into French as follows:—
“Il acquit la femme et la terre!”
Naturally after (a very long way after) foreign languages came the study of English. We had a writing and arithmetic master (whom we unanimously abhorred and despised, though one and all of us grievously needed his instructions) and an “English master,” who taught us to write “themes,” and to whom I, for one, feel that I owe, perhaps, more than to any other teacher in that school, few as were the hours which we were permitted to waste on so insignificant an art as composition in our native tongue!
Beyond all this, our English studies embraced one long, awful lesson each week to be repeated to the schoolmistress herself by a class, in history one week, in geography the week following. Our first class, I remember, had once to commit to memory—Heaven alone knows how—no less than thirteen pages of Woodhouselee’s Universal History!
Lastly, as I have said, in point of importance, came our religious instruction. Our well-meaning schoolmistresses thought it was obligatory on them to teach us something of the kind, but, being very obviously altogether worldly women themselves, they were puzzled how to carry out their intentions. They marched us to church every Sunday when it did not rain, and they made us on Sunday mornings repeat the Collect and Catechism; but beyond these exercises of body and mind, it was hard for them to see what to do for our spiritual welfare. One Ash Wednesday, I remember, they provided us with a dish of salt-fish, and when this was removed to make room for the roast mutton, they addressed us in a short discourse, setting forth the merits of fasting, and ending by the remark that they left us free to take meat or not as we pleased, but that they hoped we should fast; “it would be good for our souls AND OUR FIGURES!”
Each morning we were bound publicly to repeat a text out of certain little books, called Daily Bread, left in our bedrooms, and always scanned in frantic haste while “doing-up” our hair at the glass, or gabbled aloud by one damsel so occupied while her room-fellow (there were never more than two in each bed-chamber) was splashing about behind the screen in her bath. Down, when the prayer-bell rang, both were obliged to hurry and breathlessly to await the chance of being called on first to repeat the text of the day, the penalty for oblivion being the loss of a “card.” Then came a chapter of the Bible, read verse by verse amongst us, and then our books were shut and a solemn question was asked. On one occasion I remember it was: “What have you just been reading, Miss S——?” Miss S—— (now a lady of high rank and fashion, whose small wits had been woolgathering) peeped surreptitiously into her Bible again, and then responded with just confidence, “The First Epistle, Ma’am, of General Peter.”
It is almost needless to add, in concluding these reminiscences, that the heterogeneous studies pursued in this helter-skelter fashion were of the smallest possible utility in later life; each acquirement being of the shallowest and most imperfect kind, and all real education worthy of the name having to be begun on our return home, after we had been pronounced “finished.” Meanwhile the strain on our mental powers of getting through daily, for six months at a time, this mass of ill-arranged and miscellaneous lessons, was extremely great and trying.
One droll reminiscence must not be forgotten. The pupils at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Roberts’ were all supposed to have obtained the fullest instruction in Science by attending a course of Nine Lectures delivered by a gentleman named Walker in a public room in Brighton. The course comprised one Lecture on Electricity, another on Galvanism, another on Optics, others I think, on Hydrostatics, Mechanics, and Pneumatics, and finally three, which gave me infinite satisfaction, on Astronomy.
If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge, mine at school certainly proved a notable failure. I was brought home (no girl could travel in those days alone) from Brighton by a coach called the Red Rover, which performed, as a species of miracle, in one day the journey to Bristol, from whence I embarked for Ireland. My convoy-brother naturally mounted the box, and left me to enjoy the interior all day by myself; and the reflections of those solitary hours of first emancipation remain with me as lively as if they had taken place yesterday. “What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I must know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”
This noble resolve lasted I fancy a few months, and then, depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly! I tried to supply first one deficiency and then another, till after a year or two, I began to educate myself in earnest. The reader need not be troubled with a long story. I spent four years in the study of History—constructing while I did so some Tables of Royal Successions on a plan of my own which enabled me to see at a glance the descent, succession and date of each reigning sovereign of every country, ancient and modern, possessing any History of which I could find a trace. These Tables I still have by me, and they certainly testify to considerable industry. Then the parson of our parish, who had been a tutor in Dublin College, came up three times a week for several years, and taught me a little Greek (enough to read the Gospels and to stumble through Plato’s Krito), and rather more geometry, to which science I took an immense fancy, and in which he carried me over Euclid and Conic Sections, and through two most delightful books of Archimedes’ spherics. I tried Algebra, but had as much disinclination for that form of mental labour as I had enjoyment in the reasoning required by Geometry. My tutor told me he was able to teach me in one lesson as many propositions as he habitually taught the undergraduates of Dublin College in two. I have ever since strongly recommended this study to women as specially fitted to counteract our habits of hasty judgment and slovenly statement, and to impress upon us the nature of real demonstration.