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§ 15. Written exercises, translations, &c., were given in on every day, except Saturday; and the master had, if possible, to go over each one with its writer and his appointed rival or æmulus.

§ 16. The method of hearing the rules, &c., committed to memory was this:—Certain boys in each class, who were called Decurions, repeated their tasks to the master, and then in his presence heard the other boys repeat theirs. The master meanwhile corrected the written exercises.[22]

§ 17. One of the leading peculiarities in the Jesuits’ system was the pains they took to foster emulation—“cotem ingenii puerilis, calcar industriæ—the whetstone of talent, the spur of industry.” For this purpose all the boys in the lower part of the school were arranged in pairs, each pair being rivals (æmuli) to one another. Every boy was to be constantly on the watch to catch his rival tripping, and was immediately to correct him. Besides this individual rivalry, every class was divided into two hostile camps, called Rome and Carthage, which had frequent pitched battles of questions on set subjects. These were the “Concertations,” in which the boys sometimes had to put questions to the opposite camp, sometimes to expose erroneous answers when the questions were asked by the master[23] (see Appendix: Class Matches, p. 529). Emulation, indeed, was encouraged to a point where, as it seems to me, it must have endangered the good feeling of the boys among themselves. Jouvency mentions a practice of appointing mock defenders of any particularly bad exercise, who should make the author of it ridiculous by their excuses; and any boy whose work was very discreditable, was placed on a form by himself, with a daily punishment, until he could show that some one deserved to change places with him.