“Goldsmith’s Histories of Greece and Rome are miserable performances, and I do not at all like to lay out 50 pounds on them, even after they have received all Mr. Pinnock’s improvements.  I must own too, that I think the order for globes and other instruments unnecessarily large.  To lay out 324 pounds at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,000 pounds a year for all purposes of English education.  One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools.  Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year’s salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary to defer the establishment of schools.”

At one of the colleges at Calcutta the distribution of prizes was accompanied by some histrionic performances on the part of the pupils.

“I have no partiality,” writes Macaulay, “for such ceremonies.  I think it a very questionable thing whether, even at home, public spouting and acting ought to form part of the system of a place of education.  But in this country such exhibitions are peculiarly out of place.  I can conceive nothing more grotesque than the scene from the Merchant of Venice, with Portia represented by a little black boy.  Then, too, the subjects of recitation were ill chosen.  We are attempting to introduce a great nation to a knowledge of the richest and noblest literature in the world.  The society of Calcutta assemble to see what progress we are making; and we produce as a sample a boy who repeats some blackguard doggerel of George Colman’s, about a fat gentleman who was put to bed over an oven, and about a man-midwife who was called out of his bed by a drunken man at night.  Our disciple tries to hiccup, and tumbles and staggers about in imitation of the tipsy English sailors whom he has seen at the punch houses.  Really, if we can find nothing better worth reciting than this trash, we had better give up English instruction altogether.”

“As to the list of prize books, I am not much better satisfied.  It is absolutely unintelligible to me why Pope’s Works and my old friend Moore’s Lalla Rookh should be selected from the whole mass of English poetry to be prize books.  I will engage to frame, currente calamo, a better list.  Bacon’s Essays, Hume’s England, Gibbon’s Rome, Robertson’s Charles V., Robertson’s Scotland, Robertson’s America, Swift’s Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare’s Works, Paradise Lost, Milton’s smaller poems, Arabian Nights, Park’s Travels, Anson’s Voyage, the Vicar of Wakefield, Johnson’s Lives, Gil Blas, Voltaire’s Charles XII., Southey’s Nelson, Middleton’s Life of Cicero.