favor will inevitably follow. But I have no misgiving as to the future-it rises bright and glorious before me, and on its forehead is the morning star-the herald of a brighter day than our schools have yet seen. That enthusiasm which started this enterprise on the 8th of March on the flood tide of popular favor, will carry your committees and teachers on until you have time enough to put your institution on to a well digested course of study, which you will from time to time modify and adjust to the educational wants of the people, whom your own work here will help to train to a higher and higher standard. With this wise adjustment of your course of instruction so as to impart the best preparation which the diversified professions and occupations of the community require, this High School will stand a monument of wise liberality and large public spirit, a measure of the progress of intelligence slowly but surely diffused over honest convictions firmly held because embedded in the habits of a half century of opposite practice, a shrine at whose altar-fire many ingenuous minds will be kindled with the true love of science, a fountain of living waters whose branching streams will flow on with ever deepening and widening current, which will bear on its bosom noble argosies, and nourish all along its banks, trees, whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations.

I have thus noted rapidly, but not briefly as you desired in your letter, the chief, although not all the efforts to establish in the First School Society of Hartford, a Public School of a grade higher than the District Schools, so far as I was personally conversant with the same, from the first formal announcement of the subject in the Center Church on the evening of July 4, 1838, to the dedication of the building erected for its accommodation on the 1st of December, 1847. You will please receive this communication, long as it is, as a contribution only to the history of the English and Classical High School of the Town of Hartford, for which other citizens labored, if not so long, with equal earnestness and with more ability. The names of several, from their connection with committees, reports, and speeches, have been incidentally introduced, and before the final record is made up (which should in my judgment include the history of the bequests of Edward Hopkins and other benefactors, and as far as practicable, the teachers of the old Town Grammar, and County Free Schools, of which the institution over which you preside, is the lineal descendant and legal representative), the names of others, with their special work by voice or pen, or personal influence, should be appropriately noticed-although the growth of a public institution, whose establishment involves a radical change in public opinion and the habits of families, and the imposition for the first time, or a large increase of property taxation, is the sum total of innumerable contributions made at different times, of which some of the most important may never be recorded,* and the names of their authors not even be known, or have been purposely concealed. Such laborers, in obscure or conspicuous portions of the field, find their true inspiration and reward in the ever extending results of educational efforts wisely put forth. No human eye can follow, no human hand record, the influences which go out from one, much less from many,

* The fact of being appointed to preside over a public meeting, or to serve on a committee to inquire into the expediency of a proposed measure, is no evidence that the persons so appointed are in favor of the same, or join in the final recommendation. Thus the presiding officer of the meeting on the 11th of January, 1847, and two of the members of the committee appointed to consider and report on the expediency and expense of a school of a higher grade than the District Schools, spoke and voted against the resolution to establish a Free High School on the 8th of March following. So of other members of this and other committees-several were put on more from their relations to local or political interests, and from confidence in their character for intelligence and fairness generally, than from having taken any active part in previous discussions.

institutions of learning thus established or improved-from even one intellect, otherwise dead as the clod of the valley, or fickle as the wave, made strong by its teaching to discover and defend the truth in some hour of popular delusion, or one heart inspired with love to God and man to work on in some forlorn cause of human suffering and calamity, like Todd, or Gallaudet, or Wells, until the mute can speak, the insane be clothed again in their right mind, and the mangled victims of disaster and the battle-field be treated without pain.

In conclusion, let me say, while at no period of our history has the original school policy of the State, in providing a higher as well as an elementary grade, been so generally realized as in our District Graded and Town High Schools; or the obligation on the Town of Hartford to discharge the trust, assumed in accepting the early bequests made for the specific purpose of maintaining a school of the higher grade, been so fully discharged as in its provision for our English and Classical High School-there is not only room, but urgent necessity, for still further development of the system in the State generally, and in its local administration and application here. Our town organization of schools is still fragmentary and disjointed; the opportunities of even elementary instruction are very unequally distributed; the actual attendance, any day in the year, of children of the teachable age in public schools of every grade is about one-half of the whole number enumerated (only 3,720 out of 7,834); the management and inspection of our schools in reference to securing the highest uniform excellence throughout all public schools of every grade, in the most economical and productive results of the large sums collected by taxation for school purposes, through ten independent committees, if applied to any private enterprise involving the same number of persons, the same capital, and the same expenditure, would be deemed loose and ruinous; the subjects and courses of study, although very numerous and carefully prepared, need both reduction in some directions and enlargement in others, and such practical readjustment throughout as will make systematic instruction in music, drawing, and gymnastics universal, and give our future machinists, engineers, builders, mechanics and chemical technologists as well as merchants, teachers, and aspirants of regular professions of every name and both sexes, that practical knowledge of the sciences which is essential to the highest and earliest success in every occupation.

