LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. Class NOTES ON EDUCATION FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS NOTES ON EDUCATION FOR MOTHERS &f TEACHERS BY CAROLINE SOUTHWOOD HILL \\ AUTHOR OF "MORNING LESSONS ON THE GOSPELS" "WILD FLOWERS AND THEIR USES " _ OF THE ' \ UNIVERSITY 1 OF / rt>S LONDON SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1906 QENERM. Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON <5H Co. At the Ballantyne Press PREFACE THE authoress of these essays on education, Caroline Southwood Hill, was the daughter of the late Dr. Southwood Smith, the eminent physician and " Father of Sanitary Reform." She was one of the first to apply the Pestalozzian principles of education in Eng- land, having already gained from her father many enlightened ideas, more particularly on the intimate connection between physical, mental, and moral de- velopment. These experiences, combined with her sympathetic understanding of children, and keen in- sight into the workings of the child-mind, give weight to all her thoughts on education. The essay which is placed last in this volume was written in her early years. The other essays were the fruit of her ripe thought, and have not been printed before. The strength and beauty of her influence over chil- dren, and the kind of surroundings she chose for them, are described in an article in the Monthly Repository of 1833, from which we cull a few illustrative sentences. The writer expatiates on the exquisite situation of her 166988 PREFACE house and grounds, and gives a picture of the free outdoor life, describing a dinner in the wood. " Dinner ! dinner ! not that way : here is the hall passage between these verdant clustering pillars, under these natural Gothic arches and rich tracery work; now we enter the ante-room, treading the thick carpet of harebells, and looking out through the beautiful lattice-work of the thinned copse on hill, wood, and valley ; and yonder is the salle-a-manger. How grace- fully the festoons of our pavilion hang from branch to branch, just fluttering in the sun, yet not scaring away the birds ; and there she sits beneath, the queen of our simple revels, in all the unassuming state and absolute power of affection, the grand -daughter of Pestalozzi (not by father's side nor by mother's), and calls her pupils to come, like the hen gathering her chickens and they will. See how they muster like the pretty witches of Macbeth ; but at a sweeter spell, and to a better kettle of fish and soup. One toddlin' wee thing raises her blue-bonneted head amid the rank grass, like a springing harebell. Another drops gently from tree to ground like a mellow apple. Among the roots of the old tree where they overhang the declivity, a broad straw hat surmounting a white jacket ascends, like a fast-growing mushroom, with a face as roguish beneath as Puck. . . . Oh, the weary years through which I used to ask of everybody that pretended to know, what Pestalozzianism was ! and none of them vi PREFACE had the sense to tell me that it is no ism at all, at all ! I have my answer now I feel it here. . . . Very cheering it is for those who grow faint and heartsick in battling for the world's good against the world's perversity. Look at those children ; they are spurred by no rivalry, they struggle for no prizes, they are not drilled in classes; and discipline what is their discipline ? * The sound of the child-striking rod These valleys and woods never heard ; Ne'er sighed at the threat of a task, Nor smiled when vacation appeared/ And yet they learn ; ay, learn abundantly. They know more of objects than others of their ages do of words. Their vocabulary has meanings to it, their counters represent something. And who will get on better with books, provided the books are worth getting on with ? They have the love of learning in them, and the love of their teacher, and these are two powers that draw them along faster than a pair of flying dragons. More- over, and that is the best of all their getting, they get understanding, and with all their learning they learn wisdom. It were a good place this for an adult school on the same principle ; everybody here seems rational and happy. 1 " I hope that the following essays, embodying my mother's thoughts and suggestions, may prove as vii PREFACE helpful to many parents and teachers as I know the Memoranda to have been in times past. I realise, however, that written words can never fully convey the impression of holiness and wisdom which her living presence gave to her own children. OCTAVIA HILL. June 1906. Vlll CONTENTS PAGE I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES 11 II. THE WILL 23 III. THE INTELLECT 33 IV. ON CERTAIN FACULTIES 47 V. ON SOME FAULTS AND HABITS ... 64 VI. MEMORANDA OF OBSERVATIONS AND EX- PERIMENTS IN EDUCATION 72 ix NOTES ON EDUCATION FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS I GENERAL PRINCIPLES GOD has given to women a very high and noble share of this world's work to do for Him. That share is education. Women are largely the educa- tors of the world. The first years of life are the most important, and these are almost wholly in their care. The task requires knowledge. No education of a girl should be considered complete which does not include instruction in the art and science of educa- tion. In some relation or other the task is pretty sure to fall to her. Education includes two branches, the care and development of the body, and the care and develop- ment of the mind. For the first a knowledge of physiology and the laws of health is required ; for the second a knowledge of the human mind and the laws of