disregarded, and the master peevishly declared
that " it was impossible to teach the boys that way."
He now bethought himseK of employing a boy; and
he soon lighted on a bright, intelligent, and quick little
lad of the age of eight ; his name was John Frisken ;
and little Johnnie Frisken is the head corner-stone of

150 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

the world-famous Madras System. Then other little
boys were appointed as assistant-teachers ; young Fris-
ken was made head-superintendent; and at last this
part of the school was placed entirely in his hands.
To his little teacher "a smile of approbation was no
mean reward, and a look of displeasure — and the Doctor
had black, heavy, bushy eyebrows — sufficient punish-
ment." This was in the year 1791. It is necessary to
be particular as to the date, because later on a violent
quarrel arose as to whether Dr Bell or Joseph Lancaster
was the originator of the system of mutual tuition, — a
quarrel in which we have neither part nor sympathy.
The masters gave him no end of trouble : one of them
took to ill-using the little boys, biting their fingers and
pinching their ears, so that the good, eager, and irascible
Doctor was more and more thrown into the arms of his
little boys. And now our young friend Frisken, at the
early age of eleven, had charge of a third of the whole
school — which numbered about three hundred boys.
One master he dismissed: a doubtful person, but his
place was desired by one "Still more doubtful. His
application, which is very curious, contains among other
things: "I have been told that you was a very odd
kind of a gentleman, and very fond of abusing and
quarrelling with the teachers, when they were not even
in the least fault imaginable," Another applicant was
a German gentleman, of the name of Piezold. Dr Bell
was very anxious to get Mr Piezold, and Mr Piezold
was very anxious to get to Dr BelL But there was one
difficulty in the way. That difficulty was Mrs Piezold.
Mr Piezold wrote : " As I, being a man of family, can't

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 151

act arbitrarily in the matter you are concerned in, but
must absolutely accommodate myself to the humours
and dispositions of Mrs Piezold, to her liking and dis-
liking, pleasing and not pleasing ; so I am necessitated
to give up the whole scheme as soon as she uttereth the
tart reply and objection, although the loss arising from
that resignment be ever so great." Happy and wise Mr
Piezold ! Timely happy, and timely wise ! He had
learnt to the utmost the well-known lesson : —

** The man's a fool who tries by force or skill
To stem the current of a woman's will ;
For, if she wUl, she will, you may depend on't.
And, if she won't, she won't, and there's an end on't."

Everywhere Dr Bell was a great favourite with
children; and that is a first-rate test of character and
disposition. The Eev. Mr John, a Danish missionary,
writes to him — "My house resounds still with en-
comiums of our tender, beloved Dr BelL Mary Ann,
Dickey, Jackey, the little female philosopher Kitty,
and August — every one cry almost after you, and com-
plain why I have let you depart so soon."

Ajid now, in 1796, "the education at the Asylum,
under Dr BeU's vigilant superintendence, was so com-
plete, as far as it went, and the character of the boys in
consequence so good, that applications were made for
them from all quarters." The great conqueror, Tippoo
Saib, sent for one of them, named Smith, to come and
show him the electrical machine, the condensing engine,
and other interesting specimens of mechanism,

Dr Bell liked Indist, and the climate seemed to agree
with him. He says, in a letter to Mr Dempster: " What

152 LECTUBE ON DR BELL.

a delightful climate this is ! The weather never changes
for months. K we had only domestic society like yours
in Great Britain, I know not who would quit India. I
know not who would but to repent of it." But I have
met many men who grew sick of the blue sky and the
brown faces. I remember a young man I knew who
had come home for a holiday from a station in the back
parts of the Punjaub, and who told me he had not seen
an Englishwoman's face for years ; and he used to sit
for -^hole days in his window at his lodgings, and fill his
whole soul with the pleasant home-looks of the passers-
by. Another — ^an officer coming home — on his arrival
in the Channel, shouted " Hurrah ! there are .the old
dirty clouds again; good-bye to the nasty, eternal,
monotonous blue ! " But the climate and the unremit-
ting blaze of sultry sun at last began to tell upon him
in the year 1794, and this compelled him to think seri-
ously of coming back to his native country. He felt
he had done a good deal of work, and that he " had
wrought a complete change in the morals and character
of a generation of boys." He accordingly returned to
England by way of the Cape — ^for there was then no
other way — ^with about £25,000 in his pocket.

Here let me pause to glance a little at the correspond-
ence appended to the end of the first volume. The
letters are from all sorts and conditions of women and
men, and they here and there give us a glimpse of the
way of living and thinking three generations ago. It is
somewhat comic, for example, to find one of Mr Bell's
young pupils writing in this way : " Our meeting with
papa and mamma was joyful beyond description. The

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 153

engine of paternal affection was conjoined with that of
surprise." But this is only one of the good results of a
classical education. Again, when Mr BeU consults his
friend, Mr Dempster, on the best course of political
study for a young peer, Mr Dempster says that this
study is summed up in the old proverb, " Honesty is
the best policy."

