"QUEEN ELIZABETH'S ACADEMY."

WHEN Holofernes kept a grammar school in the days of Elizabeth, and the budding wits of the age played truant from it, many an hour no doubt was spent by these youths in a profitable idleness watching the able men of the parish muster, march, shoot, and drill as they exercised the arts of war on • those peaceful English greens.

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An extraordinarily entertaining sight it must have been, too, for every ablebodied man then alive, of whatever size, shape,

• class, habit of mind or of body, was liable to be called on to serve in defence of his country threatened by danger to creed and liberty. Nominally, indeed, the Militia service of

• Elizabeth's day was a voluntary one, for after due notice ; given by the curate, a recruiting party used to march through the'parish inviting all to serve. The Commission of Array ' issued in Henry "V.'s days against a feared invasion by the French imprisoned any one who refused to serve, and these sixteenth-century ringers were practically compulsory. The ' service was carefully arranged. Many and quaint are the reghlations about wages, apparel, carriage of arms, weapons, -and all the rest of it, as we read them in reprints of County

• Musters that stir the heart with their records of valour and ' devotion of homely Englishmen dead long since. All classes in 'the -country were called upon. Men of family were appointed to the more dangerous positions; they were to be - captains and halberdiers. In an earlier record there is a I' clause Whidi recommends that the captain of a village band

should be mounted on a steed that does -not go "beyond a Canterbury pace," lest the hearts of his untried followers should fail them, seeing their leader able to run away in a moment of danger and leave them behind. Yeomen and labourers took bills, pikes, bows, and guns,—that is, the culver and the arquebus. The big men were chosen to bear the stiff ashen pikes, fifteen to eighteen feet long,—these wore armour. The smaller men were gunners, and it seems that the national pastime of shooting with the longbow—which had been com- pulsory upon Englishmen for many generations—was falling a little out of fashion because of the newer arquebus, a clumsy weapon of short range, but so terrifying that at first the arquebusier received no quarter in battle, being regarded as a ruffian beyond the range of civilised warfare. When the able men of Elizabeth's day used to shoot—twice a month, and not on Sundays—at the butts, which were maintained at the cost of the parish, the best prize was for the arquebus and the next for the longbow. And the curate of each parish whose living was worth E20 or more was to be at charges for the arquebusiers or their wages, some grace of congruity apparently being recognised between explosives and the Church militant. The training • of "tyros and men unwarlike " belonged to corporals, of which there were four to a hundred men. There were " vintimers " and " decimers "—officers too—and there was a muster- master, who had charge of penalties for abuses and things lacking, and who had to arrange about the armour with which these bands were generally ill-supplied, to see that the mats were of red, scarlet, murrey, or tawny, "to make a gallant show," to make each man dismount and see whether he were properly buckled and arrayed, whether his "gascoes" were wide and loose, and his hose easy for marching and fighting,—that is, "not tight nor bolstered up." He had to effect exchanges if a little man were found wearing a big man's armour, Or a big man squeezed into a tight corselet or " pair of Almair rivets." Thus was each man throughout the kingdom pre- pared in his place to serve his country, and thus Shakespeare must have studied them on the green at Stratford-on-Avon, and beard Bates and Williams grumbling long before he was old enough to draw in Henry V. the moral that to grumble is the privilege of the free man, and does not interfere with a stout workaday patriotism.

Now, while national defence was being practised in English villages years before the Armada set -sail northwards, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, great-hearted gentleman and gallant sailor, was taking very much to heart the uselessness of a class that should have been of the first service to the realm. These were certain wards of the Crown and gentlemen's sons, who were not getting such education as fitted their own or the national honour, being unfit, he said, for anything but to holloa a hound or lure a hawk. And since, to Sir Humphrey's mind, that could not be called an education which did not plant first of all and firmly in the mind a love of country and a sense of national responsibility, be drew up a scheme which should, he thought, bring such honour on his race that "there shall be hereafter in effect no gentleman within the realm but shall be good for something, whereas now the most part of them are good for nothing." The Universities, he complained, were too narrow. They taught "no matters of action 'meet for present practice both of peace and warre." "For such," he goes on, "as govern Common weals ought rather to bend themselves to the practices thereof than to be tied to the bookish circumstances thereof," and the end to be attained by his scheme of educa- tion is the training of youths to be intelligent and effectual members of the "Common weal." He quotes the opinions of Plato and Lyeurgus to the effect that the State should interfere with the education of children, "since the public have more interest therein than their parents "; and it is just on this point that "Queen Elizabeth's Academy" furnishes suggestions for a need of our own day. The details of an educational scheme more than three hundred years old cannot be applied to modern needs. But the foundation of the whole thing is surely based where we to-day must base any theory of national education,—that is, on each individual's sense of his duties and responsibilities towards his own country. The liberal education suggested by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, with the exception of his complaint, that rich men's sons in the Universities," by taking up their scholarships and fellowships do disappoint the -poor of .their livings and advausements,"

differs in detail from the education of to-day, or at least that education provided for the "nobles and gentlemen" about whom be was so anxious. But it deserves a summary, because the point of it all is the training up of the youth of a nation to take an active part in the welfare and the defence of their country.

