And he concludes his letter, an octogenarian writing to an octogenarian: "Let us all remember, in the language 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.'"

CHAPTER XVI.

DR BELL'S CHARACTER AND SYSTEM.

There

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 all 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 bore. 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

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 attraction 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 assistants, 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 more. 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 absolutely open to every kind of conjecture. Then he was himself very parsimonious; and perhaps her allowances were small, 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,

he trades in currency 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 primum 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 halfa-crown out of his pocket-'I can do more with this half-crown than you can do with all your fixed salaries.' "Vixêre fortes ante Agamemnona;" and Dr Bell is not the only man who has tried to fix burdens on the shoulders of others, which they themselves touched with but one of their fingers. "Payment 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,

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 him. 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 Tasmanian devil. It is seen to require other qualities to commend 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 considered "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