its development and health. A woman must study the constitution of the human body before she can wisely direct the diet, sleep, bathing, clothing, exercise in short, any of the details 11 GENERAL PRINCIPLES of a child's daily life details which seem so trivial, but which have, in fact, a mighty effect on health r temper, happiness, and consequently on mind and morals. Each educator should have a clear, strong aim ; make up her mind what she wishes the child to turn out, what sort of a human being it is her object to fashion. The object of education ought to be to produce in the being who is under care the Christ-like spirit viz. love to God and man, and the spirit of self- sacrifice. This is the highest state of man; and it can only be won by long, patient, and wise guidance. We are complex beings, living in a complex world, and many faculties must come in to enlighten us as to our practical carrying out of the spirit. We must be " wise as serpents," if we would be " harm- less as doves. 11 We need both the spirit and know- ledge. The object of Education, then, may be briefly stated to be the development of a sound body, of a sound mind, of a Christ-like spirit, or, as St. Paul calls it, charity. He does not mean by this word what we mean by it giving to the poor; on the contrary, he says, "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.'*'' He places charity above all knowledge. " Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all GENERAL PRINCIPLES faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing." He places it above self-sacrifice. "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." He tells us what charity does: "suffers long," "is kind," "rejoices in the truth," "bears," "believes," "hopes," "endures, all things." He tells us what charity does not. "It does not envy," or " vaunt " ; " it is not puffed up," " does not behave unseemly," " does not seek her own," " is not easily provoked," " thinks no evil," " does not rejoice in iniquity." The educator should be content with no lower standard than St. PauFs, either in herself or her pupil. Charity, or the Christian spirit, then, is that spirit which puts man in his true relation to God and to man. We cannot give this spirit either to ourselves or to our pupils ; but we can " quench the spirit." We can bring up a child so that the spirit will be stifled ; or, on the other hand, we can put impediments out of the way, and leave the nature free for the spirit to work upon it. You cannot make a rosebud open, but you can refrain from pulling open its folded petals, and so destroying them ; and you can refrain from removing it from the stem, and also from shutting it out from light, air, and rain. The teachers who pull the rosebud open are those who overwork and strain nature in their hurry to obtain results ; and this is never more disastrous than 13 GENERAL PRINCIPLES when the teacher wishes to force on the religious sentiment before the child can feel and understand. The teachers who remove the bud from the stem are those who sever a child's life from religion, having no care for it themselves, or who place a child in circum- stances where it cannot feel in its own nature the reason for what it is made to do ; for instance, why it should pray, why it should learn lessons, why it should give up to its playfellows. The nature dies when there is no connection between what you require the child to do, and what it likes to do or feels it a duty to do. The teachers who shut up the bud from the light, air, and sun, are those ignorant or indolent teachers who neglect to give the instruction, and to use the influences necessary for the growth of heart, and mind, and soul. To develop love to God and man is the end at which education should aim, and love is the means. We learn this last principle from the way in which God has ordained that life should begin. The infant, at its entrance into this world, is received with a flood of love; it brings exquisite happiness, and it is lured to the action which maintains its existence by the pleasure attending it. Life begins with happiness; and this instructs us how we ought to endeavour that it should go on. It is essential that childhood and youth should be happy, for on what children experience they build their opinions their faith in, or their mistrust of, God and man. 14 GENERAL PRINCIPLES Do not let us confuse indulgence with happiness. The two are not only not the same, but are incom- patible. No child is so miserable as the spoilt child, whose wishes are obeyed, and who is therefore kept in a continual fever of restless desire, first for one thing, then for another. Without the power of endurance, no happiness is possible to man or child ; and opportunities for its exercise are of daily occurrence. Make a child fearless of pain ; but seek to avoid its having any which wise management would avert. Wise management will in most cases ensure 1. Good health, a great source of enjoyment. 2. Obedience, freeing the child from restless wishes, punishment, and struggles of his will with yours. 3. Freedom, the utmost compatible with the child's physical and moral safety. Impose no unnecessary restrictions, and exact inexo- rably an instant obedience to duty. You have in this union of freedom and obedience ', added to the joyous sense of existence natural to healthy childhood, and the deeper joy of a sense of your unfailing love, the elements of a happy life. Yes; these four love, freedom, obedience, health are incontestably what the educator should aim at developing. Train the child to an instant obedience to duty, regardless of any reluctance. Let the words, "Is it right ? " be continually heard. Your love, strengthened by the voice of its own conscience, will induce the habit of bearing pain firmly, and of performing duty conscientiously. 