In another letter we find Dr Bell sending Mrs Berke-
ley " a dozen elegant dried bottle bonnets." What these
bonnets are I cannot tell; I have made inquiries in
various directions, but without result. Considering,
however, the fact that bonnets have been waxing and
waning, growing into and out of all shapes, growing
beyond and beneath knowledge, transforming themselves
from gigantic tunnels and coal-scuttles, which they were
in 1836, into almost invisible haK-crowns, it is not dif-
ficult to believe that historic darkness and oblivion will
settle for ever on the particular form of a bottle bonnet.
It is, perhaps, an even greater mystery why Mrs Berke-
ley should have a dozen. Mrs Berkeley also mentions
" a young Scot," who is one of the six preachers of the
Canterbury Cathedral It gives a clearer idea of the
arduous nature of the labour of these gentlemen that
they preach two sermons a-year each. And Mrs Berke-
ley's moral is weU worth pondering : " My advice to all
people who mean to succeed is ever to plough with the
heifer, if they mean to rise ; for, whether the lords of
the creation know it or not, or are too proud to own it,
we women, one way or other, openly or under the rose,
whether we be wife, sister, or daughter, guide the world.*'
The same sprightly lady abuses without limit the weather

154 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

of Canterbury, and says : " Alas ! we have not had a St
Andrews winter. I wished myself there all this vile,
frosty, severe weather. K I had a good gas baUoon
Mrs Frenshaw and I both declare that we*woiiLd set off
in it in the beginning of November, and stay till May ;
then off again to England. An Edinburgh winter may
be bad enough, but in London I never suffered so little
cold as I did in St Andrews in winter." I heartily
agree with Mrs Berkeley, and I admire even more
intensely than she can the climate and the pearly tints
and soft golden lights of the lovely skies of this ancient
capital. We have fuchsias growing in the open air, and
wisteria and jessamine; and I have myself seen roses
blowing in December. So that we can handicap our-
selves up here — give Canterbury ten degrees to the good
and to the south, and yet beat her in an easy canter.

Another correspondent, the Eev. Mr Millingchamp,
writes to Dr BeU from Canton, and gives him some
account of the natural history of the Chinese. " There
are two species of air ; or, as the Yuking more pointedly
expresses it, the air has two sexes. When they agree,
the seasons are regular, the weather favourable, com
grows, &c. When they disagree, and the she-air will
not permit the he-air to approach her, the consequences
are terrible. He flies round her in a whirlwind or
typhoon; earthquakes are caused by the male air en-
closed in the bowels of the earth and struggling to make
his escape. The souls of good men after death take up
their residences in the he-air and become josses or semi-
gods : the souls of bad men pass into the she-air, and
become so many devils.'* This is quite in accordance

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 155

with the character of the Chinaman. A country in
which roses have no fragrance, wheel-barrows are driven
by sails, roads have no vehicles, ships no keel, workmen
no Sabbath, and magistrates no sense of honour ; where
the place of honour is the left, the sign of being puzzled
is to scratch the knee, and the seat of intellect the
stomach, — is a country where men will believe any-
thing.

Mr Dempster writes to him in 1792 to come home.
" The truth is," he says, " Nature calls us strongly back
to our original haunts ; where we sought our birds'-nests
is the spot where we wish to smoke our pipe and take
our snuff in old age. There was a man who retired
some time ago from Copenhagen with a fortune, to
build a house underground, and live upon train-oil at
home. So return you will, and encounter with pleasure
the north winds of the Scores and the links of St
Andrews."

Another friend and correspondent warns Dr Bell not
to speak so loud in argument, and, at least now and
then, to allow others to say something. " Mrs Floyd's
remarks on the pitch of your voice in argument are not
wholly unfounded. Turn about is fair play ; and your
colloquist has a right to be heard sometimes."

And 80 Dr Bell came home with the desire in his
heart for what he calls " the only solid comfort of life,
— a union with an amiable and sweet partner ; " and
he left the too brilliant shores of India with the good
wishes of everybody— down to TeUisigna Pillah, who
"presents his respectful compliments to Dr Bell, and
much regrets that a severe cold, which confines him at

LEOTtrSB OS DB BELL.

bomo, 1 mta him from having the pleasure of %viahiiiii
Dr Bell leasont voyage in persotL"

DB BELL AT HOUE.

Dr Bell came home, too, with the report of ^fi
HftdiBs ABjlum in his pocket, which he made up his
mind to publish under the title of " An Esperiineiit in
Education, nmdo at the M:;'- Vsylum at Madma, sug-
geating a System by which a School or Family may
teach itself under the superinte idence of the Master or
Puent." Ho already believed in hia System — as he
had believed in himself — with hia whole soul. Even
the printer ho tried to convert. "You will wort for
an enthusiast," he says; "but if you and I live a thou-
sand years, we shall see this System spread over the
world." The chief advantages, he points out, are at
present two : " The younger ones can read and sjiell to
the monitors twice or thrice in the morning and aftor-
nooti, when to the master not more than once. The
elder boy, while he is teaching his class, is inatracting
liimself." And one of his masters thus writes: "I
h(ul a boy, who is the dullest, heaviest, and the leaat
inclined to learning I ever had, who, having for aix
niontlis past wrote upon sand, and read alternately and
constantly while at school, ia now able, not only to spell
every wonl, but can tell me many worda, let me aak him
whore I will ; and he appears now to have an inclina-
tion to learning, to which, when he first came, he had
an utter aversion." The children wrote with their
fingers or witli a. stylus upon damp sand.

In the year 1800 Dr Bell's friends are of opinion

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 157

that he meditates taking a wife. "It is the general
belief," says Mrs Dempster, " of all my female friends
that you would only hire so dear a house, and keep a
carriage, with a view to fascinate some coy damsel."
Dr Bell, who was now 47, seems to have agreed with
these ladies ; for, on the 3d of November, he married
Agnes Barclay, the eldest daughter of the Eev. Dr
Barclay, of Middleton.

In 1801 he is presented with the living of Swanage,
in Dorsetshire, — not a bad living, of the value of over
£600 a-year. To this residence he goes; and here, for
the first time, we get some glimpse of his personal man-
ners in a schoolroom. He goes into the Sunday-school
of a Mr Stickland in the village of Swanage, paces up
and down the room, asks questions, explains passages,
hurries from class to class, and absorbs all the attention
of the children, who were not accustomed to the vision
of a black -browed, fiery -eyed, eager Scotchman, until
Mr Stickland was obliged to call to him — "Sir, sir,
will you be pleased to pitch yourself ! " He hammered
his injunctions into the monitors, Mr Stickland used to
say, " like a blacksmith on an anviL" But his love for
children was always with him ; and he seems always to
have been able to win their hearts, even when he bullied
them into tears. Of the introduction of his System into
the Swanage school he himself says : " It is like magic;
order and regularity started up all at once. In half an
hour more was learned, and much better, than had been
done the whole day before. They quit the school at
dismissal with reluctance, and they return before their
time to renew the competition."