After recommending fluency in the use of the vulgar tongue, the "Academy" advises the study of the "civil policy" of other lands, with a practical application to the problems of home. The students are moreover to be taught "more wit and policy than school learning can deliver for the greatest school clerks are not always the wisest men " They are to study arithmetic and geometry, -which would bring in the practice of artillery and fortification. They are to

practise, under capable instruction, with the arquebus and with skirmishing and marching, to study astronomy, and navigation, the modelling of ships, map-drawing, perspective and mensuration. They must understand something of "simples," surgery, and medicine; civil law too, and divinity and common law; and there shall be also an instructor who shall "set down and teach exquisitely the office of a Justice of the Peace and Sheriff, not meddling with pleas and cunning points of the law, because "noblemen and gentle-

men should learn to have some judgment in these offices." They are to learn modern languages, fencing, music, to have, in short, an education in the true sense, that draws

• out all the capabilities of a man, and thus "this seely frozen "island shall be brought into such everlasting honour that all the nations of the world shall know and say when the face of an English gentleman appeareth that he is either a soldier, a -philosopher, or a gallant courtier." In a splendid compliment to his Sovereign, Sir Humphrey desired that the institution should be known as "Queen Elizabeth's Academy,"—" so your Majesty," said he, "being dead, shall make your sepulchre in the mouths of the living."

It was a scheme fitting a great mind in a great age when a new sense of responsibility was being called out to meet the new great needs of the time, and it was a scheme worthy the heroic temper of a man determined "always to live and die in this mind—that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear, or danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour, seeing death is inevitable and the fame of virtue -immortal." Now the point for us to remark is this. While Sir Humphrey Gilbert was theorising about an education which should fit young men of the upper classes for the service of the State, the State was actually putting part of his theory into practice, and bad come down by main force upon another class about whose education nobody then cared at all, and was fitting it by practical exercise for the service of the State. We have reversed things to-day. The State does not interfere with the education of gentlemen and all whom • the term includes, but she has taken in band the education of the class that produced such stout defenders in the days of Elizabeth. Yet she does not oblige them, as they were then obliged, to understand that the purpose of education is to serve the country. That means that we leave out the vital part of education in our State education. Taking the fact and theory of Elizabeth's day together, can we not evolve something to suit our own ? Sir Humphrey Gilbert thought an educa- tion useless which did not fit a youth for the service of the State. It is to-day ; although we are obliged to leave that part of a gentleman's education very much to public opinion. Butme have applied State control to the education of another class, and are we not wasting an opportunity unless we teach them, as Sir Humphrey Gilbert taught, "that if through pleasure or idleness we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth but the shame endnreth for ever " ?

Lofty expression of abstract sentiments does not usually make much impression on the plain man, especially when he has been a National school boy. He is concerned (as he should be) with a necessarily narrow and engrossing round of duties, and the idea of responsibility towards a remote abstraction known to him as the -State does not touch him

• very close. Neither does the pressure of public opinion bear hard on him in this respect. The way to impress it on him is • when he is young, so that he should learn patriotism as he learns " geography and the "three R's." Patriotism, like courage, is • largely a matter of habit, and is most trustworthy when it has ' become half mechanical. If the children and lads of our 'National schools were trained as the able men of Elizabeth's day—their forefathers—were trained, to some skill in national defence, would it not go far to plant in them that deep-rooted sense of personal responsibility in the national welfare which is the only solid foundation for a vast Empire ? For in the education of this class it is true to-day that "the public, have more interest therein than their parents." And since the State has interfered so far, should it not go farther and drive the ideal of State education deep into the minds of the State- educated, " always to live and die in this mind—that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear, or danger of death, shunneth his country's service and his own honour, seeing death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal" ? This is not the language of modern instruction in County Council schools ; but the principle might be adapted; because for the sake of the national well-being it is necessary to get it somehow into the national head.