work could give him no assistance, nor can the impulse to what he afterwards accomplished as a pioneer in educational theory be looked for in these college days.

After receiving the amount of academic distinction appropriate to one who worked seriously at a subject which failed entirely to excite his interest, Quick emerged from Cambridge, and, like multitudes of other graduates, took holy orders. A half century ago almost every one who had no taste for the medical or legal professions, unless he were strongly anti-religious, did exactly what Robert Hebert Quick did. As his biographer points out, no one could pretend that his motives for undertaking ministerial work were due to any such call as prompted men like Pusey and Newman to "see in the clerical profession the one and only worthy pursuit in life.”

It would not be necessary to make an apologetic comparison of this nature had not ungenerous criticism questioned Quick's sincerity in selecting his career. He was comfortably off. His nature was twisted in no direction by unworthy ambition. His attitude toward religious matters is constantly revealed in his journals, and nothing could be freer from cant. His nature was deeply impressed by the reality of spiritual things. Simply because his temperament did not fit him, or rather because he fancied it did not fit him, for the work of a parish priest is no ground for casting reflections on his motives for accepting ordination in the Church of England. As a schoolmaster he may be said also to have failed. But no one would think on that account of denying his devotion to the cause of education.

After his ordination he became a curate without stipend in an East End parish. It is characteristic that his good nature and sympathy should have caused him at the very start to work among the poor. It is equally characteristic that he soon felt impelled to give up parish work for an educational career. From what is reported by those associated with him he was by no means a failure. There was much in his nature which admirably fitted him for just this type of clerical duty. But he already evinced that impatience of results

which produced that unstableness, so mysterious to his friends, which crops out time and time again in his after life. His lack of self-confidence was coupled with a strange miscalculation of the "vis inertia" in human nature. So, looking on educational work as offering a relief from the difficulties of an active life, with its soul-disturbing problems, he turned to teaching.

His first experience hardly convinced him that his choice was a wise one. He had left his London parish to become mathematical master in a school at Guildford, because he seemed to himself to be "doing no good there, and getting very idle." Idleness was certainly not to plague him in his new situation, but before long he had thoughts of seeking another curacy. He complained of monotony and routine, and soon shook off the traces, calculating that the sum total of benefit he derived was a better understanding of the character of boys. "My intercourse," he tells us, “on the whole, raised them in my estimation, and increased my liking for them."

He also learned to have a supreme contempt for common educational methods. He embarked on his teaching adventure with something of the reformer's spirit; but, brought into contact with human nature in its undeveloped state, he was all the more convinced that what he was doing as a fixture in the machinery of a school was partly ineffectual and partly harmful. In fact he was hardly built in the way to command success either as a subordinate or as a principal in a school. Apart from his disappointment at seeing no chance for applying his views on educational reform, what can be said of a prospective educator of youth who had so little of the infallible dictator in him as to say in speaking of juvenile morality: "Lying, indeed, did come under my notice, but so, also, did many instances of truthfulness when truth was inconvenient and dangerous."

Quick had often visited the Continent before, but now apparently he went there with the serious purpose of learning something of secondary education in France and Germany. He was a keen observer of what fell in his way. His criti

cisms of Matthew Arnold's well-known writings on the school systems of the Continent indicate that he penetrated beneath the surface of pedagogical literature and watched as a sympathetic but discriminating observer the actual working of these school systems. Of the years which fall between his temporary retirement from teaching and his return to it again we are given very little information in the fragments from the journal. But undoubtedly in the five years from 1860 on he was laying the foundation for his work on Educational Reformers which appeared in the early seventies. What he read and observed during this period did not tend to make him accept English educational methods in any less critical mind than in the few months of his novitiate. More definite and better-informed convictions seemed to have encouraged him, however, to make another trial. Probably he now felt that he could not only criticise but offer some positive programme of reform.

