two miles from Haileybury: an evening stroll, almost insufficient for a good constitutional walk, will conduct the hardreading student to Amwell-the Amwell of Cowper, immortalized in his verse. The very highway on which his prince of roadsters, undying John Gilpin, must have ridden his famous race, forms the boundary of the well known Hailey Lane. Ware, the goal of his travels, is considerably less than "full ten miles off," and in the valley which forms the separation of the counties of Essex and Hertford, hallowed by that name so dear to every brother of the gentle craft, the Lea of Isaac Walton pursues its meandering course. This peculiarity cannot have escaped the observation of any who have ever had the opportunity of visiting either of our Universities, and who are acquainted with the character of Oxfordshire, or the wide, dull, flats, extending round Cambridge. Most of our public schools have been in like manner but little favoured by the natural advantages of site, although the taste and liberality of their founders may have built the edifices themselves in a style severe and dignified. In expanse of parklike ground, and clusters of noble trees, they have the advantage over Haileybury, but in rustic scenery the latter place may fairly bear away the palm. The Etonian, it is true, may well be proud of the distant view of his Windsor, or of the swiftly running stream of his Thames, and may adore in his Shooting fields' the shades of many noble characters as holy as his Henry's. The Rugboan may view with admiration the magnificent elm trees which overlook the "school close," or the leafy group which centres on the gentle ascent of "the Island." The Wykehamist may extol the distant view of the grey College as seen from the chalk downs of Hants, and the Harrovian look from Harrow Hill over a wide extent of plain till he almost descries the rival towers of Eton in the distance;-but when once we quit the immediate ground on which any one of these places stands, poetry and its attendant train vanish at once from our thought. Rugby with the "trim hedge rows" of Warwickshire the dullest of our midland counties'-unvaried by scarce a single small spinney: Harrow with its equally uninteresting succession of plain and field: Winchester with its hot and glaring table land, where hardly a tree relieves the tired eye: even Eton, though more favoured by the hand of nature-cannot hope to supply the pleasing effects produced by a ramble through Herts. For a county so near London we know of none so captivating, and many old Haileybury men, we are sure, must recall with pleasure endless strolls through the glades of Lord Salisbury's woods, or the no less pleasing walk towards the splendid park of Pansanger.

It was amidst such scenery that, at a period of more than thirty years ago, were laid broad and deep' the foundations of the East India College. Those who, for that period, have been amongst the ruling influences of India, there received all their primary training; and, with but a few exceptions, the Civil Service of India have issued forth from its walls. Those only whose almost antediluvian existence carries them back to a period when Haileybury was not, and those-some seventy or eighty in number-who passed at the India house when civilians were in great request, can have no immediate personal sympathy with our subject; but the place where their relations or friends, or at any rate where their fellow workers received their education, cannot be supposed to be totally devoid of interest; and it is the attention of the Civil Service, indeed of every friend to India, whatever be his profession, which we would endeavour to excite whilst treating of the system, with its merits and demerits, therein pursued. The appointments to Haileybury, like other Indian ones, are vested uncontrollably in the hands of the Directors, of whom each member has generally two a year to dispose of, and on some occasions even more. The nominee is referred to the India house examiners in order that his qualifications may be tested previous to entrance. Of the test he undergoes there, we may have to speak anon; if rejected on trial he is thrown back for another period of six months, if pronounced duly qualified he enters college the very next term. We would wish that those of our Readers who spent many days at Haileybury would return with us and spend one more day in its precincts, that those who are mainly ignorant of the internal working of the institution would take one glance at its component elements at the motley crew who form the brotherhood of the college. We will take the opening day of term, the fourteenth of September or the twenty-third of January, and what a varied crowd shall we there see assembled! It is true that the beginning of an Oxford or Cambridge term collects almost every species of youth, from the head of the acknowledged aristocracy of a public school to the unobtrusive freshman just emancipated from the thrall of a private tutor, and amalgamates the somewhat incongruous materials into one consistent republic; but of these many have been looking forward to the universities as that which shall put the coping stone on the education of their earlier years they have foreseen this termination for a long time. previous, and in most cases the change is only from a smaller to a greater world,-one composed of nearly similar materials, but cast in a deeper and more comprehensive mould. The men from public schools meet there the friends of their early school