15 GENERAL PRINCIPLES God's design in creating man was that man should arrive at sharing His Divine Nature. " Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," are words clear as light to show us God's intention in our creation, and the character we should aim at developing. The three attributes of God which Man should seek after are holiness, love, and truth. These are divine perfections in which man may share if he will, and so grow into the likeness of his Father which is in heaven. Pleasure and pain, put before the child as motives, foster its lower nature, and nourish selfishness. The only motives given by the wise teacher are three : first, obedience ; second, conscientiousness ; third, affection. A child must act either in obedience to a command, or because his conscience bids him, or led by affection to his teacher to follow out the teacher's wishes. From the cradle the child must be obedient, and when older he must realise that obedience is his prime duty. Obedience is obtainable from the very first hours of infancy. If a child is healthy and properly warmed, washed, fed, and clothed, there will be no pain in its existence, no crying, and no irritation. If you shock it with water too cold, or bandage it too tight with clothes, or pain it by feeding it amiss, then there will be suffering, cries, and re- sistance. But wise management will ordinarily secure comfort and ease to the child; and clumsy, ignorant management has this to answer for, that in addition to spoiling the child's delicate tissues and organs, 16 GENERAL PRINCIPLES it begins the resistance to authority, and lays the seeds of disobedience and struggle. All the actions necessary for the health and growth of the body are pleasurable. The new-born infant, as I have pointed out, is lured to take the milk that sustains its life by the pleasure attached to the act. If the mother's bosom were stuck all over with thorns, or if the milk scalded the child's mouth, it must inevitably perish, refusing to take nourishment. It was necessary to attract the human being by pleasure to nourish its body. Pleasure and the body are therefore always spoken of by divines and moralists as in strict relation. These two companions have often an ugly third conjoined with them, viz. sin. Pleasure, the flesh, and sin are in Scripture and elsewhere continually united in thought. The natural man, Adam, the man of sin, the old man, these are all scriptural terms in which the three ideas of pleasure, the body, and sin are included. What theologians call " original sin" is nothing but this natural and divinely-con- stituted allurement or tendency which draws us to the performance of acts agreeable to the senses. (It is true the evil passions of men are included in the idea of original sin ; but these are the fruit of later years, sprung from seed sown in the earliest.) Now how comes it that the love of pleasure, a feeling which is laid so deep in the foundations of our being that it is the very first sign of life we give, and which leads us on to those acts by which we live, from the first moment we draw breath till we cease to breathe, should be coupled in our minds, and not 17 B GENERAL PRINCIPLES wholly unjustly, with sin? Has God laid a snare for us at the very threshold of life ? Does He draw us on by a motive, and then punish us for obeying it ? Far from us be such a thought ! Let us firmly believe with St. James, " God tempts no one."" It is we who are wrong. And this is our error. Finding that it is easy to get others to do what we wish from a motive of pleasure, we presume to apply that stimulus ; we use it as a motive, instead of letting it lie where it began, in the depths of our nature, an instrument in God's hands inciting us to healthy physical action. The same may be said of pain. The fear of it should never be used as a motive. In short, pleasure and pain are consequences, not motives, and should always be kept in their proper place, viz. behind, and not before, our actions. If we are not to use pain and pleasure as motives, what motives are we to employ ? At first, obedience to command ; as conscience develops, obedience to its dictates; these, with love to the teacher, are all-sufficient. Think with joy and awe how beautiful by nature is the child; so beautiful that we are told "of such is the kingdom of heaven."" The parent should place it under such conditions as will develop the good only, the good folded up in it like the leaves in chest- nut buds. But we are clumsy. We do not let the child pass through the right experiences. For one thing, we often give it up to its own will at an age when it 18 GENERAL PRINCIPLES should have no will of its own, but be instantly obedient ; or, later on, we control its innocent healthy will when that should have free play ; or we make it obey us when no possible good, but harm rather, accrues to it by obedience. Not that we bid it do what is bad, but what it is not ready for. The great secret of education is to time and proportion what we require of the child, so that it shall feel the rightness and delight of its experiences. Obedience, even when it is hard, has its appropriate delight, when it has the celestial sources of reverence and love ; and these emotions must be innate in every human creature. The utter dependence of the infant, its pathetic helplessness, must create in it the sense of reverence, as the loving ministration of those on whom it depends for everything must create in it love. Thus, from