ready for whatever might happen. But my brother's wife, more fortunate than her great predecessor, like Minerva, came into the world ready armed, and was, or thought herself, innately fitted for the parental office, and capable, by her spontaneous and self-directed energies, of superintending, no less her son's education, than her daughter's. Her husband, who is a thriving man," and still remembers that When house and goods and land are spent, Then larning is most excellent, spares no expense in carrying into execution any and all the plans which the fertile imitativeness of his good lady suggests, (expense indeed seeming to be one of the chiefest ingredients in the forming and storing the infant mind); and as he has himself no time for any thing but business, my sister-in-law has that sort of autocratical sway over the nursery and school-room, which is bounded only by the obstinacy of servants, and the still greater inflexibility of the party least consulted in the affair,-Dame Nature herself. 66 re Scarcely had their eldest boy attained to the completion of his fifth year, when he was provided with a private tutor; and his sister, who is less than a year younger, was at the same time saddled with a governess. "We can never begin too early," said the lady. Ay, ay, I hate idleness: train up the child in the way he should go,' echoed the papa :-and so to it they went, TUTTO-ing on one side the house and j'aime-ing on the other, from morning to night, let the sun shine as delightfully as it pleased, and the smiling fields invite as they might the poor little sufferers to lay up a stock of health and vigour, to fortify their tender organs for the rough shocks of a rude world, which await their riper years. What progress my young nephew and niece made in precocious learning, I knew not; for I never cared to make myself that bore of a rising family—an examining friend; but I was soon aware that their health declined, that their heads were visibly too large for their bodies, (either from an actual developement of the overworked part, or from the shrivelling and emaciation of the other members), that their cheeks were pale, and their appetite failed them. When I pointed out this circumstance to the mother, she assured me it was nothing but weakness; adding that to remedy this evil she carefully had her children bathed in cold water every morning in summer and in winter; which she doubted not would soon restore them to their good looks. This narration explained to me the sobbing and lamentation I had heard before daylight in the nursery, when I spent the Christmas at my brother's. Never afterwards could I bear to sleep in that house. The thought of the poor little innocents shivering and coughing at the edge of the bathing-tub in a frosty morning, while I lay comfortably wrapped in my bed-clothes, recalled the misery I had so often suffered before the invention of machinery for sweeping chimnies, when I have heard some unfortunate child scraping his back along the flues in the walls of my bed-chamber, and earning a miserable existence, at the expense of disease, distortion, and hopeless slavery. "At least, however," I mentally exclaimed, "those black little urchins escape the drudgery of a fashionable education." This strong call of the bathing-tub upon the feeble organs of infancy was not answered; and instead of the expected health, shivering fits, fevers, and internal complaints were the rewards of an impertinent interference with nature. "It is very odd," said my sister-in-law. "It's all worms; and yet I never failed putting all the children through a spring and fall course of Ching's lozenges.' At this time it was the fashion to make children hardy; and my nephews and nieces (and they were now numerous) were kept in a state nearly approaching to nudity; their linen dresses barely meeting the demands of decency. In this plight, they were daily sent out in all weathers to walk for one hour (the canonical duration of a lesson), and to trail their listless limbs round the interior of a fashionable London square for the purposes of air and exercise. The appearances of consumption in one of the girls at length put a stop to this excess; and, a new system springing up, flannels, a full meal of meat, with an occasional glass of wine, (i. e. egregious stuffing) became the order of the day. Even this did not answer, and the girls were put under the tuition of a drill-sergeant, and taught the manual exercise; dumb bells were bought, and an elastic board mounted in the nursery, as proper substitutes for liberty and the natural use of the limbs. In one corner of the school-room may be seen Miss Jenny choaking in a monitor; in another Bobby standing fast fixed in the daneing-master's stocks. Little Biddy is chained by the hour at a time before a miserable old piano-forte, with her fingers close locked in the brass partitions of a cheiroplast. Flat on her back lies stretched on an inclined plane, the pallid Alicia, like Ixion on his wheel; while Thomas, who labours under St. Vitus's dance, carries about one arm extended on a broad board, to obviate a growing contraction of the muscles. All the girls are screwed up in a double panoply of patent stays, to reduce their bowels to the calibre of "an alderman's thumbring," the dimension which fashion once more, in