158 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

He also introduced yaccination into Swanage, and
'' set all the old women and others in the neighbouring
parishes inoculating with vaccine matter." One of his
parishioners, an old man of eighty-four, thus spoke of
him: "You may travel far and near without finding
his equal ; it is true he was irritable and passionate in
his temper, but there are none without their faults."
And then the old man begins to philosophise: "We
are all made up of a compound matter, — earth, air, fire,
and water ; and Dr Bell had certainly more of the fire
than of the other ingredients in his composition. But
if the blaze was larger and more fierce, it was sooner
over; and people of this description are more loving,
and have better and warmer hearts than generally fall
to the lot of others."

And now we come to Dr BeU's connection with and
relation to another remarkable man, Joseph Lancaster.
Joseph Lancaster was one day walking from Deptf ord to
Greenwich, when his attention was attracted by an in-
scription, " To the glory of God and the benefit of poor
children;" and while he was meditating on this, the
children burst forth into singing. His heart was melted;
and " it pleased God to implant within me a wish and
desire that / might one day thus honour Him; and
through all the vicissitudes of the intervening period,
my hope was seldom long clouded. I knew not how it
was to be accomplished ; but, being assured that it was
a divine impression, my mind was constantly endeavour-
ing to find out a way. I had not long entered into the
straw-hat business ; but I was persuaded this was the
channel to accomplish my wisL" He adopted the mu-

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 159

tual system, and found he " had no more labour with
250 children than he had formerly with 80/* In
the year 1804, he was anxious to become acquainted
with Dr Bell; and he wrote him a letter beginning
"Eespected Friend," and ending "Thy obliged friend
and admirer." It is an odd sign of those educational
times, that Lancaster enumerates among his chief diffi-
culties, " the price of sand in London, 9s. the load." In
one of his letters, Dr Bell tells us that Joseph Lancaster
tried " to form his teachers by lectures on the passions."
Dr Bell's more practical mind asserts that "it is by
attending the school, seeing what is going on there, and
taking a share in the work of teaching, that teachers are
to be formed, and not by lectures and abstract instruc-
tion." The fact is both these men were right ; and if
you could have rolled them into one, you would have
had a first-rate professor of education. But now a lady
made a great discovery — a discovery that was destined
to make people's hair stand on end, to unsettle the wigs
and tempers of the gravest bishops, and to spread fear
and dismay throughout the fabric of society. This lady
was Mrs Trimmer. The discovery she made was that
" there was something in Joseph Lancaster's plan that
was inimical to the interests of the Established Church."
And so Mrs Trimmer sounded her war-bugle; and forth-
with Churchman and Dissenter, Bishop and Quaker,
Tory and Whig, set to work pounding each other ham-
mer and tongs. This discovery was made by Mrs Trim-
mer on the 24th of September 1805 ; and in the letter
announcing her great discovery, she calls this quiet,
unoffending, enthusiastic, straw-hat-making Quaker, " a

160 LECTUEE ON DR BELL.

Goliath of scliisniatics." Alas! even celestial minds
are seized by rage ; and even good Cliristians hit upon
this too fiery method of stating that they do not agree
with each other. The art of calliag names is a great, a
recondite, and a useful art ; and it has been practised in
all ages by the greatest men. Let us hear what Luther
says of Aristotle — whom he mixed up with the erroneous
developments and wrong-headed logicians of his time :
"Truly a devil, a horrid calumniator, a wicked syco-
phant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon, a beast, a
most horrid impostor on mankind, one in whom there is
scarcely any philosophy, a public and professed liar, a
goat, a complete epicure, the thrice execrable Aristotle."
And Mrs Trimmer follows, but with unequal steps, the
majestic pace and thunderous objurgation of the great
Luther. And even Dr Bell does not think much of
poor JosepL He teUs Mrs Trimmer that he had " ob-
served his consummate front and his importunate solici-
tation of subscriptions in any and every shape," and he
insinuates that he is a " conceited and ignorant quack."
Mrs Trimmer keeps at it On the 1st of October, she
discovers that the quiet gentleman whom she calls " our
friend Joseph," was " not originally a Quaker, but an
Anabaptist, intended by his father for what they call
a minister^* The contempt and the italics are Mrs
Trimmer'^ "Whether he changed for the love of a
pretty Quaker, whom he married, or whether the ftrooc?-
hrim was the best cover for his schemes," etc. Too
suspicious and improper Mrs Trimmer! to attempt to
read motives which can be known only to the Maker of
Joseph Lancaster and yourself. On the 30th of I^ovem*

LECTURE ON DR BELL. " 161

ber in the same year (1805), she further discovers that
Lancaster is " ignorant of every principle of good educa-
tion, and his plan is a direct |)erversion of yours." Here
we may pause to notice a social phenomenon ; and it is
this : There is a large number of people in the world
who will not allow you to do anything unless you do it
in their way ; and there is another large number of
people who will not allow you to do anything unless
you have discovered the ideal — ^the best possible and
conceivable method of doing it. For my part, I agree
with the opinion of the Duke of Wellington — "Her
Majesty's Government must be carried on." If there is
motion and life at all, there is some power of alteration
and of improvement; and for this we must always
be thankful. On the 11th of December, Dr Bell — his
internal fires heated by the bellows of Mrs Trimmer —
finds out that Lancaster is " illiterate and ignorant, with
a brazen front, consummate assurance, and the most art-
ful and plausible address, not without ability and in-
genuity, heightened in its effects under the Quaker's
guise." In March 1806, Mrs Trimmer announces that
the bishops have been got at, and that " the dignitaries
of the Church, even the highest^ are fully convinced of
the danger of the plan of forming the children of the
lower orders into one organised hody," (The italics are
hers.) Fancy this : The -children -of -the -lower -orders-
in - one - organised - body marching upon the Church !
!N"ow, beyond all question, the Church was in danger.
But what an attack, and what a revolution ! It was a
revolution that might have been bought off with sugar-
candy, and an attack to be met with toys and picture-