the very beginning, has God linked reverence, love, and obedience together ; and freeing the obedience thereby from being that of a degraded slave, raised it into a joyous sympathy of soul in good. From the very first, in one sense, the child obeys conscience for conscience tells it should obey its parent. With opening intelligence it hears its own conscience giving commands ; let it never swerve from obedience to that voice ; to do what is right let that and that alone be the motive of every action. You are only treating it according to its nature in turning its view inwards and letting it contemplate the vision of its duty. There is "a light which lightens every one that comes into the world." It is 19 GENERAL PRINCIPLES pure and proportioned to his needs in the child : oh ! teach him always to seek its guidance, and walk in the path which its rays enlighten. There should not be many thorns to press on his little feet ; but such as there inevitably are, teach him early to trample on. Never, for pain or pleasure, let him wander from dictates of conscience. If you never put any other motive than duty before him, he will grow up to act from no other. It is perfectly easy to train a child to follow whatever motives you choose. The choice of good and bad lies in his nature, the development rests entirely with the educator. The choice of Hercules is fashioned in the cradle ; it is yours ; you have made it before lie makes it. If you have set pleasure and pain before him as guides in infancy, childhood, and youth, he will follow them; if you have always appealed to conscience, he will reverence and obey conscience. His soul will have tasted of sublime satisfaction, and be bound, in manhood, in conscious love to his Maker and his God. Education should lead the child through such ex- periences that by doing what is right he shall know what is right. We must know what is right for the child ; know its nature, and feed its faculties with food convenient for them, else disgust will ensue, and the nature will pine and perish. If it permanently dislikes what is right, such a state is unnatural, and is a proof of want of skill in manage- ment. For instance, if lessons are permanently dis- tasteful, the lessons themselves must be in fault. In such a case, we have not got down into the child's 20 GENERAL PRINCIPLES mind, and seen what ideas it is capable of receiving ; if we presented those ideas, the child would gladly seize them. It is as natural to rejoice in a new idea as to rejoice in a new toy or a new dress; but all is dull, blank, and dreary when ideas are confusedly heaped on the mind in which it has no interest. We are held up, as it were, and raised, by being always guided and always linked in loving union with a will higher than our own ; at first our parents' ; when old enough to know Him, God's. Those who seek to discard either form of obedience cast away the anchor of their soul, and drift at random on a stormy sea of tumultuous passions, which can only surround them with perpetual unrest and misery, and end in total shipwreck. Accustom the child from the first breath it draws to obedience, and let its experience be such as to create in it perfect trust and love, first to its parent, afterwards to God. In order that the child be happy, we should impose upon it no duties unsuited to its state of development ; but every faculty, physical, moral, and intellectual, which can be used should be used, and will prove a source of happiness ; for it is in the nature of things that happiness results from faculties used in right measure and way. The child should be allowed as much freedom as is consistent with its safety. We all know the delight of liberty and freewill ; and none are more susceptible of this happiness than children, and none suffer so sadly from vexatious restraint and interference. In- stead of being incessantly told to do this or not to do GENERAL PRINCIPLES that, a young child should be placed in circumstances where it will neither do harm nor suffer harm ; and then it should be left to its own devices. More especially for the first two or three years of its life it is better to contrive to avoid as much as possible the constant " do " and " don't " ; for instance, to put the knife and the candle beyond the little child's reach, rather than continually tell it not to touch them ; for though the child must be instantly obedient, it is our duty to see that we let it have the blessed sense of liberty as far as possible, and that its actions may spring from its own inward activity. The secret of progress is always to require a little effort, but one that will not overtax the powers. It is wretched mismanagement to require too much of the child ; on the other hand, let us not require too little. Obedience, fortitude, punctuality, neatness, conscien- tiousness, politeness, giving up to others, &c. &c., are habits ; the two first of which may be cultivated from the very cradle, the rest as soon as the child is old enough. Each age has its duties and faculties, which are the divinely-appointed sources of its joy, and we should take care to curtail no age of any, rob it of none, nor force any on it prematurely. Deprive no human creature of his seasons, but at every age let him have the pleasures and exercise the duties appropriate to his development. ' ' How many things by season seasoned are." II THE WILL I MAY dismiss in a very few words the subject of obedience. It is the first duty of the child, first in importance, and first in point of time ; it is the duty that meets each individual at the threshold of life, as it met the progenitors of the whole human race at