* We may judge of the competency of many of these people to be official censors of education by the following specimens from a report of Gregoire’s.  Since the rage for destruction has a little subsided, circular letters have been sent to the administrators of the departments, districts, &c. enquiring what antiquities, or other objects of curiosity, remain in their neighbourhood.—­“From one, (says Gregoire,) we are informed, that they are possessed of nothing in this way except four vases, which, as they have been told, are of porphyry.  From a second we learn, that, not having either forge or manufactory in the neighbourhood, no monument of the arts is to be found there:  and a third announces, that the completion of its library cataloges has been retarded, because the person employed at them ne fait pas la diplomatique!”—­("does not understand the science of diplomacy.”)

The difficulty as to the mode in which children were to be taught being got over, another remained, not less liable to dispute—­which was, the choice of what they were to learn.  Almost every member had a favourite article—–­music, physic, prophylactics, geography, geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, natural history, and botany, were all pronounced to be requisites in an eleemosynary system of education, specified to be chiefly intended for the country people; but as this debate regarded only the primary schools for children in their earliest years, and as one man for a stipend of twelve hundred livres a year, was to do it all, a compromise became necessary, and it has been agreed for the present, that infants of six years shall be taught only reading, writing, gymnastics, geometry, geography, natural philosophy, and history of all free nations, and that of all the tyrants, the rights of man, and the patriotic songs.  —­Yet, after these years of consideration, and days of debate, the Assembly has done no more than a parish-clerk, or an old woman with a primer, and “a twig whilom of small regard to see,” would do better without its interference.

The students of a more advanced age are still to be disposed of, and the task of devising an institution will not be easy; because, perhaps a Collot d’Herbois or a Duhem is not satisfied with the system which perfectioned the genius of Montesquieu or Descartes.  Change, not improvement, is the object—­whatever bears a resemblance to the past must be proscribed; and while other people study to simplify modes of instruction, the French legislature is intent on rendering them as difficult and complex as possible; and at the moment they decree that the whole country shall become learned, they make it an unfathomable science to teach urchins of half a dozen years old their letters.

Foreigners, indeed, who judge only from the public prints, may suppose the French far advanced towards becoming the most erudite nation in Europe:  unfortunately, all these schools, primary, and secondary, and centrical, and divergent, and normal,* exist as yet but in the repertories of the Convention, and perhaps may not add “a local habitation” to their names, till the present race** shall be unfit to reap the benefit of them.