and their peculiar application." Sir Walter Scott, who was an omnivorous reader, but certainly not a bright scholar according to the regulation pattern, thought that "the best part of every man's mind is that which he gives himself." Leslie declares that it was Fuseli's "wise neglect" of young Landseer that helped to make him what he afterwards became. Turner's father sent him to school to learn drawing; but it was not long before his master, a thoroughly competent man, sent young Turner back to his father with a note that lessons were thrown away upon him, that it was of no use trying to teach him, and that "the case was hopeless." These are the commonplaces of educational controversy; but they all point to the important fact that spontaneous activity is the most valuable power in the mind, and to the duty of the wise teacher, who will endeavour to find out what direction this activity is taking, and encourage its growth. "People," says Rousseau, "do not understand childhood. With the false notions we have of it, the farther we go, the farther we go wrong. The wisest lay stress on what it is important for men to know, without considering what children are in a condition to learn." The problem for modern teachers is a very difficult one. It is to reconcile the claims-the enormous claims —of modern education, with a reverence for the individual powers of each personality. Another aimanother problem quite as important is to eliminate the didactic element from instruction, and so to make it an art. Many able young men in secondary schools are rising up to give practical solutions to these prob lems. The able teachers in primary schools have-or seem to have even a more difficult task before them; but they, too, by faith and perseverance, will at long. and at last "beat their music out." The Life of Dr Bell' may give them here and there suggestions, may indicate some side-light which may help them towards the performance of their task, or may at least give some short but honest word of encouragement: "Es rufen von drüben Die Stimmen der Meister Hier winden sich Kronen In ewiger Stille Die sollen mit Fülle Die Thätigen lohnen, Wir heissen euch hoffen!'" But, whatever we who are elders and professional. teachers may say and discuss and resolve, there sounds in our inner ear the cry of the children-a cry to which the whole past history of education has been somewhat deaf: "TAKE US WITH YOU!" 141 LECTURE ON DR BELL. [The following lecture was delivered in the Greek Classroom of St Andrews in 1877; and it is the sketch on which the preceding 'Life' is based. It may perhaps be of use to print it here as giving, in a very condensed form, the main facts regard ing the educational theories and doings of the founder of the "Madras System of Education." That system is now forgotten; but what we must not forget is, that we owe to Dr Bell-through his trustees, Mr John Cook and the Earl of Leven and Melvillethe founding of two Chairs of Education in the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews.] IN the year 1844, John Murray brought out, in three thick octavo volumes, the Life of the Rev. Dr Andrew Bell. This 'Life' was begun by Robert Southey, the well-known reviewer, literary man, historian, and poetlaureate. He died when the first volume was finished; and even this first volume had to be edited and carried through the press by the loving care of his wife, Caroline Bowles. The two last volumes were written by his son, the Rev. Charles Southey, of Queen's College, Oxford. These three large octavo volumes contain about 2000 pages; and they altogether form a mass of extremely dull and unattractive reading. This dulness. is not so much due to the subject-a man whose life was very well worth writing-as to the extraordinarily chaotic form in which the materials are presented to us. They are not presented, they are shot down at our feet. But for this one can hardly blame the reverend gentleman. Dr Bell had kept every letter, note, paper, pamphlet, or report he had received during a period of sixty years; and, as he knew almost everybody in England, Scotland, and the other two hemispheres, one can form some rude guess of the Chimborazo of rubbish he had managed to accumulate around him. His amanuensis, Mr Davies, toiled devotedly through this chaos, and gradually worked the facts in it down to fourteen octavo volumes. Robert Southey undertook the task of further reducing this, he died in the process of the work, and Charles Southey continued it. Sometimes many hundred papers had to be searched for a single fact or date; and the same papers-many of them almost illegible-would sometimes pass through Mr Davies's hands some forty or fifty times. It took Mr Southey a year only to mark the papers which he wished Mr Davies to copy for him, and the result at last appeared in these three thick volumes. The first is readable, as everything Mr Southey wrote bears the marks of thought, diligence, literary form, and some grace; but the two last volumes could only be read under extraordinary circumstances, by the offer of a great reward-in a country inn on a rainy day, after all the advertisements of the local newspapers had been perused-or by a firstclass misdemeanant in prison. It is these three thick volumes that I propose to lay before you a very short view of. Andrew Bell was an extraordinary man. I may even go so far as to say he was an extraordinary Scotchman. In a country where every man has been framed in a mould, which was afterwards broken and no copy kept, it argues considerable force of mind or character to distinguish one's self at all. The son of a barber, with no fortune except the education he received at St Andrews, he goes to Virginia as a tutor, and makes a small fortune in tobacco; he comes home, and-though short-sighted -fights a duel in St Andrews, loses his money, takes orders in the Church of England, and goes to Madrasmakes a large fortune in India comes home, buys estates, marries a wife, rises to be a dignitary in the Church (and has a very near view of the mitre), writes a large number of books, shakes hands with princes, kings, and emperors, revolutionises education in the Old and the New World, leaves £200,000, bullies and terrifies his trustees before he dies, travels several hundred thousand miles, and makes a large number of warm-hearted friends, surely this is experience enough to satisfy the appetite or the ambition of any one man. He was born at St Andrews in the year 1753. His father was a barber in the city. He was a barber in the golden age of barbers-in the time when they did not cut hair, but built hair-built up enormous edifices of horse-hair, grease, and flour, without which no professor could lecture and no judge could try a case. But he was more than a barber. He was also a clock and watch maker, and something of an astronomer; he kept the University clock in order, and regulated it by observations; and he also invented a plan of casting types, which the great printers, Foulis of Glasgow, afterwards |