the Creation of whom but two virtues were de- manded, industry and obedience. The feeble child, whose very life is at first at the mercy of those in whose charge he is, and who depends on them for all that constitute his happiness or misery during his early years, is placed at such great distance below his parents in knowledge and power that he may from his very first entrance into the world learn submission. Parents begin, and rightly, by requiring unreasoning submission. Not only does a continual struggle between the will of parent and child render all the little arrangements of life insuffer- ably difficult and harassing, but the child misses the ennobling and fortifying discipline gained through constant submission and constant exercise of self- control. In a thousand daily little occurrences a child, if left to himself, would act differently from THE WILL the prescribed rule; but, by habitually doing as he is told, his powers of self-control and habit of sub- mission to the rule of right are strengthened, and by this means he is gradually fitted to do battle with the greater temptations of manhood, and prepared for victory in that combat. A very few weeks have elapsed from the birth of the child; and he already begins to have his own notions of what is pleasant. These notions would often lead him on a dangerous way ; the parent is there, a visible law, already making feelingly known to him that the things which he i thinks good he is not to have, and that an incomprehensible power rules him, giving and withholding pleasures independently of his will. The little eye, at first barely conscious of the light of day, soon distinguishes in the midst of that light one face whose beaming smiles he answers with his soft smile. By degrees, with the proverbial, physiog- nomical power of childhood, he feels in that face behind the calm greatness, the inexorable firmness, the noble, deep tenderness a something he cannot comprehend, a mysterious, holy power; he feels this, and submits. Happy the parent who has never lost the vantage-ground given her by nature, but has maintained unquestioned control over her child ; happy the child to whom disobedience has never occurred as a possibility. Such cases there are, though too rare. The children of my acquaintance, of whom it can be said that they never in their lives have disobeyed, have been very strong-willed children, in all cases the off- THE WILL spring of very strong-willed parents, whose manner was that of conscious command. I do not think any one was ever disobeyed who did not expect to be so. The children I have in my mind were extremely nervous and excitable ; and it would be difficult to estimate the value, even physically, of the result to them of having parents whose control over them was entire : there is no rest to children like that of being governed wisely and despotically. Amongst the many advantages of implicit, prompt, unfailing obedience, one is the beneficial effect on health. To have children obedient, as these were, four things are necessary: a strong will in the parent, a manner expressive of that strength of will, wisdom, and extreme tenderness. To these I ought to add a fifth, that the parent should know that his authority is derived from God, and must be used for the purposes of God ; that is to say, to lead the child up to goodness. A parent in whom this consciousness is very strong and abiding will have that in his manner which will both ensure and ennoble the obedience of his children ; whilst a parent who lacks this religious sentiment will never win the sort of confidence or the entire reverence which flows irresistibly towards the religious parent. I do not, of course, mean that a parent is to state in words to a child the ground of the authority he wields over it ; he must so use his power that the child shall neither inquire into its source, nor scan its limits, nor disregard its mandates ; all I mean to say is, that manner is an expression of thought and feeling, and that if a parent acts from religious motives it will be 25 THE WILL apparent in his manner, and impress his children, who in obeying him will feel they are submitting to a holier authority than the children of an irreligious man will. Children feel long before they can understand; and they soon learn to discriminate as to what manner of spirit those about them are of. I think, in short, the obedience partakes of the nature of the command. The obedience of the chil- dren who, in this metropolis, thieve at the command of their parents, must be a very different feeling from the obedience of those same children who, on their exit from a reformatory, obey the precepts of their instructor and steal no more. The obedience of the daughter of Herodias, when she asked for John the Baptist's head, must have been a very different obedience from that of Jephthah's daughter when she yielded herself up to fulfil her father's vow. In a word, the nobler the motive from which the command issues the nobler is the obedience, and also the more entire and the more willing. This principle explains the reason why high-spirited children often do not obey servants, and why all children who are much with servants usually become disobedient. Servants are apt to see nothing in a fault but its consequences, and no ground for their own authority but this supposed right to order and interdict in their little world, the nursery. " Master Dickey ! 