intimate terms with his nurse, and probably others of her own order.

But this kind of easy intercourse is precisely that most jealously regarded by the trainers of youth whom we are now considering. No doubt it began in a reaction from great abuses. Such writers as Madame de Geulis are full of the misdeeds and blunders of nurses and filles de chambre; and servile households, no doubt, among other evil influences, assisted in cockering the men of the ancient regime into the horrible selfishness that makes them a by-word but the love of rules as such, and the impossibility of getting servants to attend to them in all their rigidity, brings about this jealousy in the natural order of things. Perhaps the opposing schools do not differ so much in each having a system as in the importance of rigidly adhering to it. The people we mean make everything depend on a plan being carried out to the letter. The others respect rule but do not worship it, and are not afraid of occasional lapses and breaks. They have faith in indirect influences which the sticklers for system seem to regard as powerful only for evil. All that is good and wise must be conveyed to the mind by direct processes and an elaborate rule of restrictions. It is a theory of infinite refinements, as it must be where there is an inborn tendency to go wrong, which it is supposed can be checked by stopping up every possible loophole of expression. The Educator of this school, confident in himself, goes on the principle that every error is somebody's fault besides the perpetratorthat it might have been prevented -and that he alone is vigilant enough for such incessant watchfulness. He therefore gladly takes upon himself the responsibility of being the only inculcator through whom alone shall every impression, every opinion, every principle be received. Perhaps there is more remarkable instance of this confidence than in that book on

no

'Practical Education' from which we have already quoted, the joint work of Miss Edgeworth and her father, which excited great attention at the time of its publication. Nowhere shall we find more implicit belief in a system, with more contempt for the general practice of mankind. It is really a clever book, with much acute observation -one that on this account could never have been written by a person trained under the enervating discipline it enforces; and its view can never be disproved, because success is made to depend on a rigid punctiliousness and obedience beyond human power to practise ; for this system, put forward for general adoption, demands of parents such vigilance of personal supervision as simply disables them for all the other duties of life. This is plain enough when it is understood that the child is never to speak to a servant from its birth; that it must never walk with one; that it must have no nursery and no schoolroom, no holidays, no disagreeable lessons, no punishments; that it must have no companions out of its own family; never come into a moment's collision with brothers or sisters, and therefore must never be with them unwatched; that it must never read a book that has not been examined sentence by sentence; that it must never be coerced, but reasoned with all day long; that it must be encouraged to ask questions on all subjects, and no question must remain unanswered; that it must not be allowed to acquire knowledge intuitively, or by its own inferences, for fear of some error insinuating itself; that it must never be allowed to pass a word in reading that it does not understand; that it must never hear nonsense, or even wit, without its being analysed; that it must never be alone with a stranger for fear of receiving incorrect impressions; that its ear must never be exposed to solecisms in grammar or vulgarisms of pro

nunciation. If you can secure your child from one and all of these dangers, you will have made your son all that a man should be; if, in spite of such care as you have been able to bestow, some false reasoning or unphilosophical desires manifest themselves, the answer is ready: evil has found some cranny to creep through-a servant has spoken, a friend has flattered, a page in some tolerated book has not been cut out. Everything turns on the maxim, "We cannot be too particular." A mother is highly commended, and her success in education vouched for, who carried these precautions to such extreme length that, though warmly approving Mrs Barbauld, and regarding her books for children as a new era, a veritable reformation, she did not trust her simplest sentences into her children's hands without castigation and amendments. The sentence, "Charles shall have a pretty new lesson," is solemnly censured as weakly giving in to a child's love of novelty; while Charles's statement, "I want my dinner," is fraught with peril. Does Charles take for granted that what he eats is his own, that he must have his dinner." "These and similar expressions are words of course, but young children should not be allowed to use them." Again, it is

taken amiss that Charles is told that "the sun is gone to bed." We are told that "when the sun is out of sight would be more correct, though perhaps not so pleasing.' Such passages as, "Little boys don't eat butter," Nobody wears a hat in the house," are thought positively dangerous; the one, because affirmative sentences should always express real facts; and the other because it initiates the child into the false language of fashion and prejudice. While the flippant answer to Charles's demand for wine, "Wine for little boys? I never heard of such a thing!" elicits the grave significant remonstrance: "If Charles were to be ill, and it should be necessary to give him

