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blooming of their own accord in these later days, blooming everywhere about the path, a success even as the cabbages. And they were a magnificent success, especially the Great Feversham.

But who really was the Great Feversham some may question, for there is a certain old saying which runs 'Greater is he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.'

UNA L. SILBERRAD.

649

THE BOOK ON THE TABLE.

'DOROTHEA BEALE. 1

DOROTHEA BEALE was born in the year 1831; and perhaps no time could have been more appropriate for one whose life was to be spent in educational reform. Whatever the cause, indisputably the training of Early Victorian women had degenerated into a system whose aim was a mere show of ornamental achievement, whilst its discipline imposed crushing restraints, as if ornamental beings were recognised to be necessities of a highly dangerous character. Napoleon, we know, reserved religion for special use in girls' schools, where it was to be maintained in full severity'; and when amongst his reasons he instanced the unsteadiness of women's ideas, their need of constant resignation and of a kind of indulgent and easy charity, it is likely that he expressed the views of a later day than his own. Dorothea Beale was not the first in her family to rebel against accepted traditions. In the preceding generation her cousin, Miss Caroline Cornwallis, dreamt already of 'raising her sex, and with it the world,' and her writings, audacious and for the best of reasons anonymous, had made some stir and received the compliment of being taken for the work of a man. Something of Miss Cornwallis's combative spirit belonged also to Dorothea Beale, in addition to her own more solid qualities of judgment, patience, and devotion to duty. The story of her childhood forecasts with singular accuracy the mature woman. It is on record that she once dressed a doll; and that she had holidays we know, for they were spent rubbing brasses' in the old city churches, or, later, taking the younger members of the family for walks, watch in hand'; but play, in the ordinary sense, neither then nor afterwards did she need or understand the need of in others. At the age of thirteen she had already begun to teach, with herself as her first pupil. Four years later she was amongst those who listened to F. D. Maurice at the opening of Queen's College. In 1849 she became mathematical tutor in the same college; in 1854, head-teacher. Ideas as to the right and wrong ways of conducting girls' schools crystallised early in Miss Beale's

Dorothea Beale, by E. Raikes.

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mind, and the management of Queen's failing to secure her approval, she somewhat rashly decided that her own theories would find freer scope in the Clergy Daughters' School of Brontë fame, now removed from Cowan Bridge to Casterton. Times are unlike Jane Eyre,' she wrote soon after her arrival there; but many barbarisms survived, and the London teacher, filled with missionary zeal and high hopes for 'women and the race,' burned to remove them. The control of the school, however, lay in the hands of six clergymen much respected in the neighbourhood, who had on their part settled views as to the right training of the female intelligence and showed no disposition to welcome missionary enterprise in their own field. Proposals to mitigate the penal discipline of the school were overruled as heretical, after a discussion in which one clerical humorist remarked: 'We do hear of angels being punished, but not of their going up higher.' Other differences arose. Miss Beale's Anglicanism proved profoundly alarming to Calvinistic Yorkshire; the restrained gravity of her manner and the cut of her dark nunlike dress were suspect no less than her unconcealed ardour for reform. Be firm but very gentle' was the counsel received from a wise father at this trying juncture; and perhaps his daughter paid most heed to the first part of it. Anyhow, the Casterton experiment ended abruptly, and in the closing days of 1857 she returned to London to digest her failure at leisure.

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Her use of the interval which followed was exceedingly characteristic. A certain school-book convicted of some Romish taint had lately been pronounced unfit for young English minds. Dorothea Beale, with her quick practical instinct, perceived the educational gap, and, heartsick and anxious as she was, bent all her remarkable powers of concentration to the task of filling it, accomplishing her work on the bare floor of an attic, unfurnished and fireless, severities which the student welcomed as a convenient check to friendly intrusions. The result of her labours was published in August 1858, and probably Miss Beale's own subordinates were the first to make use of her 'Text-book of History,' for the same month saw her established at Cheltenham.