L

162 LECTX7RE ON DR BELL.

books. If only tlie worthy bishops could have read the
signs of the times, and put themselves at the head of
this "organised body of the children of the lower orders."
The lower orders! — But it is much more pleasant to
turn to Dr Bell at his true work of teaching. " Here/'
says Mr Davies, " would he often come, and, humbling
himself to the capacity of a little child, would take a
class, and prove his power by drawing out the infant
mind." Unfortunately the difference between Dr Bell
and Lancaster assumed the form of a personal dispute
as to priority of discovery, on which it would be useless
to enter here and now.

In 1808 the System was introduced into Ireland.
There it superseded an older and more vicious system,
under which " the boy who had written the best copy
was ordered by the master to pull the hair of the boy
who had written the worst, and so to do until they
arrived at their seats in the school again." This is the
pious and charming Arcadian simplicity which always,
iQ one part of the world or other, is waiting for the
return of the coming Astrsea.

In 1809, Dr Bell is made Master of Sherbum Hospi-
tal, near Durham. This was an old foundation for the
benefit of lepers and old men. The daily allowance of
the lepers was " a loaf weighing five marks, and a gallon
of ale to each ; and betwixt every two a mess or com-
mons of flesh three days in the week, and of fish, cheese,
or butter on the remaining four; on Michaelmas -day,
four messes or a goose," — and so on.

The System was now making progress in every direc-
tion, both in London and the country, and in 1810 it

LECTURE ON DB BELL. 163

made its way into some of the great classical schools.
But in 1811 the great controversy broke out in another
form. Lord Eadstock now took the trumpet in hand,
and blew a blast of warning to the bench of bishops.
He wrote to the * Morning Post,' that he dreamt he saw
the whole of the bench of bishops dressed in their robes,
with their mitres on their heads, and aU in a most pro-
found sleep. Then came a chubby-faced little man (this
was the fearful enemy discovered by Mrs Trimmer to be
the Goliath of the Philistines, and whom Southey else-
where called The Dragon), in an entire drab-coloured
suit, and a broad -brimmed hat, and after eyeing the
bishops " with a sort of supercilious and insulting air,"
suddenly exclaimed, in a slow and sonorous tone of
voice, "Ye slothful and mouldering puny dignitaries,
have ye not slumbered your fill?" and so on. Next
Lord Eadstock " perceived a lovely youth standing by
my side clad in white, and of heavenly mien. * Be of
good cheer,' " he said, etc. The lovely youth was Dr
Bell, who was by this time fifty-eight. Then Lancaster
wrote to the papers ; then Dr Bell ; Mrs Trimmer joined
with her light skirmishers ; one or two bishops brought
up their heavy guns ; and there was the usual amount
of noise, and insinuation, and recrimination and dust,
and missing the mark, and neglecting the children
through it all. Dr Bell had unfortunately said that
he did not propose to educate the children of the poor
in an expensive manner, "nor even to teach them to
write and to cipher," whereupon Lancaster jumped up
and accused him of advocating " the universal limitation
of knowledge." AU this, however, has no interest for

164 LECTURE ON DE BELL.

US now, but may well take its place in a " Museum of
Educational Fossils."

In the end of the year 1811, Dr Bell had induced a
number of noblemen and gentlemen to found a Society,
which was called the National Sooibty, which still
exists, has done a great deal of good work, and is still
doing a great deal of good work. And the great poet
Wordsworth, about this time, cheers on Dr Bell by tell-
ing him that he is happy "to think in the present
afflicted state of Europe, that there is at the least one
small portion of it where men are acting as if they thought
that they lived for some other purpose than that of
murdering and oppressing each other." He was invited
to pay a visit to Lord Kenyon, a great friend of his,
and an enthusiastic admirer of his educational ideas;
and his lordship gave orders to his butler to present
every man-servant and labourer in his employment with
a guinea. The butler brought him the list and apolo-
gised for its lengtL " It cannot," Lord Kenyon replied,
"be too long on such an occasion, when so great and
good a man pays us a visit for the first time." In these
volumes we get glimpses — ^very partial glimpses, but still
worth something — of Wordsworth, Southey, S. T. C,
and Hartley Coleridge. Miss Wordsworth sometimes
polished Dr Bell's English for him; but he was not
quite satisfied with this — and who is? The English
language is so vast a field, and provides so many differ-
ent ways of writing down one's sense, that every one
likes to wander about in it at his own sweet will, and
not to be set right by any one whatever. A young ^Ir
Bamford becomes one of his proteges. This gentleman

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 165

tells some remarkable stories about the memory of H.
Coleridge, who was one of his class-fellows. "Hartley
was very irregular in his time of attending school. He
used to run in about ten o'clock, with his hat on his
head, chewing a slate-pencil in his mouth. * Where
have you been ] * said the master. Hartley, laughing, * I
really don't know.' * You are a strange fellow, Hartley,
to go on in this way. Get me sixty lines of the tenth
book of 'the Iliad.' * Shall I say them now, sir?*"
While visiting a friend of Wordsworth's, Sir George
Beaumont, he received a letter from a friend in Leices-
tershire, telling him that " several families in his neigh-
bourhood have been rendered a heaven upon earth by
teaching." And a learned judge writes to the same
gentleman, " I really think that his plan, if rightly con-
ducted, is one of the most stupendous engines that ever
have been wielded, since the days of our Saviour, for
the advancement of God's true religion upon earth."

