Here Cowper has the advantage of treating a subject which he understood, about which he felt strongly, and desired for a practical purpose to stir the feelings of his readers.

He set to work in bitter earnest.

"There is a sting," he says, "in verse that prose neither has nor can have; and I do not know that schools in the gross, and especially public schools, have ever been so pointedly condemned before.

But they are become a nuisance, a pest, an abomination, and it is fit that the eyes and noses of mankind should be opened if possible to perceive it." His descriptions of the miseries which children in his day endured, and, in spite of all our improvements, must still to some extent endure in boarding schools, and of the effects of the system in estranging boys from their parents and deadening home affections, are vivid and true.

Of course the Public School system was not to be overturned by rhyming, but the author of _Tirocinium_ awakened attention to its faults, and probably did something towards amending them.