The vacations may be roughly indicated as follows: one month at Easter; two weeks in early summer (Trinity Sunday); one month during dog-days, middle of July to middle of August; ten days at Michaelmas, circa 1st October; ten days at Christmas. Total thirteen weeks. The Winter Semester begins at Michaelmas; the Summer Semester at Easter.

The question might arise whether a plan of study so carefully elaborated, and in its minute details so rigidly carried out, may not, by limiting the sphere of the teacher's activity, operate adversely to the true interests of the scholar. This question must be answered, in the writer's judgment, decidedly in the negative. A well arranged plan of study should rather be regarded as, in itself, an unmixed good; nor is there ground for apprehension that the minute directions which may accompany it, if only they have been suggested by the experience of wise and practical men, will hamper the teacher, whose ingenuity the daily varying demands of the class-room will still abundantly exercise, after all the aid which a careful ordering of the work can give has been afforded. The Germans are in no danger of supposing that external appliances, however complete, can ever become a substitute for skillful instruction, and German individuality, both in scholar and teacher, is too strong to be repressed by the regulations which give an external uniformity to educational establishments. Goethe remarked, at the beginning of the present century, when the German estimate of German character was somewhat different from what it is to-day, that his countrymen excelled only as school-teachers; and it is to the multitude of able and devoted teachers that the unequalled excellence of German schools, and the very development of the theory and methods of education whose result is the Gymnasium, are due.

The Germans demand from their educational institutions a more positive moulding influence upon character, than we are wont to expect in this country. They expect every course of study to produce certain definite results, and to confer acquisitions and capacities which can be measured and described. It is common for a German teacher, at the outset of a new course of study, to inform his pupils, not only what ground he proposes to take them over, but what the results (in the way of

capacity to perform new operations) of the said course will be. In the same way, the discipline of the Gymnasium, so severe and half-military in its character, and holding the scholar under its influence during the ten most impressionable years of his life, is expected to bring his character into a certain form, and to confer a type of mind which shall testify to the training which produced it. The aims of the German education are as definite, in a certain sense, as the aims of the Spartan education, although they are less narrow. It would be judged altogether unsatisfactory to be able to claim for the Gymnasium, as the advocates of classical education in this country have often done, only a discipline, vaguely understood, and quite undefined; rather, would such results as these be expected: an acquaintance with the more important classical authors; the ability to write a good Latin or French essay; the power to relate the leading events in any important episode of history.

That there is a certain hardness, not to say brutality, connected with the discipline of the Gymnasium, can not be denied. The German scholar must also be a soldier, and the soldierly qualities of obedience and industry are those most valued in a pupil, while that side of education regarded in America and England as so important, the desirableness of influencing by love, and of always appealing to higher motives, is, in comparison, kept in the background. Education is thought of as a serious business, as a path over which one must be driven as well as led.

Since the plan of study in the Gymnasium is based upon the capacity of the average pupil, who receives no aid at home, and is perhaps insufficiently supplied with books, there would seem to be danger that the bright scholar might be disgusted and fatigued (or as the German phrase is "abgestümpft") by the incessant reviews and repetitions of the earlier years of the course. It is, in fact, very common, for such parents as concern themselves closely with the progress of their children, to spare them the drudgery of the lower forms, by employing an older Gymnasiast, or a philological student, to carry them, according to the methods employed in the Gymnasium, but more rapidly, over the work of Sexta and Quinta; nor does it appear,

though Gymnasial teachers affirm that pupils so grounded are never afterward so "nagelfest" (firmly grounded) in the elements as those who have been in the Gymuasium from the outset, that the year or year and a half thus gained, is gained at the sacrifice of thoroughness.

The Gymnasium in its working and its results may be fitly compared to a great overshot-motor-water-wheel, the efficiency of which should not be judged by its apparent occasional pauses and halting, faltering revolution, but by the multitude of smaller wheels which it maintains in steady motion. The casual visitor, at a single Latin recitation in Quinta, would be likely to think it "German slowness" which imposed upon the scholars a lesson which they could learn in from fifteen to thirty minutes. Yet a better acquaintance with the school would show that the shortness and easiness of the single tasks is justified by the large number of lessons; the progress in each department being slow, but many departments being carried simultaneously forward. Two years (the entire allowance of time for Sexta and Quinta)—the teacher, accustomed to more hasty progress, might exclaim,-devoted to the study of Latin forms and inflections! Four years bestowed upon the Latin inflections and syntax, and besides only three books of Cæsar and 1,000 lines of Ovid. while in America boys are through the Freshman class in college: how absurdly slow! Yet these scholars, who are withal only fourteen years old, have already acquired the elements of French, and would, beyond the shadow of doubt, acquit themselves better, though their reading has been so limited, upon unseen Latin, than college FreshBut as in the plan of a great campaign devised by an able general, the far-reaching wisdom of the combinations in their smallest details and the significance of each detail in producing the grand result, are only clearly seen at the close when crushing blow succeeds blow, so it is at the later stages of the Gymnasium course that the substantial results of the earlier years testify most fully that they have been wisely spent. Whether these results are fully realized, and whether certain dangerous tendencies, inherent in the system of training, are avoided, depends chiefly upon the Director, to whose influence indeed, in a country where the average quality of instruction.

