no inconvenience whatever has been observed from the children remaining at continued lessons, even two or three hours together." To keep young children standing for two or three hours together was surely something very like cruelty.

Mr Johnson, the head-master of the Central School, was obliged to give up a great deal of his time to showing visitors over the school, to explaining the system, and to the training of teachers (among whom was a young Persian); and Dr Bell thought it advisable that he should be relieved of his duties as master. Accordingly he one morning fell upon Mr Bamford with the sudden intimation that he was to be the master of the Central School. Mr Bamford was dumfounded. "I received the intelligence," he says, "with real grief. I shed tears; but go I must, and that very morning." London was, in the year 1814, "crowded with foreigners, among whom were the Emperor Alexander and his sister, the Grand Duchess of Russia,-the latter of whom had expressed her intention of visiting the Central School." Dr Bell wrote several times to the Grand Duchess, sent her copies of his reports and works; and in one of his letters he asks permission "to lay his books at the feet of his Imperial Majesty, at any hour, as he goes out or returns, so as not to occupy a moment of that time which was so fully employed." The Emperor of Russia was not so scrupulous about his time,-which surely was also of some value. Dr Bell achieved the interview he sought; but, he had to wait five hours in an ante-room for it. "The Grand Duchess," he says, " soon" (this must mean soon

dear. "A discovery is made," he says, "and is given without patent, and at an incredible expense to the author, and it is too dear to those who profit by it at four shillings and twelve shillings! It should have been published in quarto, and sold for five guineas— this has sense in it. You will not soon be reconciled by me." The ebullient Doctor's idea of patenting the plan of asking one boy to teach another, and selling the description of his plan for five guineas, is very characteristic. But in all ages there are to be found men who would like to patent the Atlantic Ocean or to bottle up the English language.

Dr Bell not only went about the country himself, to direct or to organise, but he had several assistants in this work-among others, Mr Grover, who organised, on the Madras System, schools at Manchester, Salford, Leeds, Bolton, York, and Sheffield.

he did not care

At the close of the memorable year of 1815, Dr Bell revisited, after an absence of more than thirty years, his native city of St Andrews. Scenery did not interest him; the progress of towns to watch; hardly a trace of politics is to be found in his letters; schools and the System absorb all his thoughts. "Nothing," he writes to a friend, "is curious, or interesting, or beautiful in my eyes, but the faces of children, but the infant mind, but the spiritual creation." He loved children; he believed in children; he believed in the System; he believed in every detail of it. "If the master do not immediately," he writes, "adopt the new system in all the departments of his school, especially by teaching every letter, monosyllable,

and the syllabic lessons of the spelling-book, by writing them on the slate, I shall entertain no good hope. Let him talk to me for ever of difficulties, want of room, etc. etc.,-he will talk in vain. I will not listen to him. Difficulties in the instruction and discipline of a school are created by the master, or often handed down to him."

There were, of course, enormous advantages in this enthusiasm. But it had its drawbacks. Dr Bell was constantly making alterations in the details; and he expected the teachers to be as loyal to, and as fond of, every new alteration as they had been of the old plans. "Besides," says Mr Southey, "his manner of condemning trifling inaccuracies in those schools which he visited in his travels, was often unnecessarily harsh and violent; and while the slightest omission called forth unlimited blame, it required a very high state of perfection to obtain his commendations."

Every cult has its mysteries; and the worship of the System very soon developed several. One of the chief mysteries was ILTO. Dr Bell is "glad Davis is so jealous about ILTO. It is beautiful

I fear I shall not sleep

soundly till I hear from you, or see it producing the same fruits in Baldwin's Gardens as in Bishop Auckland. Wherever it is attended to as it ought, and duly understood, it will do all that can be done for a school. I have gone to the full length of my tether. I can go no further. It leaves nothing more for me to do. All the world will in time learn every lesson by writing it. Believe you have not

done it as it ought to be done, till you are delighted and charmed as all are, where it is performed rightly.

It is completely done at the Barrington School; and all there think it all in all. I think it consummates my labours and leaves nothing more for me to do. Dr Bell, then, had come to the Hercules Pillars of Elementary Education; and there were no more worlds for him to conquer. Everything that the human intellect could do had been done; the bright consummate flower of his thought was IL TO; and the coping-stone had been placed upon the immortal edifice of Primary Instruction. What was this ILTO? It was nothing more than that children should write their letters as soon as they had learnt them; and these four letters were learned first, as the easiest to write. It was a small anticipation, a slight instalment, of the well-known Schreib-Lese-Methode of Germany.

72

CHAPTER XII.

DR BELL ON THE CONTINENT.

The

SOON after the battle of Waterloo, the English began to resume their old habit of making the grand tour. Continent had long been closed to them by Napoleon; and they were now glad to get back to their old playingfields their former holiday-making places—and to travel about under a brighter sky and in clearer air than are generally found in London. Dr Bell was among the number. He left London on the 18th of June 1816, and arrived at Paris on the 21st. He found, on his arrival at Paris, that the Society for Elementary Instruction had nominated him an honorary member. But he very much feared, in fact he "knew, that the beautiful simplicity of the new system is ill adapted to the genius of the French nation." Among other places which he visited, he went to the school of the Duchesse de Drevas. There he found "about seventy boys, in bad order, noisy, with all the Lancasterian nonsense, loss of time, and dreadful clattering of hands and slates;" and he found his friend, the Abbé Gualtier, "most bigoted and prejudiced: he contends that they do already as to emulation, etc., as I propose, and advocates even the