Not long after 1830, there died in a Sardinian convent, noted for its ascetic observances and for the piety of its inmates, a French monk, who went by the name of brother Ambrose. His death was considered to be accelerated by the strictness with which he followed the rigid rules of the order, from some of which his failing health would have justified deviation, and by the frequency and severity of his self-imposed penances. His body, feeble when first he entered the convent, was no match for his courageous spirit. In accordance with his dying request, his beads and breviary were sent to a vicar named la Chapelle, then resident at Lyons. When that excellent priest opened the book, he found the following words inscribed upon a blank page:--
"Blessed be the Lord, for in Him have I peace and hope!"
And Henry la Chapelle kneeled down, and breathed a prayer for the soul of his departed friend, Dominique Lafon.
"Etiam illud adjungo, sæpius ad laudem atque virtutem _naturam sine doctrinâ_, quam sine naturâ valuisse doctrinam."--CICERO, _pro. Arch._, 7.
"Que vous ai-je donc fait, O mes jeunes années! Pour m'avoir fui si vite, me croyant satisfait?"
For the abnormal, and, we must think, somewhat faulty education of our later boyhood--a few random recollections of which we here purpose to lay before the reader--our obligations, _quantuloecunquoe sint_, are certainly due to prejudices which, though they have now become antiquated and obsolete, were in full force some thirty years ago, against the existing mode of education in England. Not that the public--_quâ_ public--were ever very far misled by the noisy declamations of the Whigs on this their favourite theme: people for the most part paid very little attention to the inuendoes of the peripatetic schoolmaster, so carefully primed and sent "abroad" to disabuse them; while not a few smiled to recognise under that imposing misnomer a small self-opinionated _clique_--free traders in everything else, but absolute monopolists here--who sought by its aid to palm off on society the _jocosa imago_ of their own crotchets, as though in sympathetic response to a sentiment wholly proceeding from itself. When much inflammatory "stuff" had been discharged against the walls of our venerable institutions, not only without setting Isis or Cam on fire, but plainly with some discomfitures to the belligerents engaged, from the opposite party, who returned the salute, John Bull began to open his eyes a little, and, as he opened them, to doubt whether, after all, the promises and _programmes_ he had been reading of a spic-and-span new order of everything, particularly of education, might not turn out a _flam_; and the authors of them, who certainly showed off to most advantage on _Edinburgh Review_ days, prove anything but the best qualified persons to make good their own vaticinations, or to bring in the new golden age they had announced. Still, the crusade against English public seminaries, though abortive in its principal design--that of exciting a _general_ defection from these institutions--was not quite barren of results. It was so far successful, at least, as completely to unsettle for a time the minds of not a few over-anxious parents, who, taught to regard with suspicion the credentials of every schoolmaster "at home," were beginning to make diligent inquiries for his successor among their neighbours "abroad." To all who were in this frame of mind, the first _couleur de rose_ announcements of Pestalozzi's establishment at Yverdun were news indeed! offering as they did--or at least seeming to offer--the complete solution of a problem which could scarcely have been entertained without much painful solicitude and anxiety.