see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it was
already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr.
Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,--
everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and
then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with
this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading
articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not
what will do us good. The very same faults,--the want of
sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right
reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an
Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also
hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which
would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the
faults, shows us this also just as truly.

[xii] It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr. Oscar
Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the
Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton,
because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may
well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a
boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little
boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great
value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and supply
of school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent
authority. Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he
and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public,
combine the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house;
that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother
of his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) engaged in
preparing little boys for competitive examinations, and that the