dear. "A discovery is made," he 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 guineasthis 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 curious, 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,

and the syllabic lessons of the spelling-book, by writing them on the slate, I shall entertain no good hope. Let him talk to me for ever of difficulties, want of room, etc. etc.,-he will talk in vain. I will not listen 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. But 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 ILTO. Dr Bell is "glad Davis is so jealous about ILTO.

to see its effects.

It is beautiful

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 Auckland. 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

done it as it ought to be done, till you are delighted and charmed as all are, where it is performed rightly. It is completely done at the Barrington School; and all there think it all in all. I think it consummates my labours and leaves nothing more for me to do. Dr Bell, then, had come to the Hercules 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 IL TO; and the coping-stone had been placed upon the immortal edifice of Primary Instruction. What was this IL TO? 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 instalment, of the well-known Schreib-Lese-Methode of Germany.

CHAPTER XII.

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 playingfields their former holiday-making places-and to travel about under a brighter sky and in clearer air than are generally found in London. Dr Bell 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 Instruction 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 Abbé Gualtier, "most bigoted and prejudiced: he contends that they do already as to emulation, etc., as I propose, and advocates even the

noise."

No discoverer likes to hear that his "discovery" has been found, and found out, before: "Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra dixerint." He soon left Paris and travelled south. Somewhere between Dijon and Dole, on the 16th 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 emphasis 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 venerable chief of his principles. The development of the faculties the mind, the heart, and the body-sum up, I think, what he said. From the principles he derived his art. I explained that mine arose from experience." It had come to this that Dr Bell 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 gossip 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