These adieus to old Westminster took place on a Saturday; and the following Monday found us already _en route_ with our excellent father for the new settlement at Yverdun. The school to which we were then travelling, and the venerable man who presided over it, have both been long since defunct--_de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; and gratitude itself forbids that we should speak either of one or of the other with harshness or disrespect; of a place where we certainly spent some very happy, if not the happiest, days of life; of him who--rightly named the _father_ of the establishment--ever treated us, and all with whom he had to do, with a uniform gentleness and impartiality. To tell ill-natured tales out of school--of such a school, and after so long a period too--would indeed argue ill for _any one's_ charity, and accordingly _we_ do not intend to try it. But though the feeling of the _alumnus_ may not permit us to think unfavourably of the _Pensionat_ Pestalozzi, we shall not, on that account, suppress the mention of some occasional hardships and inconveniences experienced there, much less allow a word of reproach to escape our pen. The reader, with no such sympathies to restrain his curiosity, will no doubt expect, if not a detailed account, some outline or general ground-plan of the system, which, alas! we cannot give him; our endeavour to comprehend it as a digested _whole_--proceeding on certain data, aiming at certain ends, and pursuing them by certain means--has been entirely unsuccessful; and therefore, if pressed for more than we can tell, our answer must be, in the words of Cicero, _Deprecor ne me tanquam philosophum putet scholam sibi istam, explicaturum_.[14] But though unable to make out--if, indeed, there were any spirit of unity to be made out--in Pestalozzi's scheme, there were certain manifest imperfections in the composition of his plan of education--improprieties to which the longest familiarity could scarcely reconcile, nor the warmest partiality blind even the most determined partisan. In the first place--to state them at once, and have done with the unpleasing office of finding fault--it always struck us as a capital error, in a school where books were not allowed, to suffer almost the whole teaching of the classes to devolve upon some leading member of each; for what, in fact, could self-taught lads be expected to teach, unless it were to make a ring or a row--to fish, to whistle, or to skate? Of course, any graver kind of information, conveyed by an infant prodigy to his gaping pupils, must have lacked the necessary precision to make it available to them: first, because he would very seldom be sufficiently possessed of it himself; and secondly, because a boy's imperfect vocabulary and inexperience render him at all times a decidedly bad interpreter even of what he may really know. In place of proving real lights, these little Jack-o'-Lanterns of ours tended rather to perplex the path of the inquiring, and to impede their progress; and when an appeal was made to the master, as was sometimes done, the master--brought up in the same vague, bookless manner, and knowing nothing more _accurately_, though he might know _more_ than his puzzle-pated pupils--was very seldom able to give them a lift out of the quagmire, where they accordingly would stick, and flounder away till the end of the lesson. It was amusing to see how a boy, so soon as he got but a glimpse of a subject before the class, and could give but the ghost of a reason for what he was eager to prelect upon, became incontinent of the bright discovery, till all his companions had had the full benefit of it, with much that was irrelevant besides. The mischiefs which, it would occur to any one's mind, were likely to result in after life from such desultory habits of application in boyhood, actually did result to many of us a few years later at college. It was at once painful and difficult to indoctrinate indocile minds like ours into the accurate and severe habits of university discipline.