wine, or were he to see another child drink it, he would lose confidence in what was said to him. We should be careful of our words if we expect our pupils to have confidence in us; and if they have not, we need not attempt to educate them." It is nothing to this argument that a child with all its faculties in proper play, could not possibly be misled by this mode of speech, and that its sharpness is stimulated by lively address; for wit and readiness are here avowedly discountenanced as inconvenient to Educators, as they are apt to be in other systems. The child must take in what is said to it, and neither more nor less. There are such children in the world who remain children all their lives, and never take anything into account but the words they hear, accepted in their grammatical meaning; but they are not in real life regarded as a triumph of the teacher's art. One danger of all this to the parents is, lest, in attending with such lynxeyed watchfulness to the mint and cummin of mere forms of expression, the weightier matters in conduct and manners should be lost sight of. They may allow themselves a hundred inferior modes of thought and habits of looking at things, as they suppose, unperceived by the child for whom they display them, while they are dressing their sentences in Quakerish plainness, cutting and snipping every book that contains a phrase that may be misunderstood, and puzzling themselves with the difficult art much pursued by some Educators of making easy things easier; and all the while it may be those things which they suppose hidden fathoms out of sight, which are carrying all before them in forming their child's mind. The taint on our hidden springs of action, pride or vanity or meanness or ambition or contempt, may well tell with exceptional force when the line assumes perfection, and disdains all aid from without. What does show in such

education is most often not designed but undesigned resemblances. The observer sees likenesses where the parent, in disappointment, recognises nothing but marked and inscrutable differences between himself and the son of so much effort. The child has caught something, habit, turn of thought, trick, peculiarity, by which we know him to be all over his father's son, and yet that father sits and wonders at such a result of all his pains.

Such revelations as these may explain how it is that so many clever people have children the reverse of clever, or that make a failure of life. Hereditary powers can scarcely be utterly quenched, but a good deal may be done to neutralise them by early interference with their natural development. Clever people acquire self-reliance, which, if their tempers incline that way, easily degenerates into contempt of others' opinions. At any rate, if a fool has whims about education, all concerned set themselves to oppose and counteract them; but a man of genius is permitted to work out his experiments. People stand by to see what will come of it. If he decides on neglect, and lets his child follow his own will, choose his own company, and learn or not as he pleases, his admirers stand by expectant of a child of nature who shall shame all their pains. If he tries more recondite departures from the practice of his neighbours, it is still the same-he carries his way without resistance from without. Whether body, mind, soul of his offspring are crammed or starved; fed up with wine and beefsteaks or famished on potatoes; tricked out in fantastic finery or let go barefoot; shut up from all companionship or forced into premature manhood and acquaintance with evil; urged to precocity or kept in dull ignorance; drenched in nambypamby sentiment or stiffened into pride and indifference; denied books or made critics before they can spell; the experimentalists

carry out what comes into their heads more effectually than other men, and their obstinacy in mistake or error bears a larger, more fatal crop of its legitimate fruit.

There always have been Educators of the class we have dwelt upon, and they have always been opposed by another school, who modify necessary rules by regard to individual character. One of Dante's heavenly voices attributes to them much of the evil of the world

"E se il mondo laggiu ponesse mente Al fondamento che natura pone

Seguendo lui, avria buona gente.
Ma voi torcete alla religione
Tal che fu nato a cingersi la spada
E fate re di tal ch'e da sermone:
Onde la traccia vostra e fuor di strada."

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Once-happily those days are past -flogging was the favourite system of lovers of system. Thus we read in Southey of a good man, Colet, Dean of St Paul's, reported by Erasmus as delighting in children in a Christian spirit, who yet thought no discipline could be too severe, so that whenever he dined at the school, one or two boys were served up to be flogged at dessert" for his delectation. Erasmus on one of these festal occasions was witness of the flogging of a gentle boy of ten, who almost fainted under the scourge"not that he deserved this," whispered the Dean in Erasmus's ear, "but it is fit to humble him." Now we have left all this, and every boy must play whether he will or no. Pope prophesied of these days, though, under the old prejudice, he believed in the rod as the only teacher,