7 will not have you dirty your clean socks " or, " Miss Mary ! you shall do as I tell you," are modes of thought and speech not likely to awaken much high and sympathetic obedience in the child. If Dickey 26 THE WILL wants to go in a dusty or miry road in quest of a lost kite or any other similar purpose of pleasure, Nurse had better sympathise in that object, and smile good- naturedly on the dirty socks ; for, if you would have children care for the objects to which you would lead them, you must care for those to which nature leads them. If Nurse has sympathy with Dickey's search for his lost kite, or whatever other childish happiness he was in quest of, she will find him better disposed another time to sympathise in her anxiety for his neat dress. If, however, Dickey is bent on dirtying his socks for no adequate reason for the same children soon become aware they ought not to wet, soil, or tear their clothes recklessly a quiet appeal to his conscience (" Is that right ? ") will waken something in the little breast which, if always appealed to, grows into a judge whose sentence no child hears unmoved. When a child does wrong, let the voice of its own conscience, strengthened by your rebuke, be its only punishment : and when it does well, let the voice of its own con- science, strengthened by your love, constitute its only reward. Train it to judge its own actions by the standard of right, as far as it has been given that standard ; and depend upon it that you will soon be able to do away with all punishments save its own consciousness of wrong-doing, and the loss of your sympathy when it acts wrongly. No child can habitually be called to self-judgment without soon beginning to reform ; if the reflection of himself in the moral looking-glass is ugly, he invariably strives to change himself; so naturally does man love the good 27 THE WILL and fair. The parent, however, who undertakes to lead a child by the voice of its conscience, must be one whom the child reveres for his holiness and wisdom, and loves for his sympathy in all his little pleasures, as well as in his highest feelings ; and the parent should, moreover, know how to inspire in the child's mind that hope nay, that confidence that it can conquer its faults, without which no progress in self-improve- ment ever was made by any human being. To return to the question of nursery government. The less innate powers of ruling nurses have, the more do they need all possible support from those whose agents they are. Children should be told to obey them ; and parents should never speak disparagingly of them before children, unless they have been guilty of some serious fault, against which the children should be warned. If a nurse is not fit for her place, dis- missal is the proper course. To hear those who are older than themselves, and in authority over them, found fault with, habituates children to censorious- ness, and shakes the foundations of confidence, and therefore of obedience to all seniors whatever. Nurses, governesses, relatives any persons, in short, who undertake the management of children for parents often find their authority disliked, simply because that of the parents is preferred. This happens with good children as well as with naughty ones. With the former it springs from an almost fanatical love of the parent ; with the latter it is one form of the rebellious spirit : they hardly obey their parents, and spurn the authority of those who, they think, have still less right to control 28 THE WILL them. Parents must support the authority of all such persons as they employ about their children. I re- member how a good and great man acted on one occasion. His little daughter, at seven years old, returning from her first lesson from a writing-master, threw her arms round her father's neck, and, sobbing passionately, exclaimed, " Papa ! Mr. Baird " (the writing-master) "wanted me to begin my 0*3 in the middle, and I wouldn't, because you always begin them at the top." The father, though both amused and touched at his little girl's vehement loyalty to him, answered, " Oh, but you had better do as Mr. Baird tells you ; always obey your teachers always learn in the way your teacher thinks best." The next writing day the child was no longer unconquerably obstinate, as she had been on the previous occasion : she felt she was obeying her father in obeying her master ; but every o she made in the master's way certainly the right way was a bitterness to her. Having said, in the most emphatic language that occurs to me, that obedience the most unqualified must be exacted from children, I hope I run no risk of being misunderstood if I proceed to state what appears to me the whole object of procuring this entire and habitual submission. It is to enable and habituate the child to do without hesitation that which is right. The parent knows what is right, commands it; the child must obey. But as in infancy the child must be carried, yet in due time learns to walk alone and goes whither he will, THE WILL so his mind, which should at first, and from the very first, be obedient to parental commands, in due time must be free, and his actions spontaneous. All the command exercised by the parent has regard to this moment ; all he does is a preparation for the time when his child, emancipated from his control, shall be a free agent. All education has for its object the education of the will ; the parent desiring that, when his child reaches manhood, he shall will to do what is right. Now, the propensity of human nature being to seek happiness and to avoid pain, educators have made large use of this instinct, and for the most part have used no other incentives to the will than these motives of pleasure and pain. Does a child act well, he is re- warded with some pleasure invented for the purpose of associating happiness with that good act; or, if he behaves