With my best thanks, as a citizen, to you for your judicious and faithful work as the teacher of our highest school, and for your eminent success in so adminis trating your delicate and difficult office of principal as to harmonize and consolidate two institutions which might under other auspices have proved hostile and mutually injurious; and, to your immediate associates, and fellowlaborers generally, who together now make the liberality of the State, the town, and of benevolent and public-spirited individuals (amounting in 1869 and 1870 to $272,352 for all objects), accomplish the noble purposes for which our public schools were originally instituted, more broadly and thoroughly than at any period of our history since John Higginson taught the first school in Hartford in 1637,

I remain your obedient servant and friend,

HARTFORD, January 14, 1871.

HENRY BARNARD.

NOTES TO THE HISTORY OF GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.

The Earliest School in Hartford.

The first mention of "the school" in the records of Hartford is in 1642, where the townsmen make provision for it, in the way of endowment, not as an institution established then for the first time, but already in existence, and part of the public polity, like roads, protection from fire, the Indians, and worship. Since writing in 1853 the first edition of the History of Common Schools in Connecticut, in which I state from good authority that the town and State legislation only embodied the practice which the founders of Hartford, from their personal antecedents, their own education in grammar and free schools, and the moral necessity on such men with children to be educated and trained in the admonition of the Lord, had commenced from their first settlement here. Hooker and Stone were both teachers, and under their instruction began, so far as I can now recall, the first school of the prophets-the first formal theological seminary in the country. Their first students in theology were very naturally the first teachers of the children of their own preceptors and neighbors, and we know from Cotton Mather, that John Higginson, before we hear of him as chaplain at the fort at Saybrook (in 1640), and minister in Guilford, was "a schoolmaster at Hartford," and resided here with his widowed mother-his name and others appearing on the records from 1636 to 1639. If he taught at all, the school and teaching would resemble the schools in which he and the fathers of the children were taught (the grammar and free schools of England), and the teachers would come within the category of masters, themselves educated men 11 able to instruct youths so far as they may be fitted for the University." Mather compares Higginson, who had the support of his mother and her children to provide for, to Origen, "who after the untimely death of his father, had his poor mother with six other children to look after; whereupon he taught first a grammar school and then betook himself unto the study of divinity; thus this other (son of Francis) Higginson, after a pious childhood, having been a schoolmaster at Hartford and minister at Saybrook, &c., &c." We find that the school at Hartford was good enough to satisfy the Rev. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge (the seat of a grammar school and the infant University), whose son "little Sam was here in the family of his grandfather Hooker at a little later date.

Will and Bequests of Governor Hopkins.

The Will of Gov. Hopkins, dated London, March 17, 1657, with an account of the Town Grammar Schools, and the County Free Schools, established under the acts of 1650, and 1672, towards each of which the General Court appropriated six hundred acres of land, and in 1680 to two of them, the one at Hartford, and the other at New Haven, "the school revenue given by particular persons, or to be given for this use so far as it will extend," together with a sketch of the institutions at Hartford, New Haven, and Hadley, which in their inception and early history were greatly aided by his bequests, will be found in the “History of the Common Schools of Connecticut.”

The following paragraphs of the Will contain all that refers to the subject: "And the residue of my estate there, [in New England], I do hereby give and bequeath to my father, Theophilus Eaton. Esq, Mr. John Davenport, Mr. John Cullick and Mr. William Goodwin, in full assurance of their trust and faithfulness in disposing of it according to the true intent and purpose of me the said Edward Hopkins, which is to give some encouragement in those

foreign plantations for the breeding up of hopeful youths both at the grammar school and college, for the public service of the country in future times."

"My farther mind and will is, that within six months after the decease of my wife, five hundred pounds be made over into New England, according to the advice of my loving friends, Major Robert Thomson and Mr. Francis Willoughby, and conveyed into the hands of the trustees beforementioned in further prosecution of the aforesaid public ends, which, in the simplicity of my heart, are for the upholding and promoting the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ in those distant parts of the earth."

Bequests of Gibbins, Richards, and Talcott.

The following letter from Charles Hoadly, Esq., State Librarian, mentions several additional bequests and confirms the statement made above:

HARTFORD, January 9th, 1871.

DEAR SIR: You ask me whether I can give any items, relative to the legacy for educational purposes by William Gibbons (or Gibbins, as he himself spelled his name). in addition to what is stated in the note at the foot of page 31 of Vol. IV. Colonial Records of Connecticut.

The will of Mr. Gibbins is dated February 26, 1654 [i. e., 1655]. The fol lowing is a copy of one clause of it: "I give my land at Peniwise now in the tenor of John Sadler towards the mayntenance of a Lattin schoole at Hartford; provided that the fence bee continued in the same line and way of common fencing as that now is. And for the present, until the lease I have made to John Sadler be expired, I give out of the rent due from John Sadler fifty shilling yearly."

