tute. When our Hon. Secretary was quite sure that the machine could be run without danger, he retired. A month later the institute fell to pieces, for reasons too long to be detailed. Again we started, this time with a pleasant little hall; we held lectures; we collected a new library; we began with the best intentions; the people were left together to themselves: in three months the new institute followed the old, Had the original Secretary been able to remain, that institute would now, I believe, be a center of light and leading for the population of Hoxton.

Let us now take one step upwards. We find ourselves on the level for which a great number of institutions are running; it is a level raised a good deal above those rough lads' clubs; a level where there is no rough-and-tumble, no mutiny, no fighting. It is the level for which Toynbee Hall chiefly exists. Toynbee Hall, the first of all such institutions, and still incomparably the best; Toynbee Hall, whose lectures are as good as those of the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street; whose Easter exhibition of pictures is as fine as the old masters at the Royal Academy; whose workers are a splendid company of young university men; whose founder is a clergyman with a talent for administration which has enabled him to create this delightful place, and an originality of thought and language which after his five and thirty years of splendid work has left him still only Vicar of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, and Canon of Bristol, his native city. All kinds of commonplace persons have been promoted to Bishoprics and Deaneries; Canon Barnett, passed over, remains among his own people. Better for the people? I am not so sure. It would, I think, be better for the people if they saw this noble Christian life recognized by the highest distinctions which the Church has to offer. It is not that any such distinction would distinguish this man, but it would distinguish the Church, and it would help the people to believe in the Church which this man has so long

THE REV. CANON SHUTTLEWORTH

advocated, with the reward that he his been passed over in silence and contempt. With Toynbee Hall may be ranked the various Polytechnics in London, the father of which is the institute in Regent Street, founded by Mr. Quentin Hogg. These Polytechnics are all alike; they give instruction in the evening to lads between fifteen and twenty or upwards--the age varying; they also have. for the most part, a day-school in technical work. The Polytechnics teach everything as well as it can be taught; I mean that they have all the appliances for teaching, together with teachers as good as could be got at any university. They are more than schools, however; they contain within themselves clubs of every description, athletic, literary, social. Let us, for instance, consider the People's Palace, which is far more than a Poly technic. It contains a day school of boys in technical work, and evening classes where everything practical is taught. Here are a debating society, a literary society, a sketching club, a ramblers' club, a harriers' club, a football club, a swimming club, a gymnastic club, orchestral and singing clubs, a choral society, besides art schools, engineering schools, mathematical schools, schools for photography, shorthand, French, chemistry and physics, and everything else that you please. The place every evening con tains thousands of students besides those who come for the concerts, for the library. for the winter garden, for the social evenings and dances of the girls.

What is to be the end of these schools? What will become of the "Poly" boys? It is hard to say; they are having as

good an education as many a lad destined to eminence in art, science, and literature. What will they do with this great and wonderful acquisition? It is difficult to find an answer. I have my own view. I find many of them already eager to leave the industrial life and to plunge int> journalism. It is said that the pay of journalists is decreasing rapidly on account of this invasion. I do not believe that they will stop at journalism; they will demand the throwing open of all the pro fessions to enter which now costs from a thousand to two thousand pounds-by passing examinations. This, however, will not happen just yet. It is sufficient to note that at the present moment London lads by tens of thousands are receiving as good an education as the average public school boy.

Of girls' clubs I have already spoken; they vary in social importance with the standing of the girls; for instance, Miss Maude Stanley's girls, in Soho, are gentlewomen compared with those of a Whitechapel club. For girls, also, of the better sort there are boardinghouses, where they can live with great cheapness -too great, considering that it enables them to take lower pay than would be offered them were things dearer.

There are, next, which must not be overlooked, a few institutes where special classes are looked after. Thus the Rev. Professor Shuttleworth, Rector of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in the city, has founded a club for the use of the respectable young men and girls who are clerks and accountants, shorthand writers post-office and telegraph employees, and the like. It is a charming place, in the very heart of the city, looking out at the back on a disused burial-ground, converted into a little garden. This club is, frankly, a place of social intercourse, culture, and reac

tion. They hold smoking co dramatic representations: dances; in the summer they h and lawn-tennis. And here, other clubs of the kind, the take their glass of bitter or the Scotch," and, so far, withou chief.

My limits are over-passed. scious of omissions by the hu then my readers do not wish logue.

For instance, I have about the men chiefly known in these movements; I have sa about the free libraries now sp in all directions. The influe libraries will be educational bling, or the reverse, according in which they are used. M books in demand are fiction. be the last person to make an this subject, because I am qu that there is no more potent modern education than moder its best, and no more potent evil than modern fiction at its

To conclude endeavored to taking the exam parish only, the goes on in al London parishmore thoroughly less. You have

in a well-work there is not a ho character is not the clergy. You how volunteers ranks of the working in obs solutely unknow siring no notori reward. That i the workers, at not? You hav boys by tens of

in the evening
taught discipline
restraint and a
order by all the
you have seen t
Houses for th
and the criminal
cue Homes for t

What, you wi
to be the end of

P

spread for them everywhere. As for the slums and tenement lodgers and the rough lads and the factory girls, there is nothing to do but to work on, and to keep working on, and never to lose hope whatever happens, and never to lose faith in the human heart, which may now be desperately wicked, but is not so bad as to be beyond the reach of the strong arm and the patient brain.

