BOOKS.
ALMOND OF LORETTO.* Wao was Almond, and where and what was Loretto ? Patriotic and properly proud of her own heroes as Scotland is, potent and pervasive as is her influence throughout the Empire, it is doubtful how many could answer this question. The life of a schoolmaster, even of a successful Head-Master who impresses his 'personality powerfully and for good upon his pupils, is a singular mixture of domestic fame and public obscurity. It is this that makes schoolmastering so unselfish, so self- sacrificing a calling. It is like the greatest, the least famous of all works, the work of a mother. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of former pupils all over the world rise up privately, or at gatherings of "old boys," and call their whilom teacher blessed; but unless either he expresses himself in writing or speech in some memorable way, or his portrait is drawn by some specially skilful pen, he is soon forgotten, except as a name and a link in the swiftly fleeting generations.
Let it be said at once that in this case both the subject and the portraiture claim attention. "Almond of Loretto" was indeed an uncommon personality, a pioneer in his profession. He has not a little of the truly heroic about him, and Mr. Mackenzie has portrayed hint with taste and discrimination, with a loving and a loyal band, yet—what shows the truest love and loyalty—with frankness and fidelity. The result is a book which all who have the care of the young, whether boys or girls, would do well to peruse, and also a book which ought to appeal to a wide circler of general readers, more particularly in these days when so much is talked and written, often without experience, about the combination of physical and intellectual health, about the open-air regime and the simple life, about rational clothing and feeding, about combating the degeneracy of the race, and about the merits and defects from all these points of view of the public-school system. Moreover, through it all there breathes a manly, patriotic, scholarly, serious spirit which is in itself refreshing and invigorating. The "muscular Christianity" of "Tom" Hughes and Charles Kingsley was smiled and even laughed at. Yet looking back, it may be said that the social epoch which the movement heralded, and to some extent, at any rate, produced, was a virile and efficient one. The ideal, too, was neither ignoble nor ignorant. But it has needed repetition in a somewhat different form for a later generation. The "open-air boy" of to-day Almond may be said to have invented, at least in Scotland. For, oddly enough, Scotland, the land of sport, was in education, and,
" Almond of Loretto: being the Life and a Selection from the Letters of Hely Hutchinson Almond, Head-Master of Loretto School, 1862-1903. By Robert Jameson Mackenzie, late Rector of the Edinburgh Academy. London : A. Constable and Co. [12s. 6.d. net.]
indeed, as regards the ordinary habits of boys and young men, behind England from Almond's point of view when, in the early "sixties," he began his campaign.
Loretto at that time was little known. The name is one of those survivals from Roman Catholic times so picturesque in the midst of Presbyterian and Puritanical Scotland. The " Chappel of Laureit" had been in old days a place of pilgrim- age for King and Commons coming to pay their vows at the shrine of "Our Lady of Loretto," one saint, with many local names, the patroness, it may be remembered, of the ancient schools of Winchester and Eton. Loretto had become the site of a school under a certain Dr. Langhorne in 1829. Almond, who was distantly connected with this family, went there in 1857 as mathematical master; then, after some four years as second master at Merchiston, bought the school, and came back as "Head" in 1862. Then was the real birthday of Loretto. It is of importance that it was Almond's own school, where he could try untrammelled what experiments he liked. When he had the chance of becoming Warden of Glenalmond—a larger opportunity, it might have been thought, than Loretto—he declined because he did not want to be under a Governing Body, for he was, indeed, an innovator.
Hely Hutchinson Almond, as his name implies, was of English extraction, but had also, as he said, "vagrant Irish ancestors," sturdy fighters both in the field and in the Senate-house. He had been born in Glasgow, that mixing-vat of Highland and Lowland, Celt and Saxon, and received his early training at the College there. Thence the famed Snell Exhibition took him, as it has taken so many able students, to Oxford and Balliol. There be won a "First" in classics because Jowett said he couldn't, and a " First " in mathematics because Henry Smith said he wouldn't. But it was rowing in the Balliol Eight which did him more good, he said, than all the prizes and classes he ever won. Every one remembers Lord Beacons- field's famous description of the English country gentleman as spending his life entirely in the open air and never looking at a book. With the first part of this life Almond had much sympathy, but the whole did not exactly express his ideal. He did not himself at once realise or adopt all his full creed or practice. Loretto started, as schools often do, a little chaotically. But from the first great prominence was given to games and physical exercise. Gradually it grew in numbers, in achievement, and in fame. "However little persons of sedentary temper may like it, the British public," says Mr. Mackenzie, "is interested in athletic prowess." Loretto, like Clifton and Uppingham, commended itself first to the world in this way. Its successes were indeed striking. They cul- minated when, out of twelve Lorettonians at Oxford—never a large school, Loretto did not send many thither—eleven were "full Blues."