"Proceed, great days! till learning fly the shore,

Till birch shall blush with noble blood no

that obtains amongst us-whose line is simple denunciation and abuse, without proposing anything, or at least proposing anything practicable. A touch of this system is common enough, but no education can be worse than that formed upon the plan of avoiding everybody else's practice as the sole principle of action. On paper, however, where it is most commonly to be met with in full force, we regard it with greater toleration. People are not taken quite at their word when in the full ecstasy of vituperation. We unconsciously assume in the writer a dependence on our good sense to interpret his ravings into something rational. We are to take whatever is inconsistent with reason as rhetoric-the sweeping swing of the arm to make the hammer's blow tell home. This dependence on his readers must be strong indeed in Mr Ruskin, the head-master of this school. No sort of misunderstanding would suit him so ill as to be supposed really to mean what he says. Through a crossfire of wild assertion and wanton injustice, we are to detect an inner light of fairness and truth. To take him piecemeal, and to ask what this or that means, and how this and that are reconcilable, is cold-blooded baseness, which we could not expect him to find adequate words to express. In fact, we also feel such a course quite out of place in treating his latest educational work, 'Sesame and Lilies.' That clever farrago of unmitigated abuse to the one sex, and of sugared abuse and railing flattery, of ill usage and petting, to the other of extravagant charges and impossible remedies- was never meant to be picked to pieces. There are eloquent and stirring parts, but we must not try to harmonise one passage with another. He is not answerable for inductions, and to go half way with him, to act up to some of his precepts, is to be more undiscerning and despicable than to throw them over

altogether. Thus, when he lays it down as a law that our first duty in a girl's education-which no thoughtful person will care to dispute-is to perfect her physical beauty and to increase its power, on the ground that nature made her a queen and regal should be her bearing, the advocates for cultivating externals-all that is meant by grace and manner-think they have Mr Ruskin on their side, till suddenly he turns round upon them for thinking so much of these trifles. "You know," he cries, "that there is hardly a girls' school in this Christian kingdom, where the children's courage or sincerity would be thought of half so much importance as their way of coming in at a door;" going on to insist that the whole system of society is "one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture." Again, while all his vague suggestions go upon that line of large expense we have attributed to educational theorists-as, for example, we must give our girls "noble teachers" in place of the modern governess he scolds his hearers for an imaginary but too probable choice. Suppose," it is asked of the ladies present, "you had at the back of your houses a garden large enough for your children to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them room to run in-no more,

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and that you could not change your abode;" and suppose, he goes on, that by suffering a coal-shaft and its concomitant heaps of coke to defile the garden, you could quadruple your income, "you would be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixtyfold instead of fourfold;" yet this, he assures the ladies, they are doing all over England, which is but just big enough for all the children to play in if all were allowed to play as they ought. How far such talk will really inculcate a love of nature it is not easy to decide; but at least it is by cross methods, and by large demands on the judgment of his hearers. However, our object is not a critique on

Mr Ruskin's style. In one point we agree with him, that unbending system, so far as it succeeds at all, succeeds with boys. "You may chisel a boy," he says, "into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze; but you cannot hammer a girl into anything." Women and girls never thrive under wholesale treatment; boys bear it better, and every plan of education involving large numbers must be carried on in this way, though it may be indefinitely tempered and modified by individual study of character in the master, and freedom of opinion and bear

ing towards each other amongst the boys themselves. This, however, does not decide the tutor's own perception of his office, which, whatever the external system, will greatly influence results. Does he modestly call himself a teacher, or does he adopt the ambitious tone of a former and maker? The two views were once defined in a few words, by Professor Wilson, as, after listening with a growing impatience to a lecture on Education by Dr Whately, he took a friend's arm as he hurried away, and muttered in his ear, "I always thought God Almighty made man, but he says it was the schoolmaster!"

IN one of Alfred de Vigny's clever sketches of the Reign of Terror, he gives a picture of the interior of the Bastile, and shows us the little children representing in their plays the terrible incidents that characterise the era. Here was one being tried for his life, here another being led to the guillotine, as though the passion of that thirst for blood had actually insinuated itself into the veins of infancy, and corruption begun from the very cradle. Nothing, how ever, is more true than that the presence of some great national calamity will SO tinge men's thoughts with its colours, that all their daily actions and sayings will partake of the features of the disaster.

A great flood or a great fire will leave after them innumerable traces in the expressions of a people, long after their ravages have ceased.

I was reminded of this tendency t'other day by an article I read in the Times.' It was a very able

and well-reasoned paper on the respective merits of the various claimants for high office, and especially for the Premiership. The writer told us that Lord Russell was old, Lord Granville polite, Lord Clarendon diplomatic, and Mr Gladstone fully qualified for the highest post in the realm.

He showed us, at what I confess to have felt an unnecessary length, that because we had lately been ruled by a very able man in spite of his years, great age alone could not be esteemed a qualification for office, still less could the memory of that long catalogue of indiscretions which attached to Lord Russell, and made him more terrible as a colleague than as an opponent.

It was, however, when canvassing the claims of Mr Gladstone that the writer evinced that sympathy with the passing events of our time to which I have briefly made some allusion already. We live in an age of epidemics: with cholera, yellow fever, and the cattle plague