days, they again associate with their cotemporaries, or find themselves on an equality with those who had been the heroes and giants of a preceding generation. The less prominent characters, who have nevertheless been looking forward to this situation for some time back, are soon borne along by the common stream, and mingle insensibly with the great mass: all have gone to the university in order to attain the passport to real life, and to be stamped with that which shall give them currency in whatever profession they choose. Not so with the world of Haileybury. The golden shower of the Directors' patronage often enriches places where it is least expected, and a large variety of characters, whose early career was far removed from the thought of India, are there brought together under one denomination. Look in at Haileybury on the first day of term, and trace the previous fortunes of the freshmen there assembled. The man of some six or eight terms spent at Oxford or Cambridge, who has evaded the Proctor's vigilance in the contests between gown and town, or daringly driven a tandem down the forbidden precints of Trumpington, who could boast that he had passed through the ordeal of the "little go," and was looking forward to high honors at the finale of his degree: the alumnus of the public school, fresh from his early triumphs at Eton or Rugby; the less marked individual from the private academy; the student who has only succeeded in passing at the India house, by the continued exertions of the regular Haileybury "crammer;" the incipient soldier transferred from the warlike atmosphere of Sandhurst, or Addiscombe, or Woolwich, to exchange the sword and shield for the pen and the toga; the midshipman quitting the lee side of the quarterdeck for the more congenial, though less romantic, regions of civilized life; the Highland youth blooming as the very heather of his native hills, and betraying by his silvery accents the land of his birth-all these, varying in age from the schoolboy of sixteen to the full grown citizen of twenty-one, thrown promiscuously into one and the same term, are the elements from which must be drawn the future utility not only of the college itself, but of the executive government of the three presidencies of India. We have drawn attention to this feature of Haileybury life, because it forms one of the most fertile sources of abuse, and is the door at which most of the anomalies which prevail there, can be laid with the greatest confidence. With materials as heterogeneous as the above, with a considerable degree of freedom and unrestraint, and with no self-denial imposed, with all the sources of evil which prevail in a large public school— the same opposition to authority, the same proneness to follow

the lowered standard of expediency established by the majority, with the outward and visible forms and regulations of a college, and with none of its internal dignity or self-respect on the part of its members, Haileybury was expected to present the same goodly appearance as Trinity, or Balliol, or Christchurch, and it fell far short of the reality of Rugby or Eton, or Winchester. Fatally, indeed, were the expectations formed of Haileybury disappointed. For years the East India College carried on its surface an unhappy prestige of notoriety: the eyes of the world only marked it on the occasion of some internal revolution, fraught with ruin to the perpetrators. Men were unacquainted with the temptations to which the embryo civilian was there exposed, and knew it but as a place of bad repute, whose chief characteristics were extreme laxity of morals, and periodical volcanic eruptions. Of the apologies which might be made for the delinquents, of the defects co-eval with the establishment of the institution, and of those which grew out of its progressive structure, many even of those whose sons educated within its walls, remained entirely ignorant. For years it dragged on a tedious existence, now threatened with dissolution, now evading publicity by its unobtrusive character, but always unknown, or at least misunderstood; and even with the brightening prospect of better days, we feel that Haileybury, as the officina of the Civil Service of India-with facts and realities instead of doubts and suppositions, requires to be laid bare before the eye of the public. We intend reviewing both the course of education there pursued, and also the whole internal economy of the college. And first, the line of study, extending over a period of two years, must claim our attention; we shall then see how far that training may be expected to fit the student for the stage on which he is to appear.

were

Many may not be aware, that, after a fluctuation of opinions regarding the time which should be spent at Haileybury, it was ultimately decided that four terms, or a space of two years, should alone entitle a student to go forth from its walls. The wisdom of such a decision is apparent at a glance. Under the previous law, by which a certain high standard of proficiency obtained in two terms or one year, emancipated a student from thraldom, Haileybury was perpetually being denuded of all the hard working and steady men, who might reasonably be expected to effect some change for the better in public opinion; and those left behind were, as might be conceived, the idle, the thoughtless, and the refractory. At the same time the course of study underwent modification, and at present it stands somewhat as follows. In his first term the student continues his early studies

in mathematics and classics, the former extending over six books of Euclid, and the latter embracing some congenial and not unfamiliar subject taken from the range of Roman and Grecian literature. An English theme, for the composing in his own language, which is rightly deemed an essential qualification for a future public servant, is also imposed as a weekly tax on his exertions; and considering that his presence is required only for two hours a day in the lecture room, he would seem to have no cause to complain of being overworked. But the tendency of his education must also be decidedly oriental, or nothing would be done towards his especial training for India; and a language, the acquisition of which has been termed the labour of a life time, and whose first appearance is invested with the power of a Medusa, has been selected as the one on which he shall make his first essay as a linguist. The merits of the Sanskrit as a language, and the reward which may be reasonably expected from its literary stores, we have endeavoured to set forth in a previous number without undue partiality or depreciation. But the question before us now is not how far the history of mankind may be illustrated, or philology enriched, by further researches into that ponderous dialect of old. We are to educate a large number of students for a wide-extended service, and the doubt naturally arises, is Sanskrit to be deemed an absolutely requisite element, a sine quâ non, in an education which has other views before it besides mere disquisitions into learned oriental tongues? We acquiesce in the justice of many of Mr. Wilson's arguments in behalf of his favourite study: we allow that a knowledge of the literary remains of a nation on which so many of their customs and modes of thinking are based, gives its possessor a firmer hold on the affections of a people than otherwise he might have been enable to attain. It is highly desirable that the repository of all that the conquered hold dear, should be regarded with a favourable, but also a discriminating eye, by the conqueror; and the more we combine a knowledge of manners as gained from books with that acquired in free intercourse with the natives of every order, the better for ourselves and for those we have to deal with. But is it just, is it even expedient to force the acquisition of such cumbrous knowledge on one and all promiscuously? Shall all, without regard to their peculiar qualifications as linguists, be compelled to toil at one language, which, while it gives them at first no reward worthy of their labour, cannot fail to inspire them with a dislike for every other. It is remarkable how few make any progress in Sanskrit beyond a knowledge of the merest rudiments, sufficient to enable them to pass muster at the examina