men.

is so high as in Germany, the superiority of one Gymnasium to another must be chiefly ascribed. The Director's supervision may extend even to the lowest classes, as is illustrated by the practice of Director Bonnell of the Werder Gymnasium in Berlin, who is in the habit, the writer was informed, of making a weekly visit to Sexta and holding there a review of the work done in Latin. But the Director's special charge is the classical instruction in Prima, where the object is, by encouraging to that private reading of the classic authors which alone confers an intelligent appreciation of ancient life, to transform dependent pupils into independent scholars, and to awaken that interest in classical study which is a pledge of its continued prosecution in subsequent life.

Upon the Director it depends, whether his pupils, before leaving the Gymnasium, acquire the colloquial use of Latin, and whether, in Latin composition, they add elegance and ease to the correctness which the training of the lower classes has given them.

The severe discipline of the Gymnasium, continued through so many years, loses finally, in a certain degree, its power The novelty has long been entirely gone, and the prescribed regularity of daily life becomes tedious; the child, moreover, has become a man within the Gymnasium walls, and demands a different treatment from that which he has hitherto received. It rests with the Director to extend, at this point, to the older scholars who are specially entrusted to him, that judicious indulgence, unmixed with weakness, which shall give the student opportunity to show himself worthy of the independence which his nature demands, and which, by making the life of the last months more free in its character, shall take away the too vivid recollection of the severities of the early years, and render less likely that tremendous rebound for which the removal of all outward restraint, at the entrance of the University, is often the signal, and from which many promising students never return to sober ways. When the Director fails in this respect, the entire upper class of the Gymnasium may become demoralized, as was the case, the writer remembers having observed, in Prima of the Katharinum at Lübeck, where a demoralization showed itself in the disposition of the class, on the smallest

provocation, to burst into a roar of laughter, and where it interfered most seriously with the advantage which the later months of study were intended to give. There are among the Directors very many who entirely meet the varied demands which their duties make upon them. Far more numerous than the dry formalists, are those others like Nitzsch of Hanover, von Naegelsbach of Erlangen; and, among the living, Classen of Hamburg, who add to a wide erudition, and to self-sacrificing devotion to their pupils, a contagious enthusiasm, and an alonua for all that is noble, and possess that ripeness of character and sympathetic nature which is the living testimony to the worth of classical culture. The strongest argument in the hands of the opponents of classical study in our own country, is found in the scanty results which classical training in America gives. If, in the time allotted to the study, no intelligent comprehension of the ancient languages has been acquired, and no glimpse of the transforming light with which the ancient world is seen to be illuminated by him who enters it through the portals of ancient speech, then the forms and rules blindly and laboriously acquired may as well be forgotten; and the unhappy condition of such a person is described in no exaggerated language by the fine passage of the Odyssey. Bk. xi, 593-8.

Καὶ μὴν Σίσυφον εἰσεῖδον κρατέρ' ἄλγε' έχοντα,
λάαν βαστάζοντα πελώριον ἀμφοτέρησιν.

ἤ τοι ὁ μὲν σκηριπτόμενος χερσίν τε ποσίν τε
λάαν άνω ώθεσκε ποτὶ λόφον· ἀλλ' ὅτε μέλλοι
ἄκρον ὑπερβαλέειν, τότ' ἀποστρέψασκε κραταῖς
αὖτις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λάας αναιδής.

In Bryant's translation—

There I beheld the shade of Sisyphus

Amid his sufferings. With both hands he rolled

A huge stone up a hill. To force it up,

He leaned against the mass with hands and feet;

But, ere it crossed the summit of the hill

A power was felt that sent it rolling back

And downward plunged the unmanageable rock
Before him to the plain.

The hill of learning has steep ascents, but, at various altitudes, table lands; and the pleasure in exploring these will abundantly reward the labor which it has cost to reach them.