Mr. Gibbins' inventory, taken Dec. 2, 1655, amounted to about £1500. The house built a few years since for his dwelling by Edmund G. Howe, near the Cove in Wethersfield, stands upon a part of the land devised to the Hartford school by Mr. Gibbins. I mentioned in the note above referred to, that pursuant to a vote of the town in 1756, this land, which was about thirty acres of meadow and upland, was let on a long lease. The original lease, signed by the committee for the school, is among the papers of the Conn. Historical Society. James Richards, Esq., who married Sarah, daughter of William Gibbins, by his last will, made in 1680, left fifty pounds to the Latin School in Hartford.

As for the bequest of Mr. Jolin Talcott, the grandfather of Governor Joseph Talcott: his will was made August 12th, 1659, and he says in it, "I give to wards the maintaining a Lattin schoole at Hartford, if any be kept here, five pounds," which was to be paid one year after his death.

You ask me also when the town of Hartford came into possession of the six hundred acres of land which was granted by the General Court May 9th, 1672, to Hartford, "for the benefit of a grammar schoole."

It was not until May 30th, 1718, that this land was laid out, "about half a mile southward of the colony line at the north end, and extending southward and eastward as far as may be needful, butting west on Enfield bounds." The land lay in the town of Stafford. In 1776 it was described as "rough and wild," and, in June of that year, the General Assembly, upon the petition of the then committee for the school, authorized them to make sale of this land. You are undoubtedly correct in your statement that there was a school in Hartford prior to the vote of 1642, by which "thirty pounds a year shall be settled on the school for ever"—and in fixing on 1637 as the year in which John Higginson, in unconscious imitation, as Cotton Mather makes out, of Origen, who taught a grammar school at Alexandria, was a schoolmaster here, and our records show, a land-owner. You might have cited Winthrop, who speaks of "one Mr. Collins, a young scholar who came from Barbadoes and had been a preacher, who was entertained at Hartford to teach a school in 1640." The qualifications of such teachers as these, and their successor William Andrews, in whose beautiful handwriting the proceedings of the Commissioners of the United Colonies are recorded from 1643 to 1649, would come within the requirements of the school law of 1650, for such grammar schools as the Town of Hartford was ordered to set up. You will recollect (see your own History), that Hartford in the first eight years of the existence of the College, contributed more than one-third as much as the citizens of Boston towards the maintenance of scholars at Cambridge. Truly yours,

Hon. HENRY BARNARD, LL. D.

CHARLES J. HOADLY.

MR. CAPRON: Since sending you my "Contribution to the History of the Public High School" so far as I was personally mixed up with the same, and "with subjects adjacent thereto" from 1838 to 1848, it has occurred to me, in passing the site of the structure erected for its accommodation in 1847, and which it cost so many years of agitation to evoke from the hearts of the taxpayers of the First Seliool Society, and of which not one stone or brick now remains in the solid and orderly proportions in which, with ascriptions of thanksgiving and songs of praise, and invocations of the Divine blessing, they were "dedicated to the cause of good learning and the breeding up of hopeful youth for the public service of the country, and a life of active employment," that you and your associates in the work of instruction, and all the living graduates, might be glad to have some memorial of the building in its external appearance and internal arrangements, as they were engraved for my School Architecture in 1848. Those plates are at your 'service; and with them I send a wood-cut of a plan drawn in 1828 by I. Spencer Jr. (now in the possession of William Hamersley), of a portion of "South Side," in which may be seen its predecessor erected in 1828 still standing on Linden Place (then Wells Alley), and the spacious lot, on which lawyers, doctors, clergymen, governors, and senators, then boys in their teens, kicked foot-ball with commendable vigor. H. B.

STREETS (1) Main; (2) Linden Place, originally a Lane leading to House erected by Thomas Y. Seymour, and afterwards occupied by Doctor Sylvester Wells, and known in his day as WellsAlley; (3) College street as projected after burning of Whitman mansion in 1827; (4) Buckingham street before it was straightened, and the west end made part of College street in 1828; (5) Buckingham after the completion of the new (M) and removal of (N) old South Meeting House; (6) Whitman Court, laid out by I. Spencer, Jr., purchaser of the Whitman estate (e e e e

A. GRAMMAR SCHOOL HOUSE (still standing as a double tenement), erected in 1828, just north of its predecessor, which was erected in 1808 (and bought and removed by D. Crowell to lot (k) corner of Whitman Court), in place of school-house which stood on north side of Arch street, midway between Main and Prospect street, bought for this purpose in 1755; (b) John Russ; (c) Enoch Perkins; (d) John M. Niles; (f) Asa Francis, with carriage-shop on lot (g) (house occupied by George Francis); (h) C. Bull; (1) Russ house; (7) Dr. Wells.