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“Plunged for some sense, but found no bottom there,

So learned and floundered on in mere despair.”[12]

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§ 1. Since the Revival of Learning, no body of men has played so prominent a part in education as the Jesuits. With characteristic sagacity and energy they soon seized on education as a stepping-stone to power and influence; and with their talent for organization, they framed a system of schools which drove all important competitors from the field, and made Jesuits the instructors of Catholic, and even, to some extent, of Protestant Europe. Their skill in this capacity is attested by the highest authorities, by Bacon[13] and by Descartes, the latter of whom had himself been their pupil; and it naturally met with its reward: for more than one hundred years nearly all the foremost men throughout Christendom, both among the clergy and laity, had received the Jesuit training, and in most cases retained for life an attachment to their old masters.

§ 2. About these Jesuit schools—once so celebrated and so powerful, and still existing in great numbers, though little remains of their original importance—there does not seem to be much information accessible to the English reader. I have, therefore, collected the following particulars about them; and refer any one who is dissatisfied with so meagre an account, to the works which I have consulted.[14] The Jesuit schools, as I said, still exist, but they did their great work in other centuries; and I therefore prefer to speak of them as things of the past.[15]