Constitutions" ordain that "the scholars must not play outside the
college, and if they meet any one, they should lower their voices." A
rule of recent introduction is that in this warm weather they must all
lie down to sleep for two hours after the midday meal; it may suit the
managers, but the boys consider it a great hardship and would prefer
being allowed to play. Altogether, whatever the intellectual results may
be, the moral tendency of such an upbringing is damaging to the spirit
of youth and must make for precocious frivolity and brutality. But the
pedagogues of Italy are like her legislators: theorists. They close
their eyes to the cardinal principles of all education--that the waste
products and toxins of the imagination are best eliminated by motor
activities, and that the immature stage of human development, far from
being artificially shortened, should be prolonged by every possible
means. . If the internal arrangement of this institution is not all it
might be as regards the healthy development of youth, the situation of
the college resembles the venerable structures of Oxford in that it is
too good, far too good, for mere youngsters. This building, in its
seclusion from the world, its pastoral surroundings and soul-inspiring
panorama, is an abode not for boys but for philosophers; a place to fill
with a wave of deep content the sage who has outgrown earthly ambitions.
Your eye embraces the snow-clad heights of Dolcedorme and the Ionian
Sea, wandering over forests, and villages, and rivers, and long reaches
of fertile country; but it is not the variety of the scene, nor yet the
historical memories of old Sybaris which kindle the imagination so much
as the spacious amplitude of the whole prospect. In England we think
something of a view of ten miles. Conceive, here, a grandiose valley
wider than from Dover to Calais, filled with an atmosphere of such
impeccable clarity that there are moments when one thinks to see every
stone and every bush on the mountains yonder, thirty miles distant. And
the cloud-effects, towards sunset, are such as would inspire the brush