Dr Bell's chief occupation in 1813 was acting as
general inspector of all his schools ; and his favourite
pupil, Mr Bamford, tells us that he could not give this
up, that "his feelings of restless vanity, unless relieved
by indulgence, would have made him intensely miser-
able." He scolded and buUied the masters in presence
of their pupils ; and " his style of talking to them, and
remarks, with a kind of boundless rage and bluster,
were, in their situation, not only unkind and unneces-
sary, but vexatious and oppressive." "He regarded
money," Mr Bamford goes on to say, "as the primum
mobile and the only efficient stimulant in the world."
He excited masters by a negative kind of threat. He

166 LEGTCBB ON DB BELL.

said, " Do this, or you shaU be mulcted, or leave your
situation." The masteis were subject to weekly and
monthly fines; and he paid "according to the periodi-
cal state of the school" " I can do more," said he to
the Archbishop of Canterbnry, taking half-arcrown out
of his pocket, ** I can do more with this half-crown than
yon can do with all yonr fixed salaries." May we not,
then, justly regard Dr Bell as the Father of the System
of Payment by Results 1 Great warriors lived before
Achilles, but there was no Homer to sing their praises,
and great practical, or pragmatical, educationists have
also existed before Mr Robert Lowe.

The correspondence to the second volume has not
much of interest But, in one letter of Dr Bell's to
the famous Mr Edgeworth, we find that he has taken
a terrible disHke to all teachers, and a corresponding
affection for all pupils. He says : " It is among the chil-
dren and youth of the school that I have learned what I
know, not among their masters, sometimes as prejudiced,
bigoted, and perverse, as their scholars are ingenuous,
ingenious, and tractable. It is in this book, I have said,
that I acquired what I know ; and it is in this book I
have recommended you to study — a school full of chil-
dren'* Mr Dempster writes to tell him to get "pre-
sented at Court, and now and then to attend the levSes;
get better acquainted with the Archbishop of Canter-
bury and the Bishop of London, etc.; bustle to be made
canon or prebendary ; that is the road to a bishopric ; **
and so on. An able correspondent, Mr D. P. Watts,
sends Dr Bell an account of an accident with some
sensible educational commentaries. There are, unfor-

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 167

tunately, still a number of people who think they must
act the part of Providence to their neighbours, and
arrange everything "for their good." At the close of
his letter, Mr Watts makes the remark : " The stability
of a country begins in the schooV* The same corre-
spondent mentions the death of a "schoolmaster in
Swabia, who had superintended a seminary fifty-one
years with severity. He had given 911,500 canings,
124,000 floggings, 209,000 custodies, 136,000 tips with
the ruler, *10,200 boxes on the ear, 22,700 tasks by
heart, 700 stands upon peas, 600 kneels on a sharp
edge, 500 fools' caps, 1700 holds of rods." After this,
one can only ask, almost fainting: where were the
police? Poor Lancaster is attacked in this corre-
spondence also. Mr Sou they goes so far as to say
that he "will convict him of falsehood and deal
with him accordingly." In another letter, he says,
" The Dragon " — meek little chubby-faced Lancaster —
" is now in the same state as the old serpent at Want-
ley, when Moore of Moore Hall had given him the last
fatal kick."

In 1815 Dr Bell comes back to Scotland and revisits
St Andrews. But he did not care for the country or
the scenery, but only for the schools. " Nothing," he
says, " is curious, or interesting, or beautiful in my eye
but the face of children — but the infant mind — but the
spiritual creation." In 1816 a Committee was formed,
with Principal Playfair as its chairman, to introduce Dr
BeU's system into his native city. The plan of this
Committee is sent to him, and he replies that he will
give material aid, on his own principle, to wit, that " a

168 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

salary given, independent of success, is a premium for
neglecting duty."

In August of this year he goes to the Ehine and sails
down it " on a raft, everywhere within an inch of the
surface of the water, except two watch-towers for the
steersman, which have a commanding view of the sur-
rounding country. This float of timber is 700 feet long
and 70 wide, and carries only four houses, and fifty men
engaged in its navigation. Some floats have 40 houses,
numerous families, and are larger in proportion." In
this excursion he meets with the great Pestalozzi, whom
he calls "a man of genius, benevolence, and enthusiasm."
About this time, too, commissioners are sent to wait
upon him to learn his System — from Sweden, Switzer-
land, and Eussia. In 1818 he received the ofTer of a
stall in Hereford Cathedral. He had to preach four
English and four Latin sermons, to sit for forty days
in the prebendal stall without any duty to perform, to
sit three hours every Sunday and holiday, and twice
every week-day, and never to walk beyond the walls of
the city during this period. In 1818 he preached a
sermon on his System, kept his amanuensis up a night
and a day copying it, preached for an hour, and took
off his spectacles to wipe them — when the congregation
thinking he had come to an end, rose up, and the good
Doctor shouted " ' God bless my soul 1 ' and, instantly
recommencing, went on for half an hour longer." In
1817 the Emperor of Russia sends him a diamond ring.

I must now pass over the remaining years, and come
to 1831. "His money," says his biographer, "was now
a burden to him." Much of his time was spent in

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 169

making wills; and ^Mr Davies, his secretary, spent
much of his time in copying and recopying them. On
the 11th of May 1831, he writes to his bankers to
transfer £120,000 to certain gentlemen in St Andrews,
entreats them *' to make all despatch — no time must be
lost." This was done. Meanwhile, Miss Bell wanted
to come and see him at Cheltenham, where he was
living: he wrote to say she might come, and as soon
as the letter had gone, he wrote to say she must not.
She came however, and he gave her his cottage, a
covering used at the coronation of George the Fourth,
his silver plate, gold coins, rings, tea-service, trinkets,
and money. But Miss Bell got it into her head that
her distinguished brother " was not in his right mind,"
and that he was not in a fit state to make his will. The
Doctor discovered this, and placed a paper in her hands
ordering her to leave his house immediately. He was
every day becoming more and more impatient to hear
what was doing with his money. " My solicitude dis-
tresses me mucL Excuse my anxiety. There is danger
in the delay of a day." In June he wants aU his money
to be thrown into Chancery, and the trustees along with
it. He next asks the trustees to come down to Chel-
tenham to see him.

