Such an enumeration may sound dull enough, but there is no dulness in the Reports themselves.  They are stamped from the first page to the last with his lightness of touch and perfection of style.  They belong as essentially to literature as his Essays or his Lectures.

In reading these Reports on Elementary Schools we catch repeated allusions to his three Missions of enquiry into Education on the Continent.  Those Missions produced separate Reports of their own, and each Report developed into a volume.  “The Popular Education of France” gave the experience which he acquired in 1859, and its Introduction is reproduced in Mixed Essays under the title of “Democracy.” A French Eton (not very happily named) was an unofficial product of the same tour; for, extending his purview from Elementary Education, he there dealt with the relation between “Middle Class Education and the State.”

“Why,” he asked, “cannot we have throughout England as the French have throughout France, as the Germans have throughout Germany, as the Swiss have throughout Switzerland, and as the Dutch have throughout Holland, schools where the middle and professional classes may obtain at the rate of from L20 to L50 a year if they are boarders, and from L5 to L15 a year if they are day scholars, an education of as good quality, with as good guarantees of social character and advantages for a future career in the world, as the education which French children of the corresponding class can obtain from institutions like that of Toulouse or Soreze?”

Schools and Universities of the Continent gave the result of the Mission in 1865 to investigate the Education of the Upper and Middle Classes in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.  Its bearing on English Education may be inferred from these words of its author, written in October, 1868:  “There is a vicious article in the new Quarterly on my school-book, by one of the Eton undermasters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation.”

The “Special Report on Elementary Education Abroad” grew out of his third Mission in 1885; and, over and above these books, dealing specifically with educational problems, we meet constant allusions to the same topics in nearly all his prose-writings.  A life-long contact with Education produced in him a profound dissatisfaction with our English system, or want of system, and an almost passionate desire to turn chaos into order by the persistent use of the critical method.

When one talks about English Education, the subject naturally divides itself into the Universities, the Public Schools, the Private Schools, and the Elementary Schools.  The classification is not scientifically accurate, but it will serve.  With all these strata of Education, he in turn concerned himself; but with the two higher strata much less effectively than with the two lower.  It was necessary to the theoretical