The Ladies' College had been founded five years before this time by a group of enlightened gentlemen inspired by the notion that it might be possible, without impairing the 'modesty and gentleness of the female character,' to cultivate within reasonable limits the female mind. It was to be tried, in short, whether

angels might not be promoted as well as punished. So far the public had not met the venture with any great show of enthusiasm, and even the arrival of the new lady principal with her reputation for advanced ideas failed at first to revive the precarious fortunes of the school. Possibly her reputation was a doubtful asset, for the moral atmosphere of Cheltenham was no more genial to reform than that of other places. Those were still the days when the word college' in connexion with girls was liable to be received with roars of laughter. Rich parents could not understand why their daughters should be educated. Some believed that girls would become like boys if they studied the same subjects. The introduction of Euclid would have been the death of the school. Scientific teaching slipped in unobserved under the name of physical geography. This subject,' Miss Beale remarks drily, was considered unobjectionable, 'as few boys learned geography.' Anxious mothers seemed to see the piano, the buttress of their own youth, decaying before their eyes. To appease them Miss Beale provided classes at which four pupils performed simultaneously the same piece on two pianos. Ungrateful for this concession, Cheltenham society took no notice of the new head-mistress, and the leaders of the religious world held aloof from what they regarded as a doubtful departure. Miss Beale, fortunately, was one of those who find opposition an excellent tonic.' She was young; her quiet ways concealed unlimited vigour and resolution; her appearance, slender, pale, smooth-browed, was charming, as a faded photograph of the time still testifies; and her manner and disposition, the School Council was pleased to declare, were such as to render it pleasant to maintain frequent personal communication with her.' Dorothea Beale wasted nothing, least of all experience, and memories of Casterton, painful as they were, proved of good service to her in her dealings with her large and not always manageable board. She was complimented upon her wisdom in accepting adverse resolutions with equanimity,' and naturally lost nothing by such wisdom, business, no doubt, getting itself accomplished more and more smoothly under a lady principal who accepted verbal defeat with calmness, her Council in return sooner or later carrying out her desires. At all events, after the first desperate struggle for existence the school made rapid headway on the lines of advance laid down by herself, growing continually beyond its bounds, until it took final shape in the stately Gothic building, with its halls, classrooms, and laboratories, its boarding-houses, training

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college, auxiliary day school, sanatorium, kindergarten, and evennot altogether to the liking of Miss Beale, whose independent spirit scorned free education-its affiliated elementary school. New teachers in their leisure moments watched with fascination Miss Beale's masterly sway of her small kingdom. She possessed the qualification, not always found in good workers, of getting good work from others. To the educational purpose of which the college building formed, as it were, but a crude outward symbol she devoted every faculty of body, mind and soul, and of her staff she demanded no less. That some were unable to rise to the standard set before them is less surprising than the large response she obtained to her exalted ideal. Complaints were heard in some quarters that the school was Church-like. Dorothea Beale gloried in the reproach. In her view all knowledge was sacred, and she liked to think of the college as a spiritual building, a little community held by invisible bonds, the mystic in her looking beyond the practical ends of education to inspired ideals for women and the race.' It was the secret desire of her heart that from her work might one day rise a chosen body of women who should go forth in the world as a teaching order; and as in imagination she contemplated the labours of this intellectual sisterhood, who knows what visions of human progress-or, in her own language, of soul evolution-filled her thoughts? Obviously the atmosphere of a school under such a lady principal-one had almost said under such a lady abbess-would be bracing, too bracing perhaps for some constitutions. Ten minutes' meditation on rising, just to plume one's feathers for a few short flights from the earth,' was the modest spiritual exercise privately recommended by Miss Beale; but as you follow the college routine you seem to be watching a succession of short flights from the earth. There were, for instance, literature classes, whose chief purpose was to convey high teaching on life and conduct. "Blessed are the pure in heart -poor Swift!"-that,' said Miss Beale, recalling a dictum of her father's, was the best literature lesson I ever received'; and her own lessons were given in the same spirit. Shakespeare's plays proved useful, for knowledge of character is so important to women.' Dryden, Pope, and other distinguished exponents of inferior thought suffered, it is to be feared, considerable neglect; but no young lady left Cheltenham without a close acquaintance with the ethics of Browning. History, of course, abounded in moral illustrations, which were not impressed upon the pupils only, the college teachers on one occasion receiving a summons to hear

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