But in the earlier days the school was best known for what were regarded as its eccentricities. "The Loretto boy, coat- less, capless, may be met with anywhere in Scotland now," writes Mr. Mackenzie in a picturesque passage. "You may find him dangling from a rope on the sunny side of the Bass Rock, photographing or looking for eggs. You may meet him free-wheeling—red coat on handlebars—down the long slope that leads from Comrie to Loch Earn. You may observe him hauling at a scringe-net on the coast of Mull; or plying a fishing- rod or a geological hammer among the primeval hills and innumerable lochs of Sutherland. In all these situations he and his comfortable undress have long ceased to attract attention. The public has grown used to them, and for the very good reason that the public has adopted them." This is very true. Almond was in many ways a pioneer. The
wearing of flannel, the discarding of hats, sleeping with open windows, the use of periodical chest measurements as a test of physical development,—all these he invented and introduced at Loretto, and in these, other schools and the world generally have largely followed him. Wanganui School, one of the chief seminaries in New Zealand, definitely adopted Loretto ways, to Almond's great delight. There are some of his practices which still wait to be adopted. He was in favour of more sleep for boys, especially young boys. The hours of work were short, but this was because he believed in physical, not because he disbelieved in mental, culture. Like the Greeks, he put "health ", first of human possessions. It was natural that he should be attracted by things Greek. The education described so delightfully in the immortal
passage from the Clouds of Aristophanes, which consisted in wrestling and running races "with some modest mate, all in the sweet springtime when the plane is whispering to the lime," in the gardens of the Academy, those playing-fields of the Athenian boy, where Marathon, as they said, was won— and, for the rest, in learning to recite the old epic hymns, to sing, to dance, and to behave becomingly—this was indeed an education after Almond's own heart. This was very largely the education of Loretto. Only Almond later added science, in which he had a great belief, and a simple, manly Christianity. "I believe in Latin," he says, "as the best training subject, and in Greek literature as the inspirer of the nobler intel ectual qualities." "I have a great and increasing belief," he writes in another place, "in the value of scientific thought in education. But I think what has most to do with my prejudices is that the Greeks especially appear to me to have been so infinitely more rational in their habits of life than modern nations are." And again : "To have read through the Odyssey is an education in itself and gives a perpetual distaste for the vulgarity which swarms, upon the railway bookstalls. Will your French and German do this ? " If his school did not win many prizes or distinc- tions in the intellectual world, this was not because he was unintellectual. These ends are, as he points out, attained partly by specialisation, partly by the purchase of clever boys by means of what he detested,—" baby scholarships," as he called them. It was because he put other things first. Loretto was to be "a community visibly living according to the dictates of science or right reason.": "Rationality all round," in habits, in garb, in religion, this was his watchword. If Loretto remained small, he was content. Like Arnold, he did not think numbers of the first importance, and he never yielded a jot to any temptation to increase his own gains or glory. Spartan nactus es, hone =ma ! This might be called his self- adopted motto, since if he did not quote the words, he himself compared Loretto to Sparta, with no decorative build- ings, nothing to strike or charm the eye, yet the home and nurse, as he saw and was not ashamed to claim it, of a healthy and dominant, and even heroic, type. For the adorning he gave it was of a, genuinely Spartan character, the ornament of a manly and energetic spirit, well expressed in some fine lines by the school poet, Mr. Henry Johnstone, too long to quote here, but excellently well worth reading. It is characteristic that of other schools he preferred Eton, with its absence of formalism, its abundance of outdoor life, its old simple classical curriculum. But he thought Eton too luxurious. "nil tell you (cool of me)," he writes to an Eton master, "what I think the great defect of Eton. You allow any amount of hurtful self-indulgence."
It is obvious that the last thing that Almond wished to he was an ascetic. Yet he would have avowed, like St. Paul, whom he so much admired, that he kept his body in training lest he should heat the air. It is odd, but it is characteristic, that he should say : "Keble 'seams to me to take the right side in a more important contrOviersy than any theological one,—viz., the side of simple and Christian living against-fine linen and sumptuous living." And again : "Next to being where I am, I'd like to have been Warden of Keble. What a fight against all the demons of convention and preju- dice one would have had ! And fighting for an ideal is the great happiness of life." As it chanced, one of his earliest pupils and truest friends, to whom he wrote his last dying letter, was Bishop Mylne, one of the first Tutors of Keble.
It would be easy to multiply quotations, but to do justice to Almond the reader must go to the book itself, to his own letters, to the many traits and touches so happily brought together from a hundred sources and tends by Mr. Mackenzie. Almond was hicky in having as one Of his original pupil- friends Mr. Andrew Lang. The 'few pages in which that charming writer, with hit inlinitable. lightnets of hand, portrays Loretto and the "Head," as he knewliai—his cricket, his football, his love of Darwin, his strictures, in the intervals of salmon fishing, upon a certain "Higher Critic," Whom he playfully described as being "as hard to find °he's way about as the Muir of Rannoch in a fog "—are atSono.r' the most enter- taining. But the book is much More 'than exitertaining. Almond was something of a genius ; bold, original even to the verge of eccentricity, arbitrary, kindly, warm, he wan 4` man privately to be loved and adored, as in these pages he is, by his
friends and pupils ; publicly to be reckoned with and studied, and to deserve the admiration and thanks of all who care for the training of the young, or for the future of what he would have called our national "breed of men."
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