;

lastic dress, as torn and shabby as possible, in order to revenge themselves on the rector for his impositions. In order to keep a course, attendance twice a day on the professor is requisite. By voluntary absence of fifteen days, it is lost but if the absence has been occasioned by illness, the student is allowed to compensate for it, by remaining at the university during the cursillo,' or short supplementary course after the general one is closed.

There are diocesan seminaries, in which, as we have observed, a student may attend courses of philosophical lectures, and the statutes of which require that every student should communicate once a month in the chapel of the seminary; if he is absent, even on one occasion only, he loses his course, whatever progress he may have made in other respects, as a student. In the universities established in small cities, the rector, with his alguacils, performs his rounds every night through the habitations of the students, as a patrol visits the gates in a fortified town, in order to see whether the youths are properly employed in their chambers; Sundays and Thursdays are exempted from this surveillance, and these evenings the students may go into society, (la Tertulia,) or to the ronda, or may perform a serenade, to as late an hour as nine in the evening. Except at this time, he is punished, if he is found in the street playing his guitar, an instrument inseparable from the Spanish student.

The professors in general take very little pains to ascertain the progress of their pupils. If the student has attended the class regularly night and morning, they deliver him a certificate of having kept his course, without further examination. As soon as he has attended a certain number of courses, he presents himself for a degree, the examination for which is in general merely formal; and thus it often happens that he sallies forth as ignorant as a clown. In the superior universities, it is only in the case of candidates for the degree of doctor, and those for the degree of bachelor when there is a dispensation of the fourth year of attendance, that an examination of the slightest rigour is enforced. In the great cities, where it is impossible to exercise any supervision over the students at their own houses, they are without any superintendence at all, and work just as little, or as much as they please. The theological students, however, are in the habit of forming themselves into academies, where, establishing laws and conventional punishments for disobedience, they exert their talents out of class hours, under the direction of a president of their own choice. The medical students occasionally do the same: but the students in jurisprudence never

for this simple reason, that the others are in the habit of doing it; there being nothing more fierce than the little rivalities between the students of the different faculties.' The students in jurisprudence, for the most part, belong to good families; and as they are independent, they regard those of the other faculties' with a sort of disdain; especially the theologians, among whom there are a great number who are servants of canons, and monks, or even of old ladies. They are frequently seen carrying a basket of provisions for the kitchens of their masters or mistresses, following them at night with a lantern, or acting as companions to the young gentlemen (señoritos) of the house when they are sent to school, to mass, or to take an airing. Their services at the end of some years, are rewarded by some trifling ecclesiastical preferment in a village, or cathedral, which the master has in his own gift, or can obtain through his influence. Occasionally, priests are seen to emerge from this rank, who render themselves notorious by their talents as curés. But there is another class still more abject; these are the students, who live upon the soup and charity which is dispensed every day at the gate of certain convents. These unfortunate beings have no other property than their class-book, and their wretched gown, and many of them no other lodging than the peristyle of some church. Nevertheless they are seen regularly attending the classes, keeping their courses, receiving degrees, aspiring after academical, and other ecclesiastical comforts, and not unfrequently carrying them by their merit and talents, though destitute of any other recommendation. Many of them, not to say the greater part, quit the university town at the end of the annual course, and wander about all the summer, in bands of four or six, provided with guitars, singing student songs, (coplas estudiantinas,) and begging alms. This they call among themselves, andar à la tuna,' vagabondizing; and so great are the temptations which this mode of life holds out to all classes of the students, that many of them who belong to respectable families consider it a refinement of gentility to join these bands, and take part in the tuna.’ These manners have given a character quite peculiar to the Spanish student; they make him one of the most popular characters in the nation, and the most capable of furnishing tricks and adventures for the entertainment of society. This induced Cervantes to say of the innkeeper, who conferred on Don Quixote the order of knighthood, that he was mas maleante que estudiante ó page-a greater roué than a stu

dent or a page.

EDUCATION IN IRELAND.

6

OUR readers have been apprised that a great change has taken place in the nature of the encouragement afforded by the British government to the education of the people of Ireland*. It has been determined, as we learn from Mr. Stanley's letter to the Duke of Leinster, to constitute a board for the superintendence of a system of national education in Ireland ;' and a sum of money has been voted by Parliament for an experiment of the probable success of the proposed system." The experiment now for the first time to be made, is not whether it would be right or expedient for the Parliament of the United Kingdom to apply the public money to the advancement of Irish education-that has already been done to a large extent; but whether that money should be distributed by some responsible authority, for the universal good of the people of Ireland, without reference to distinction of religious opinions, and, therefore, without the suspicion of making education another name for proselytism. To understand the exact nature of this experiment, and to form any satisfactory conclusions as to its probable success, it will be necessary to examine in what manner the duty of educating the Irish people has been discharged, up to the time when this great change is proposed by the British government. The materials for this inquiry are ample. A commission was appointed under legislative authority, in 1806, 'for the purpose of inquiring into the state and condition of schools in Ireland.' The commissioners thus chosen issued fourteen reports, the last and most important of which appeared in 1812. A second commission was appointed in 1824, to inquire into the nature and extent of the instruction afforded by the several institutions in Ireland, established for the purpose of education, and maintained either wholly, or in part, from the public funds; to inquire also into the state of the diocesan and district schools in Ireland, and the nature of the instruction there given; to ascertain whether any, and what regulations may be fit to be established with respect to the parochial schools in Ireland, and to report as to the measures which can be adopted for extending generally to all classes of the people of Ireland, the benefits of education.' These important subjects of inquiry were gone into with great diligence; and up to June, 1827, when the commission terminated its labours, nine reports were drawn up, of which the most important and extensive is the first. In 1828, a select committee of the