LUTARCH has probably been more widely read than any other writer who used the Greek language; and he has had the unusual fortune to be read with equal interest by men and boys. Women have, as a rule, cared little for him; although it was a woman who paid the Lives the finest tribute they have ever received when she described them as "the pasture of great souls." That men and boys have cared for him greatly, and that women, as a class, have not been drawn to him, is due, no doubt, to the fact that Plutarch was concerned chiefly with the active side of life and only subordinately with those aspects of antique character and history which appeal to sentiment and the imagination. The sharp limitations of Plutarch's interest in affairs have given his studies, portraitures, and moralizations clear-cut precision and definiteness of outline.

As a recorder of men in action he

had no peer in the older literature, and he has had no superior among modern writers. With the speculative activities of antique life, with its spiritual affinities and its genius for artistic expression, he has only subordinate concern; with its courage, calmness, moderation, stoicism, resolute conscience in thought and in action, he is in most devout sympathy.

The first of biographers, he was also one of the first of moralists; for he was profoundly interested in thought as soon as thought passed into action and became character. In fact, character is the mas ter word in his vocabulary, as it is in Emerson's; and it is this fine note, heard with distinctness in the long series of Lives and essays, which has made him the companion and friend of men far apart in point of time and differing widely in taste and education.

Boys find the Lives fascinating because

Τ'

HE history of the kindergarten in America begins in 1859, when Miss Elizabeth Peabody, of Boston, became interested in Froebel's writings. Miss Peabody had participated in the great social, literary, religious, and philosophic movement somewhat vaguely described as New England Transcendentalism, and was peculiarly fitted both by natural endowment and experience to enter into the thought of Froebel. Her interest in his ideas grew and strengthened, and finally, in 1867, she went to Europe to study his educational principles and to visit the kindergartens in which those principles were put into practice. During her absence a genuine kindergarten was established in Boston through the efforts of her sister, Mrs. Mann. This kindergarten was conducted by Madame Matilda Kriege and her daughter, Miss Alma Kriege. Satisfied that the practical embodiment of Froebel's ideas was in competent hands, Miss Peabody upon her return to America in 1868 resolved to devote herself to the propagation of his principles by writing and lecturing. In her view (as her friend Miss Garland has recently reminded us) "kindergartning was not a craft, but a religion; not an avocation, but a vocation from on high;" and by steadily proclaiming and faithfully living this lofty ideal, she did much to fan the flame of consecrated endeavor without which the kindergarten, as Froebel conceived it, can have no actual embodiment. With this ideal Madame Kriege and her daughter were in full sympathy, and their devotion to it was proved by the efforts and sacrifices which laid the firm foundations of the kindergarten system in Boston.

Through the influence of Miss Peabody the first public kindergarten in America was opened in Boston in 1870. It was carried on successfully for several years, but was finally given up because the city was not ready to appropriate money for extending the system. A second public

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABO

After an object-lesson continu years the city of Boston was of the merit of the Froebellia and in 1888 the fourteen kin established by Mrs. Shaw wer by the Public School Board. Mrs. Shaw offered to the Bosto School the services of a teach dergarten theory and practice offer being accepted, she ch Laura Fisher to fill the pos 1895 Miss Fisher was made I the sixty-one Public Kinderg Boston, and to her insight ar largely due the exceptional me public work in that city. He the Superintendent of Public S

1895-96 has been recognized by leading educational journals as one of the most valuable contributions ever made to the literature of the kindergarten, and I cordially indorse the suggestion of one of its reviewers "that it should be printed and everywhere circulated, read, pondered, and inwardly digested."

In 1871-72 Miss Mary J. Garland studied with Madame Kriege. She had had long experience in different grades of school work, and for the eight years preceding her study of the kindergarten had been resident as one of the two head teachers at a large Church of England school in Montreal. In the fall of 1872 she opened a kindergarten and a normal class for young women who desired to become kindergartners. One of the members of this class was Miss R. J. Weston, who in 1873 became Miss Garland's associate, and for twenty-two years (until her death in 1895) labored with her unremittingly for the kindergarten cause. The work of Miss Garland and Miss Weston was of a threefold character, embracing a kindergarten, a school for older boys and girls, and (with the excep

MRS. E. W. BLATCHFORD

tion of a period of seven years, when the strain of the kindergarten and school was breaking them both down) a normal class for kindergartners. Believing that character, both noble and true, is the first requisite in one who is to attempt to form character, Miss Garland and Miss Weston accepted no students without personal acquaintance and a month of probation.

ite collection of kindergarten songs; Miss Sara E. Wiltse, known to all kindergartners through her stories, and to the general educational public through her contributions to the literature of child study; Miss Laliah B. Pingree, to whom allusion has already been made; and Miss Elizabeth Lombard, who was for some years associated with her in the direction of Mrs. Shaw's work.

In 1872 Miss Haines, of New York, decided to introduce the kindergarten into her school, and invited Miss Boelte, a German lady of high culture, to conduct the experiment. Miss Boelte had studied three years with Froebel's widow, and later had done most efficient work in England as assistant to Madame Ronge. She had also won a high reputation in Germany through a kindergarten which she established and conducted in Lübeck. About a year after her arrival in America she married Professor John Kraus and established an independent kindergarten and normal class. She has educated hundreds of intelligent young women for the kindergarten work, and through her pupils has made her influence widely felt, In conjunction with Professor Kraus she has written an excellent practical guide to the Froebel "Gifts and Occupations." Her normal work still continues, and she