"Nunquam præponens se aliis, ITA facillime Sine invidia invenias laudem,"
says Terence, and it will be so where envy and conceit have supplanted emulation: yet are the feelings perfectly distinct; and we think it behoves all those who contend that every striving for the mastery is prohibited by the gospel, to show how _communism_ in inferiority, or _socialism_ in dulness, are likely to improve morals or mend society. Take from a schoolboy the motive of rewards and punishments, and you deprive him of that incentive by which your own conduct through life is regulated, and that by which God has thought fit, in the moral government of his rational creatures, to promote the practice of good works, and to discourage and dissuade from evil. Nor did that which sounds thus ominously in theory succeed in its application better than it sounded. In fact, nothing more unfortunate could have been devised for all parties, but especially for such as were by nature of a studious turn or of quicker parts than the rest; who, finding the ordinary stimulus to exertion thus removed, and none other to replace it, no longer cared to do well, (why should they, when they knew that their feeblest efforts would transcend their slow-paced comrades' best?) but, gradually abandoning themselves to the _vis inertiæ_ of sloth, incompetence, and bad example, did no more than they could help; repressing the spirit of rivalry and emulation, which had no issue in the school, to show it in some of those feats of agility or address, which the rigorous enactment of gymnastic exercises imposed on all alike, and in the performance of which we certainly _did_ pride ourselves, and eagerly sought to eclipse each other in exhibiting any natural or acquired superiority we might possess. The absence of all elementary books of instruction throughout the school, presented another barrier in the way of improvement still more formidable than even the _bétise_ of boy pedagogues, the want of sufficient stimulus to exertion, or the absurd respect paid sometimes to natural incapacity, and sometimes even to idleness. Those who had no rules to learn had of course none to apply when they wanted them; no masters could have adequately supplied this deficiency, and those of the chateau were certainly not the men to remedy the evil. As might therefore have been anticipated, the young Pestalozzian's ideas, whether innate or acquired, and on every subject, became sadly vague and confused, and his grammar of a piece with his knowledge. We would have been conspicuous, even amongst other boys, for what _seemed_ almost a studied impropriety of language; but it _was_, in fact, nothing more than the unavoidable result of natural indolence and inattention, uncoerced by proper discipline. The old man's slouching gait and ungraceful attire afforded but too apt an illustration of the intellectual _nonchalance_ of his pupils. As to the modern languages, of which so much has been said by those who knew so little of the matter, they were in parlance, to be sure--but how spoken? Alas! besides an open violation of all the concords, and a general disregard of syntax, they failed where one would have thought them least likely to fail, in correctness of idiom and accent. The French--this was the language of the school--abounded in conventional phrases, woven into its texture from various foreign sources, German, English, or Italian, and in scores of barbarous words--not to be found in the _Dictionnaire de l'Academie_, certainly, but quite current in the many-tongued vernacular of the chateau. Our pronunciation remained unequivocally John Bullish to the end--not one of us ever caught or thought of catching the right intonation; and, whether the fault originated merely in want of ear, or that we could not make the right use of our noses, it is quite certain that all of us had either no accent or a wrong one. The German was as bad as the French: it was a Swiss, not a German, abounding in _patois_ phrases and provincialisms--in short, a most hybrid affair, to say nothing of its being as much over-guttural as the last was sub-nasal. With regard to Spanish and Italian, as the English did not consort with either of these nations, all they ever acquired of their languages were such oaths and _mauvais mots_ as parrots pick up from sailors aboard ship, which they repeated with all the innocence of parrots.