The latter part of 1867 found him assistant master at Cranleigh School. He soon exchanged this post for what seemed a better place at Hurstpierpoint. Things went smoothly for a time, but he speedily became conscious of the deadening effect of scholastic work in a small isolated community. "The thoughts and interests of the masters were hardly more extended than those of the boys, and in the dearth of other topics men devote their leisure to making elaborate studies of each other's defects." A misunderstanding between the head master and his staff, in which Quick became involved, naturally made his sensitive nature all the more open to the trying side of school routine.

Whatever may have been his relations to his superior or to his fellow-masters it is certain that he endeared himself to his students, one of whom contributes some delightful reminiscences: "It seems to me that everybody loved him and valued his good opinion, and that nobody could have dreamed of deliberately vexing him"-"more than twenty years ago and yet the picture is scarcely blurred: the cheery voice, the kind, eager face, the long growth of red beard, even the white flannels and the gray shirt."

We can hardly wonder that he entered with the fullest sympathy into the human side of school life when we read of his performing a flogging experiment on himself in order to be able to judge of the effects of this kind of punishment. "I found the pain I gave myself far more than I expected; and as I had treated myself indulgently, I feared I had often given a far more severe punishment than I had intended. My practice, therefore, for the future was much modified by the single flagellation. I wish we could more often put ourselves in the place of our pupils, and so learn or suffer what we require of them.”

It did not take long to convince him that his period of usefulness at Hurstpierpont was over. He left after a stay of three months-certainly a ridiculously short time either to test his own success or the efficiency of the school. The next year was a fruitful one, for it saw the publication of "Educational Reformers." We have already spoken of the continental experience which gave the impulse to its production. "I have found," he writes, "that in the history of education not only good books but all books are in German or some other foreign language." His own work was to serve as a kind of bait to induce English schoolmasters to learn something of foreign models by opening up a new vista of educational methods. The book was by no means theoretical, and reflected the open-mindedness of its author, who reduced himself to the role of interpreting Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi. Like Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," the book found a most appreciative public among transAtlantic English-speaking people, while Quick experienced the prophet's fate in his own country. As a business venture it was a complete failure, but Quick met this misfortune with composure. Later he was gratified to find its popularity on the increase at home, and he supplied the demand there with customary disregard for his material interests by importing the pirated American edition and disposing of it at cost price. But "Educational Reformers" brought him at least into public notice. Early in 1869 he received an appointment to a mastership in modern languages at Harrow,

being surprised and flattered to be invited to the place where he himself had been trained and where his old schoolfellow, Butler, was now head master. These associations, and the contrast to the small schools where he had previously worked, all contributed to make him feel that he was about to get into an atmosphere where he could do effectual work. All looked roseate at the outset. "Yesterday the sight of the whole school assembled in the Speech Room was to me not only pleasurable but something more too."

But nearer acquaintance with his work and his surroundings eliminated the effect of these pleasurable impressions. He had already by taste and by study acquired a strong distrust of English educational methods, and it is strange that he ever fancied he could be satisfied to work in a great public school, the very incarnation of the principles he criticised. His journals speak constantly of headaches. They may have been rather the effect than the cause of the mental depression under which he labored during the four years of his connection with Harrow.

It seems plain that he overworked himself. Here is the schedule of his day: "Down at 6; worked at Prendergast and French construing till school at 7:30; breakfast, 9:15 to 9:45; then maps, exercises, etc., till 12 o'clock; school; from 1:45 to 3, French construing and compose German exercise; from 3 to 4:30, in school; 4:30 to 5:30, looking over exercises; 5:30 to 6:30, Cæsar lesson; 8 to 10:30, looking over German exercises."

This is certainly an appalling record. "No wonder," he exclaims, "I am like a line turning a wheel in a mine." The fact is he was over-conscientious and was no economizer of time. He still believed in teaching. But those about him he regarded as "exactors of work" and not teachers. The world of the masters and the world of the boys were far apart. Neither understood the other. A great public school only presented him with the old problems on a larger scale, associated with a dead mass of conventionalism which stood in the way of improvement. His sole satisfaction was the consciousness that he had a "fair hold on boys," and his