When we speak of the Jesuit style in architecture, rhetoric and poetry, of Jesuit learning and scholarship, of Jesuit casuistry and of Jesuit diplomacy, it is either with languid contempt for bad taste and insipidity, or with the burning indignation which systematic falsehood and corruption inspire in honorable minds.
In education, the Jesuits, if they did not precisely innovate, improved upon the methods of the grammarians which had persisted from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance.

They spared no pains in training a large and competent body of professors, men of extensive culture, formed upon one uniform pattern, and exercised in the art of popularizing knowledge.
These teachers were distributed over the Jesuit colleges; and in every country their system was the same.

New catechisms, grammars, primers, manuals of history, enabled their pupils to learn with facility in a few months what it had cost years of painful labor to acquire under pompous pedants of the old _regime_.

The mental and physical aptitudes of youths committed to their charge were carefully observed; and classes were adapted to various ages and degrees of capacity.

Hours of recreation alternated with hours of study, so that the effort of learning should be neither irksome nor injurious to health.