*See Quarterly Journal of Education, No. V. p. 189.

House of Commons was appointed to examine the reports of both commissions; and upon the recommendations of this committee, the measure now adopted by government has been founded. A great deal of valuable information is also contained in the three reports of evidence on 'The State of the Poor in Ireland,' taken before the committee of which Mr. Spring Rice was chairman, in 1830. It will be our duty to analyse the various information contained in these documents, so as to afford an historical view of the education of the Irish people, before we proceed to offer an opinion as to the encouragements and the difficulties which belong to the experiment now to be made, of establishing a system of education, from which,' to use the words of the second commission of inquiry, suspicion should be banished, and the causes of distrust and jealousy should be effectually removed; and under which the children may imbibe similar ideas, and form congenial habits, tending to diminish, not to increase, that distinctness of feeling now too prevalent.'

I.-Parochial Schools.

In the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII., before the Roman Catholic had ceased to be the established religion in Ireland, a statute was passed, entitled, An Act for the English Order, Habit, and Language.' The object of this statute was in accordance with the policy of all conquerors, to eradicate, if possible, the peculiar customs of the conquered people; it attempted, however, to do this, not according to the general spirit of conquest, but by the advancement of civilization. By this act the Irish habit and apparel, and the Irish form of wearing the hair, were directed to be abolished, and the ecclesiastical authorities were called upon to administer an oath to every person receiving spiritual promotion, that he would teach the English tongue to all in his cure,—that he would bid the beads in the English tongue,' and further, that he should keep, or cause to be kept, within the place, territory, or parish, where he should have rule, benefice, or promotion, a school to learn English, if any of the children of the parish should come to him to learn the same, taking for the keeping of the same school such convenient stipend or salary as in the said land was accustomally used to be taken.' The object of this statute was much more creditable to the wisdom and humanity of the English rulers than by far the greater number of the subsequent enactments by which the good government of Ireland was sought to be advanced. But its enactments have been utterly disregarded, except in forms; and its leading principle, that a certain

direction and order be had, that all we, his majesty's subjects, should the better know God, and do that thing that might in time be and redound to our wealth, quiet, and commodity,' has been superseded by a system of repeated efforts, even up to our own day, to conduct the education of the people of Ireland upon a principle of exclusion, which, instead of leading them the better to know God in love and charity, has produced hatred and malice; instead of wealth, has produced poverty; instead of quiet, has produced anarchy; instead of commodity (convenience), has produced embarrassments which appear almost hopeless of cure, even to the most ardent and most benevolent. And yet to this hour the statute of Henry is in force, having been confirmed by an act of the 7th William III. (which we shall presently mention), and every clergyman accordingly is still required by law to take an oath on induction in the following terms:-' I do solemnly swear, that I will teach, or cause to be taught, an English school within the vicarage or rectory of, as the law in that case requires.' We cannot doubt that the conscientious clergyman must feel that the general neglect of this duty is a crime and a reproach; and that the custom which has universally prevailed for the incumbent of parishes, in which schools are kept, to allow the schoolmaster forty shillings per annum as his salary*,' does not discharge the obligation imposed by the statute, to promote the instruction of rude and ignorant people to the knowledge of Almighty God.' The labour, no doubt, of conducting these schools was, in some degree, to be paid for by such convenient stipend as in Ireland was accustomally used to be taken. It appears, however, that this charge at the schools which were established, was fixed at a sum which was anything but convenient ;' for in a petition of the clergy to George II. in 1731, for the incorporation of a society for the support and maintenance of schools, wherein the children of the poor might be taught gratis,' it was stated that the richer Papists refused to send their children to the parochial schools, and the poorer were unable to pay the accustomed salary as the law directed. From this admission we may form a pretty accurate notion of the state of education in Ireland exactly a century ago. By the act of 7 William III., it was made penal to receive any other than a Protestant education; and the ninth section of this statute enacted, that no person of the Popish religion should publicly teach a school under a penalty of twenty pounds and three months' imprisonment.

* Report of the Commissioners of the Board of Education, Nov. 2, 1810.