its folly, has assigned to female loveliness. Surely, surely, the tread-mill might supersede these various tortures; and, being applied to education, might exempt the freeborn British child, the heir of liberty and our "happy constitution," from such inquisitorial inventions! But if the bodies of my poor nephews and nieces are submitted to an endless variety of "ingenious tormenting," their minds are not less tortured than their persons. Fourteen hours per diem they are pinned down to their language-masters, music-masters, mathematical-masters, besides attending three courses of lectures on chemistry, history, and moral philosophy. Why was this not thought upon when the act was passed for regulating the labour of children in cotton-manufactories? Besides, every point of education is to be conducted on a better (i. e. a newer) method than that employed with other people's children. The poor things are, therefore, the victims of all sorts of experiments. Whatever is the passing whim, is incorporated into my sister's domestic system; and studies are taken up con amore, or languish in indifference, and masters are engaged and disengaged, with a rapidity that doubles the labour of learning, if it does not utterly defeat the end. Every body in the mean time learns every thing; the girls study Greek and mathematics, and the boys partake in all the girls' pursuits. except tambouring and tent-stitch. All draw, all play the harp and piano-forte, all sing, all dance, though two of the children are deaf, and one is lame; and the whole family, except the eldest girl, seem to have been born without a tincture of taste for the fine arts. But while the attention is thus distracted, and borne away from subject to subject at the command of an hour-glass, the overloaded memory is ingeniously propped by a complex artificial system of common-places, to which there lies but one small objection, that it is more difficult to understand, remember, and apply, than to recollect things by their natural associations. * The eldest children have now arrived at an age when the intellects usually begin to exert themselves, when the senses and the imagination are active in their influence on the judgment, and present endless themes for the exercise of its hitherto untried powers: but here again art and tuition interfere to spoil the work of nature. Opinions on all subjects are presented for acceptance, " ready cut and dried," and all books are prohibited except under the direction of a person hired to read with the young folks, and to impress on them a due obstinacy and pertinacity, not only in sectarian religion and factious politics, but in matters of criticism and general literature. The poor creatures are never suffered to think for themselves; and they are consequently as dogmatic and as positive on Homer, Racine, Byron, Hume, Bishop Berkeley, and Adam Smith, as they are on transubstantiation and the thirty-nine articles. Their notions are in all cases alike infused in the true parrot way, independent of unprejudiced reason, and unfounded on legitimate deduction: and thus cribbed up in an intellectual manège, they are ready to be committed into the hands of some favourite reviewer, (whose periodical oracles will lead them in his own orthodox faith)-incapable of receiving a new idea, or of being disturbed in an ancient prejudice; too timid to doubt, too unpractised to enquire, and too feeble to tolerate in others opinions they can neither comprehend nor combat themselves. The manner in which the young folks passed their infancy was well fitted for this subjection of the intellect. Brought into company after dinner, for the mere purposes of maternal vanity, the rest of their life was passed with nursery-maids, and with instructors scarcely more enlightened than nursery-maids. If, perchance, they ventured on a question, it was evaded by a lie or an equivoque; sometimes because the respondent was too ignorant to reply; sometimes, because the questionist was too scrutinizing for the contradictions and absurdities of received opinions and practices. At best, their knowledge was made up of isolated particularities, unconnected by general views or enlarged principles. That "Dr. Gripetithe is a very good man," or "Colebs in search of a Wife, is a very good book," was the deepest stretch of their judgments on men and things, before they were launched into the prescribed course of hardy assertions and unexamined opinions, which afterwards formed the climax of their education. The business of education is one of so much difficulty, that with all the accumulated experience of ages, the most striking geniuses are still found amongst those, who have escaped altogether from the trammels of scholastic discipline, and who have been formed by the direct influence of things, operating under the pressure of strong necessities. * These terms are not exclusively applicable to those sects and parties which are deemed heterodox. A churchman may have the zeal of a sectarian, and a govern · ment-man be a factious partizan. The phrases are used, therefore, without reference to aany particular creed, civil or religious, and merely in contradistinction to true religion and genuine patriotism. The real object of a good education is fact; the scope to which, both in public and in private instruction, it