Picture to yourself the situation. An old man, nearly
eighty, who had totally lost the power of speech, with
his faculties and eager spirit all alive, but without
the power of giving adequate expression to them, with
£120,000 to give away and no one to trust, with the
belief that his System was to be the salvation of the
world, and yet with little hope of seeing this System con-

170 LECTURE ON DR BELL.

fided to good and safe hands. The trustees, when they
came, found him with his head sunk upon his breast,
and he could talk with them only through a slate. He
asked them for a plan. " When will you have it ? Can
you bring it to me to-night at eight o'clock, or to-morrow
morning ? A plan we must have," etc., etc. But a plan
for a college, and for the right investment of £120,000,
cannot be made in an hour. " The trustees were me-
thodical in their way of doing business ; he was capri-
cious and vehement They were slow ; he was quick.
They were very patient ; he was at times very violent.
Fire and water would have combined more easily."
After the trustees left, he enters into a long and
violent correspondence with them; he accuses them
of "concocting the trust-deed, and that they surrepti-
tiously obtained it from him, under circumstances of
painful and disqualifying enactment." They reply
firmly but modestly; he tells them their "declama-
tion is written to give a death-blow to my debilitated
condition, or for a posthumous epistle to the grave,
which tells no tales." He tells them to write by return
of post, and by every post. He writes a holograph deed
on the 21st of December, and he executes another on
the 29th, which he says "perhaps supersedes it." He
speaks of the "studied embarrassments, machinations,
devices, and distortions, and perversions of the propo-
sitions of a dying, speechless, and insulated man, with
funds undisposed of, and the multiplication of writings
contrived for this purpose are inconceivable by those
who are not in such a situation." His last wishes were
expressed in a paper which he drew up at intervals

LECTURE ON DR BELL. 171

lortly before his death. He signified his approval of
iiis twelve hours before his departure ; but he did not
Lve to sign it.

His intellect and memory were unimpaired, and his
iflfections were as eager as ever. At haK-past ten on
the night of the 27 th of January, his doctor said to
him, " How are you, my dear sir 1 " and in haK an hour
afterwards his breathing became languid ; and at length
gently and calmly ceased altogether ; and no man saw
at what moment the fiery, passionate, enthusiastic soul
took its departure for another world. He only quietly
ceased to be. He was buried among the illustrious dead
in Westminster Abbey.

The correspondence in the third volume need not de-
tain us long. Dr Gray writes from Bishopwearmouth
about " Harrogate damsels and ladies, young, handsome,
and accomplished; of barons and baronets enthralled;
and of schools enthusiastically patronised." We, of this
generation, may be thankful that we have got beyond
that: we only want our work to take its right place
among other kinds of work, without prejudice and with-
out patronage. George Dempster draws an enthusiastic
picture of the result of Dr Bell's labours : " Ploughmen,
between their yokings, reading the Old Testament ; the
New read by milkmaids and dustmen; cobblers solv-
ing problems algebraically ; and girls drawing maps of
Europe on their samplers." And he repeats his advice
to Dr Bell to strive for the mitre; "bishoprics have
been obtained for trumpery essays on chemistry, and
archbishoprics for flogging Westminster schoolboys, —
then, why not you?"

173

LfiCTTBR <Ht DB 1

Vou vill |MrhnpM agrm iritli me that U I
hvxm imiiitiTHitiiig tu tuku a haclnrard took on the ei
l)x>{itiniiiga of popular tiwtrnctioD in this cooatr)';
If Kuy iitin >hould oA for lli^ moral of I>r Bell'a
I lliiiik it U to Iw fnunii in Ibe divine words, —
wUioU ATC writlou in lottere of fire upon the face of ^
«niiuiiii>n<i>t liuiuun life. " Tliu fashion of this t
IMMtx iiwuy, luid tlic Inst Llioniof; but ho that doett
llin will of 0(>d uhideth for ever," And this, too, is
* voiiw ttnti^ht from Houvon : " Whatsoever thy hand
lttul«Ui lu ilo, do it with thy might ; for there is neitjur ,
ttWtiUU UM tluvioo ill the i^Tavv, whither we all h

hasteiL^

173

EXTRACTS FEOM DR BELL'S WORKS.

[The Educational works of Dr Bell amount to several
thousand pages; but they cannot be recommended to
the perusal of even the most enthusiastic student of
education. There is much dust, chafF, and inorganic
matter in them ; and it is only here and there that one
finds something worth picking up. I have thought it
right to go carefully through the volumes, and to select
what might possibly be worth reading and thinking
about. This is contained in the following pages.]

" The advantages of teaching the alphabet, by writing the
letters with the fingers in sand, are many. It engages and
amuses the mind, and so commands the attention, that it
greatly facilitates the toil, both of the master and the scholar.
It is also a far more effectual way than that usually practised,
as it prevents all learning by rote, and gives, at the instant
and in the first operation, a distinct and accurate notion of
the form of each letter, which in another way is often not
acquired after a long period, and after a considerable progress
in reading, as may be seen in those who write letters turned
the wrong way, and other instances familiar to every one.
It likewise enables them, at the very outset, to distinguish
the letters of a similar cast, such as 6, d, p, and q, the diffi-
culty of which is known to almost every person who has

I ■ I* ■* •* . J '

' .1 ■! -I.'. 1. ■ .:■: .. _iT •

■ I :■ .•Ii!--lu':.'. I.;.': :.•:.:' -V-:-;: -. - -__.

