The Faith of - a Headmaster Life and the Public Schools.
By Et. Rev. A. A. David. (Maclehose. 10s. 6d.) BESIDES being Headmaster . of . Clifton for four years, the Bishop of Liverpool spent nineteen years of his life at Rugby as Assistant Master and Headmaster. During all this time he seldom had leisure to think consecutively -and calmly about the system within which he was working. But since leaving Rugby in 1021 he has tried "gradually to see what it all came to, and after eleven years this is the result."
Dr. David has known the Public School world both long and intimately from the inside, and in this book at any rate he does not seriously attempt to look at it from the outside. His comments are therefore likely to interest Englishmen in general less than those particular Englishmen who have taught or been taught in a Public School themselves. Many who are quite outside the Public School systeni will be glad to see how its rigidities may be modified and its best qualities enhanced by an administrator as humane and generous as Dr. David. But those who wish to look at the system in its relation to the larger world will perhaps not get from this book all the help that they would have liked. Dr. David is an idealist, but he is not a visionary. He accepts the Public Schools, though he wants more made of them ; he does not envisage a society which will have got beyond them. This narrows the appeal of what he *rites, though increasing its interest for those within the charmed circle. It is probable that apart. from Dr. David:s. old pupils, school masters.,mor_ spective, practising and emeriti will be the chief readers of the book. They will be grateful for much that they find in it, and much for which they may not 'be grateful will do them good. They will be told of the dangers of the closed mind ; they will see that Englishmen can be (though they rarely are) taught to write English at school ; they will he made to feel the deadening effects of machine-made discipline in a House ; they will meet plain, practical and sympathetic utterances about sex troubles ; and in the passages concerning religion they will find not only deep feeling but also real knowledge of the human heart. Many of them will wish that they had had such a Chief to work for, and all of them will be glad to have made acquaintance through his book with so skilled' and so understanding a master of their art.
J. F. ROXBURGH. :
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