is habitually adapted, is opinion. How far this is a necessary evil, is a subject too vast for the present paper. It is sufficient to notice, that in the actual state of society opinions are esteemed more important than solid information; and that infinitely more care is taken to preserve the world as it is, than to push it forward in the career of improvement. As long as this condition remains, there can be no question on the superiority of public over private tuition. In public institutions the habits inculcated may be vicious, the opinions and prejudices may be false (and indeed this is but too frequently the case); still, however, these vices and these false notions are those of the many. The pupil of the public is at least sure to be in the majority; while the creature of private instruction may be in error, both with reference to the nature of things, and to his own social and personal interests, to boot. If our national schools seldom permit their youth to get the start of their age and country, they are at least on a level with it; while domestic education fixes in its subject all the local peculiarities by which it is surrounded. It may make him wiser and better than others; it more frequently leaves him below the average standard; and almost always it renders him quizzical, bashful, and timid; unfit for the business of life, and unequal to figure in society. Few persons are competent to educate their own children; and it is a vast presumption in the idle and the ignorant to undertake the charge. However imperfect public education may be, it is at least systematic-a connected and arranged whole, which does not change with every caprice in the instructor. Girls' schools, for the most part, partake of the vices both of public and of private tuition; while, from the limited scope of female education, it may be more safely trusted to domestic superintendents: but any thing is better than the eternally meddling, changing, hesitating, yet persevering interference, of an ignorant, shallow, pretending mother, whose utmost effort is to constantly toil after fashions, which she can never overtake; and to torment and tease her children with endless undigested experiments in the conduct of mind and body. Under all plans of education, however, the fate of children is sufficiently hard; for if private tuition be too much a matter of caprice, public schools are too much an affair of routine. Many a child suffers incredibly, and goes through much unjust punishment; because the business of the school is neither adapted to his personal taste, nor to the mode and degree of his mental developement. In private instruction a boy may sometimes escape being treated like a blockhead, because his tutor has not the ability to discover the difficulty which impedes his progress; but in public schools the master has not the time, nor will the system ever allow enquiry into such minutia. There is a theoretic equality in the capacities and attainments presupposed in all public instruction; and woe to the lad who is either above or below this level! This serves to explain the tedious march of public education, in which six or eight years are spent in the imperfect acquirement of two languages-a miserable loss of time! But to come back to the point from which we started: What a mass of misery, what tears and sufferings, are accumulated within the space of these years! what privations, what indignities, what injustice! Of all the youths crowded into a public school, how few are there to whom learning is not rendered a most irksome and detested slavery, and who do not leave the establishment with a firm resolution never again to open a book from the moment of their emancipation! Is this necessary ?-is this desirable? and if not, can it be remedied? These are important points for the consideration of parents. Thank Heaven, I have no children to educate; and thank Heaven again, I have left behind almost the recollection of that always envied, always praised epoch, of childhood, from which all are so happy to escape:-an epoch of feebleness, helplessness, ignorance, close restraint, and subjection. I would not undergo it again, to be born heir to a Dukedom. C. M. THE FLOWER THAT FEELS NOT SPRING. FROM the prisons dark of the circling bark From the lark and linnet, the blackbird and thrush. The dormouse starts from his wintry sleeping; The flowers of earth find a second birth, To light and life from the darkness leaping; Their youth's first perfume and primitive bloom. And water'd its bed with a father's tears, Such as angels shake from their sunny wings,- Yet the blaze sublime of thy virtue's prime, As the matin ray of the god of day Brightens the dew which at last it dries: Yes, Fanny, I cannot regret thy clay, When I think where thy spirit has wing'd it way. So wither we all-so flourish and fall, Like the flowers and weeds that in churchyards wave; Our leaves we spread over comrades dead, And blossom and bloom with our root in the grave ;- Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust! If death's worst smart is to feel that we part From those whom we love and shall see no more, It softens his sting to know that we wing Our flight to the friends who have gone before, And the grave is a boon and a blessing to me, If it waft me, O Fanny, my daughter, to thee! H. |