: .'... .-I :li.ii I. ii'/f ';i'Mrlyaij«i ••:::;:.::!-.-

■ .M .vii.'ii iii.it, l«-;ijiiiii;^' in acjuir^l
..; .,■■..1 Kiii'l "lliicrary )»Iay;,'roiiix..: ; ',:

■„■ .mujoii jii.iyi'I.in- in I lie ^'reatt-r ta.

EXTRACTS FROM HIS WORKS. 175

of the scholars to obtain their object, and in their deeper
regret at failing in it. It is thus that delight prepares the
way to improvement, and that pleasure becomes the hand-
maid of knowledge."

" Our Saviour tells us, that if we enter into the kingdom
of heaven, we must become as little children. It is thus,
that among children, and from them, and by becoming as
one of them, that we are to learn those simple doctrines of
nature and truth, innate in them, or which readily occur
to their minds, as yet unbiassed by authority, prejudice, or
custom. It is in this school of nature and truth, pointed out
by the Son of God, himself God, that I seek for knowledge.
It is among the children and youth of the school, not among
their masters, sometimes as prejudiced, bigoted, and perverse,
as their scholars are ingenuous, ingenious, and tractable. It
is in this book, I have said, that I acquired what I know ;
and it is in this book I have recommended you to study — a
school full of children."

" The first and grand law of the new school is, that every
scholar, by a perpetual and generous competition with his
fellows, finds for himself his level, and increasingly rises and
falls in his place in the class, and in the ranks of the school,
according to his relative attainments. It is thus that the
dunces, as they are called, from other schools are no longer
dunces when they enter a Madras school, and breathe a
Madras atmosphere.

" The second main law of the Madras school is, that its
instruction be conducted in a gradually progressive course
of study by easy, adapted, and perfect lessons."

'^ Let no master, as he values the satisfaction and approba-

176 LIFE OF DR BELL.

tion of the visitors and directors of his school — the profit and
delight of his pupils — the gratification of their parents and
friends — the good opinion of the public — and his own ease and
comfort — ^think he has done his duty while he has a single
child in his school who does not make daily progress accord-
ing to his capacity — who is not perfectly instructed in every
lesson as he goes along. But let it also be remembered that
the scholar's time must not be wasted by repeating again
and again what is already familiar to him, except as far as is
necessary to prevent its being forgotten."

" 1. The Asylum, like every well-regulated school, is arranged
into forms or classes, each composed of as many scholars as,
having made a similar progress, unite together. The scholar
ever finds his own level, not only in his class, but also in the
ranks of the school, being promoted or degraded from place
to place according to his relative proficiency.

"2. Each class is, when preparing their lessons by them-
selves, paired off into tutors and pupils.

" Thus in a class of thirty-six scholars the eighteen best
and most trusty are tutors respectively to the eighteen
worst.

« This arrangement, by no means an important link in the
chain of self«-tuition, is frequently dispensed with ; and when
continued lessons take place, as in the schools of the National
Society, it is of course superseded.

" 3. To each class is attached an assistant-teacher, whose
business is, as the name implies, to act under, with, or for
the teacher.

" 4. The teacher who, with his assistant, has charge of the
class, as well when learning as saying their lessons, and is
responsible for their order, behaviour, diligence, and im-
provement. Both the teacher and his assistant say their
lessons with their class. In the conduct of a school, the two

EXTRACTS FROM HIS WORKS. 177

grand departments are instruction and discipline. 'Disci-
pline * (says Ascham) * without instruction is mere tyranny,
and instruction without discipline little better than useless
talk.'"

" It is an unfounded complaint that very few learners are
naturally endowed with the faculty of understanding the
lessons which are prescribed to them, and that most do in
reality lose their labour and time from defect of genius.
Quite otherwise is the fact ; for you will find the generality
of men quick in conception and prompt to learn. This is
the characteristic of man. As birds are destined by nature
to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to be ferocious ; so to
us is peculiar the (agitation) working and sagacity of the
mind. Hence it is believed that the human soul is of celes-
tial origin. The dull and the indocile are no more conform-
able to the nature of man than bodies which are accounted
prodigies and monsters. But these are very rare." — QuiNC-

TILIAN.

"Another practice of the Madras school is of high au-
thority and remote antiquity in the Eastern world. * Jesus
stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground '
(John viiL 6.) Writing on sand, borrowed from the Hindoo
writing on the ground, is of a mixed nature, and applies to
more than one branch of the scholars' studies — viz., to teach-
ing the alphabet, digits, monosyllables, notation, arithmetic,
and the art of writing itself. All the initiatory processes of
the school being formed at the sand-board, the great diffi-
culties and impediments of learning, which chiefly occur in
the beginning of every branch of tuition, are conquered by
an operation which gratifies the active disposition of youth,
and their love of imitation ; and like the pen and pencil, ties
down the mind to the single object in hand. Not a letter,
a word, a figure can be passed over unknown or unlearned.

M

178 LIFE OF DR BELL.

No task can be evaded by the scholar, repeated by rote, or
done, as too often happens, by proxy."

