once to the sublime announcement ;-" In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This he was taught to spell, syllable by syllable, and word by word;

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then to read it over and over, until he could read it off-hand without hesitation." He then proceeded with the next verse in the chapter in the same way; and was never allowed to leave off until perfect in the appointed lesson. In these initiatory stages there was the most resolute perseverance until the child gained a thorough mastery of his task. "I wonder at your patience," said her husband on one occasion: “You have told that child twenty times the same thing." "Had I satisfied myself by mentioning the matter only nineteen times," replied Mrs. Wesley, "I should have lost all my labor. You see it was the twentieth time that crowned the whole." Under such teaching, all preliminary difficulties vanished away in a few days, and reading became easy, instructive, and pleasant.

In some of these details Mrs. Wesley was probably influenced by a singular fact in connection with her eldest child. His hearing was acute and perfect; his intellect apparently keen and active: but there was no power of speech. He never uttered an intelligible word until he was nearly five years old; and his parents began to fear that he was hopelessly dumb. Having been missed longer than usual on one occasion, his mother sought him in different parts of the house, but without success. Becoming alarmed, she called him loudly by name, and to her joyful surprise, he answered from under the table, in a clear distinct voice, “Here I am, Mother!" Suddenly, and without any assign

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able reason for effort, he had gained the use of speech. This early infirmity in the case of her first-born prevented Mrs. Wesley beginning to teach him, had she been so disposed, before he was five years old. He learned with great rapidity, “ and had such a prodigious memory," writes his Mother, " that I cannot remember to have told him the same word twice. What was still stranger, any word he had learned in his lesson, he knew whenever he saw it, either in his Bible or any other book: by which means he learned very soon to read an English author well." This was her first attempt at teaching; and its great and cheering success probably fixed her future plans of action, from which she never deviated, except in the case of her youngest child. With her she was persuaded to commence teaching before the five years had expired, “and she was more years learning than any of the rest had been months."

The school always opened and closed with singing a solemn psalm, and was a scene of perfect order, nothing being permitted to interrupt the regular course of study. "If visitors, business, or accident be allowed to interfere with reading, working, or singing psalms at the appointed times, you will find such impediments multiplied upon you, till at last all order and devotion will be lost." Everything moved according to rule. "Every one was kept close to their business for the six hours." There was no loud talking or playing. "Rising out of their places, or going out of the room was not permitted, unless for good cause; and running into the yard, garden, or street, without leave, was

always esteemed a capital offense." With such teaching and discipline, no wonder that the progress of the learners was uniformly rapid and satisfactory. "And it is almost incredible," adds Mrs. Wesley, "what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year, by a vigorous application, if it have but a tolerable capacity and good health."

If, therefore, it be open to doubt whether there be any definite rule for the time of commencing, or the best mode of communicating intellectual instruction in all cases, there can be no question that Mrs. Wesley's system, as carried out in her own family, was amply justified by its satisfactory results.

THE MOTHER OF LAMARTINE*

FROM Memoirs of My Youth

My education was wholly centered in the glance more or less serene and the smile, more or less open of my mother. The reins of my heart were in her hand. She asked nothing from me but to be truthful and good. I had no difficulty in being so. My father gave me an example of a sincerity carried even to scrupulousness; my mother, of a goodness rising to devotion the most heroic. My soul, which breathed only an atmosphere of goodness, could not produce anything ungenial. I was never forced to struggle either with myself or with any other person. Everything attracted me; nothing constrained me. The little which I was taught was presented to me as a recom

pense. My sole masters were my father and my mother. I saw them read, and I wished to read; I gazed at them writing, and I asked them to aid me to form my letters. All this was carried on amidst sports and in leisure moments, on their knees, in the garden, at the fireside of the saloon, and accompanied by smiles, by railleries, by caresses. I acquired a taste for it. I suggested, of my own accord, these short and amusing lessons. I thus learned everything, a little late, it is true, but without ever recollecting how I learned it, and without a brow ever being bent to induce me to learn. I advanced without being conscious of making progress. My thoughts, ever in communion with those of my mother, were developed as it were in hers, as I had received nourishment from her bosom, until the moment I was forcibly and unhappily torn from her, when about to enter my twelfth year, to live the putrid or at least the frozen life of college. A taste for reading had early taken possession of me. It was with difficulty my parents could find a sufficient number of books appropriate to my age to gratify my curiosity. These childish books soon ceased to satisfy me. I gazed with longing at the volumes which were ranged in some shelves in a little cabinet off the saloon; but my mother curbed me in this impatience for knowledge. She gave me books only by degrees, and even these she selected carefully. An abridgment of the Bible; the fables of La Fontaine, which appeared to me at once childish, false, and cruel and which I could never learn by heart; the works of Madame de Genlis; those of Berquin; passages from Fenelon and

Bernardin de St. Pierre, which delighted me at that age; the Jerusalem delivered; Robinson Crusoe; some tragedies of Voltaire, especially Merope, read aloud by my father in the evening-it was from these that I drank in, as a plant from the soil, the first nourishing juices of my young intellect. But I drank deep, above all, from my mother's mind, I read through her eyes; I felt through her impressions; I lived through her life. She translated all for me

nature, sentiment, sensations, and thoughts. Without her I could not have spelled a line of that creation which I had before my eyes. But she guided my fingers over its page. Her soul was so luminous, so highly colored, and so warm, that she left a shadow or a chill on nothing. In leading me little by little to comprehend all, she made me at the same time love all. In a word, the insensible instruction which I received was not a lesson, it was the very act of living, of thinking, and of feeling which I accomplished before her eyes, along with her, like her, and through her. We lived a double life. It was thus that my heart was formed within me, on a model which I had not even the trouble of looking at, so closely was it blended with my own.

My mother displayed little anxiety about what is generally called instruction. She did not aspire to make me a child far advanced for my age. She did not arouse within me that emulation which is only the jealousy or the pride of children. She did not compare me to any person. She neither exalted nor humiliated me, by any dangerous comparisons. She thought, and justly, that once my intellectual strength