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History

At the same time, though Glucks seminary was a scheme hatched by a professor of Marienburg which even Peter himself came at last to consider futile and ridiculous, we see in it a first attempt, even if a premature attempt, to create for Russia a public school as we of the present day understand the term and that in spite of the fact that the schemes original idea was less to afford the general public education than to feed the Posolski Prikaz with translators, and that, developing thence into a sort of "foreign correspondence institution," it ended by being remembered amongst subsequent generations as no more than what Kurakin calls "a school of divers tongues and knightly skill on horseback and with swords.

" At all events, on its decease the only in any way "public" educational establishment remaining in Moscow was the Slavonic- Greco-Latin Academy, an institution originally founded to meet ecclesi- astical requirements, and later reorganised wholly on a general professional basis, and now so admirably conducted as to earn Webers hearty approval on an occasion when, visiting the place in 17 16, that diplomatist beheld 400 students zealously acquiring learning under "learned monks who were also men of knowledge and of wit," and when one of the senior alumni, a youth of princely family, faultlessly delivered in honour of the visitor an address couched in highly complimentary terms.

And since in similar fashion Kurakin records of the Muscovite School of Mathematics that, though an "Englishman" was at the head of it, the attached staff was made up ex- clusively of Russians, and that these Russians were imparting to their numerous young seekers after learning a scheme of first-rate and systematic instruction (the above-mentioned "Englishman" evidently being Farquhar- son of Edinburgh), the items together show that by now the plan of sending Russian youths to study abroad had not proved wholly unsuccessful, but, on the contrary, had enabled these two scholastic establishments to be staffed wholly with preceptors of native birth.

The success was not the less notable a one in that its attainment had been attended with difficulties and blunders, and handicapped throughout by the fact that all too many of the students dispatched abroad on subsidy, especially such of them as went to England, drove their guardians nearly to distraction with their pranks, and at the end of their term felt so reluctant to return home and face the consequences that in 1723 an ukaz had to inform them that, never- theless, they could seek their native land again unperturbed, and, on arriving there, would even "stand pardoned of everything," assured of clemency, and receive, not punishment, but "rewards both of recompense and of lodging!" So, in general, we see from the all-class composition of the schools des- cribed that at all events in the two capitals, and in intellects influenced by Peters reforms, popular education was now a permanently floating idea.

Yet it is difficult to determine whether that idea was the outcome of a real ardour for reform, or whether it was a scheme still being thought out before being put into practice.