" Ascham says, * The schole-house should be counted a
sanctuary against fear.*"

" Mr Locke, after stating his reason why * the usual lazy
and short way by chastisements and the rod, which is the
only instrument of government that tutors generally know,
or ever think of, is the most unfit of any to be used in edu-
cation,' concludes, * beating them (boys) and all other acts of
slavish and corporal punishments, are not the discipline fit
to be used in the education of those we would have wise,
good, and ingenious men, and therefore very rarely to be
applied, and that only on great occasions, and cases of ex-
tremity.' How would such a writer have rejoiced to have
seen the engine of the new school at work ! "

" Quinctilian, as was noticed before, in denouncing corporal
punishment, is of opinion that there would not be occasion
for its exercise — ' Si assiduus studiorum exactor adstiterit ' —
* if an assiduous exactor of his studies were to attend the
pupil.' "

" * If it should be asked what is the one and great device
for the improvement of memory, my answer would be, exer-
cise and much employment. To reflect on many things, and
as far as may be, every day, cannot but be attended with the
best effect. Memory, more than anything, is either im-
proved by cultivation, or falls off by neglect.' — QuiN. We
must also recollect that this is accomplished by means as

EXTRACTS FROM HIS WORKS. 179

much more lenient, as they have been found more efficacious
than those usually employed, by means which abridge the
labour of the master, expedite the progress of the scholar,
and reduce the expense of the parent. And that the order
and improvement of the school are produced by the amuse-
ment and interest which it creates to the children, while it
gives life, spirit, and energy to every scholastic operation,
and is calculated to render a grammar-school in reality, as
well as in name, *ludus literarius,' *the literary play,' the
wish of the ablest writers on this subject is accomplished
beyond their expectation — * lusus hie sit.' "

"'Were matters ordered right, learning anything they
(children) should be taught, might be made a recreation to
their play, as play is to their learning.' " — Locke.

" To sum up the whole ; the Madras System consists in
conducting a school by a single master, through the
MEDIUM OF THE SCHOLARS THEMSELVES, by a Uniform and
almost insensibly progressive course of study, whereby the
mind of the child is often exercised in anticipating and dic-
tating for himself his successive lessons, by which the
memory is improved, the understanding cultivated, and
knowledge uniformly increased — a course in which reading
and writing are carried on in the same act, with a law of
classification, by which every scholar finds his level, is hap-
pily, busily, and profitably employed every moment, is ne-
cessarily made perfectly acquainted with every lesson as he
goes along, and without the use or the need of corporal
infliction, acquires habits of method, order, and good con-
duct, and is advanced in his learning according to the full
measure of his capacity."

180 LIFE OF DR BELL.

" The principle on which, in teaching the Latin grammar,
I proceed, is (as has been fully explained) the same as in
teaching Euclid's elements, arithmetic, algebra, chemistry,
geography, astronomy, or any branch of philosophy, or any
art or science, and has been described in * Elements of Tui-
tion,' Part II. It is to reduce everything which is to be
taught to a methodical arrangement, a regular gradation,
beginning with what is plainest and simplest, and making
that familiar by practice and repetition till it be fixed in the
scholars mind as a habit, and proceeding gradually by short,
easy, and almost insensible steps through the branches of
science. This process is especially requisite with the ele-
ments and fundamentals of grammatical studies.

" If the syntax were composed on a scientific principle, its
rules might, while greatly reduced in number, be rendered
more comprehensive, more simple, more intelligible, and
more easy of attainment. The rule to be observed in its
composition is, that it be just and comprehensive in its
principle, brief and systematic in its method, perspicuous
and easy in its examples, and that usefulness be studied in
every particular.

" * Ut grammatica prsecepta fateor necessaria ; ita velim
esse, quantum fieri possit, quam brevissima modo sint op-
tima. Nee unquam probavi literatorum vulgus, qui pueros
in his inculcandis complures annos remorantur.'

" * As I acknowledge grammar rules to be necessary, so I
would have them to be as brief as possible. Nor have I
ever approved of the common herd of learned men who, in
inculcating them, detain boys for several years.' " — Erasmus,
De Ratione Studii.

" The scholar being now master of his grammar books,
and initiated in the art of construing, translating, and
parsing, proceeds to read the easiest prose classics, with or
without a translation.

EXTRACTS FEOM IIIS WORKS. 181

" * In whatever way, let care be taken not to teach him too
'^ch at once, nor to set him upon a new part till that which
'^ is upon be perfectly learned, and fixed in his mind.' " —

•* " He is never put into a new lesson, or new Look, till he
fcte' well learned the former ; and never put into a book till
[i^ trial has been made of his ability being equal to the book.
||lhe simultaneous perusal of a variety of books at the com-

inencement of the scholar's course of study, is in consonance
rith much that is done in a grammar-school, to perplex and
onfonnd the novice, at this early period. The perfect
junderstanding of any one author is full exercise for the
Lender faculties. Nothing should be introduced that has a
tendency to divert the attention from this one object, or to
itract the mind."

" Look at a regiment, or a ship, etc., you will see a beauti-
ful example of the system which I have recommended for a
jle school. Look at the army and navy, etc., and you
see the grand system of superintendence which pervades
the works of men, and which will guide you in the
leral organisation of your schools. Only yours is a far
complicated machine. A single inspector-general, with
secretary, both nominated by Government, and remov-
ible at pleasure, will suffice to new -model the schools,
jeive reports, visit them, detect deficiencies, point out the
Luse of failure, and see that they are conducted according
the system chalked out for them, and the principles of the
institution. In their various progress, in their subsidiary
and subordinate improvements, and the additions to our
present practices which will occur, a wide field of practical
knowledge will be opened. Of the new creation which it
will raise to religion, to society, and to the State, I shall say

182 LIFE OF DE BELL.

nothing. In each school classify, appoint, or rather, where
the scholars have made any progress, let them appoint
teachers and assistants to each class. Short lessons, short
books."

" Let the progress be secure in every step, and you will be
astonished at its flight. With new schools, and untaught
children, you will have an easy task. Nothing is so facile
and pleasant as to teach ah initio — nothing so difiicult and
ungracious as to unteach those who have been ill taught.
Place into a well-regulated institution a boy who has been ill
taught two or three years at an ill-conducted school, and a
boy of the same age and capacity, who does not know a
letter of the alphabet, and in a twelvemonth I shall expect
to see the superiority inverted."

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