ill, he is punished by some means invented for the purpose of associating pain with that evil action. From this mode of treatment two results follow. One is that the child learns in time to avoid the evil action, and to repeat the good action, for the sake of the painful or pleasurable consequences attached to each. So far the treatment acts as intended, and the child's conduct improves. But, meanwhile, another less ob- vious result is also taking place concurrently. This constant appeal to his love of pleasure and fear of pain fosters the natural instinct above named to that degree that the individual becomes intensely selfish, and carries into the business of life the ignoble spirit of early education. We need not wonder at the prevailing selfishness of men, when we remember how almost uni- 30 THE WILL versal is the practice of appealing in their early years to their love of their own happiness and dread of their own misery. This instinctive love of happiness is implanted in us for a wise and gracious purpose; it is, in fact, abso- lutely necessary to so feeble a being as man, placed in a world which would crush him but for the strong instinct that leads him to defend himself from all adverse forces, and seek after all those which are beneficial to him. This conservative instinct is made so strong, ex- pressly that man be induced to desire self-preservation ; parents need not side with it. All their influences should tend the other way ; to develop other instincts no less existent though latent the instincts which link the child to its Maker and to its fellow-creatures. By what other motives than the love of his own happiness and fears of his own pain can a child be governed ? By reverence and conscience. He is to do right simply and only because it is the will of God, not because it will make him happy. It is true that God does annex happiness to the per- formance of His will ; but that is not the motive which should sway us ; the consequences of our actions should only be contemplated by us for the purpose of seeing whether they are such as lead us to believe that our action is right, whether in doing it we are performing the will of God. Now what is the will of God ? We can have no doubt or difficulty in answering. We have but to look at the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, to under- stand precisely the life and feelings God requires in 31 THE WILL us. We are to do His will, which is to labour for the good of others even at the cost of agony to ourselves. We are to love God perfectly and man perfectly, and reckon our own happiness and misery as of no account. Shall we ever be able to train a child to this life by rewards and punishments ? Must we not rather teach him to despise pain and pleasure ? Heathens and savages have done this from some false idea; but Christians may do it from true faith and a true loyalty to God. The whole character of a man's action depends on its motive. Regulus went to death for his country a noble patriotism, worthy of endless honour and love. But Christ submitted Himself to death because it was the will of God. We all feel that is the true thing, there is the model for us; we see that thus man is linked with God, consciously performs a part in His scheme, and thus, while thinking only of submission to His will, does, by the way, the truest, greatest service to his fellow-beings. Let us early teach the child, then, that right is right because it is the will of God; and when he asks, " How am I to know the will of God ? " answer, " The will of God is the good of His creatures : all action of yours, therefore, that conduces to the good of others is right; and that is the object for which you should live." Ill THE INTELLECT GRANTING that the will of God is that man should labour for the benefit of his fellow-men, we must, in order to carry out this will, become acquainted with the laws of God's universe. It is obvious that, before a man can cure disease, he must study anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, like Boerhaave, Sydenham, Harvey, and later scientists; before he can be a useful missionary, he must study languages, theology, and many of the mechanical arts, as do the Moravians; before he can teach others, he must himself be learned, and moreover be skilled in the art of education, like Pestalozzi ; if he wishes to benefit the world by artist work, he must discover the secrets of his art, and acquire its special manipu- lation, like Raphael, Michael Angelo, and Beethoven. Knowledge is power ; and when that power is directed to the benefit of mankind, the gift is subservient to its highest, its ordained purpose. In a school in which the boys were permitted to use the school library, and rewarded for any voluntary studies they entered into over and above the regular school work, great encouragement and opportunity 83 c THE INTELLECT were afforded for the cultivation of individual talent and taste, and, in after life, the result of this wise stimulus was often traceable. I remember one in- stance. A lad at this school had learnt, in the course of his private reading, that the Norwegians had a bad, wasteful method of tanning. He spent much time and money, when he grew to manhood, in going to Norway, and endeavouring to introduce a better system into that branch of business with what result I never heard ; but I adduce it as a simple little example of the manner in which knowledge guided by benevolence will choose and find out its own way of benefiting the world around. It is quite unnatural for learning to be distaste- ful to children. Their natural curiosity inclines them to love new ideas ; and, besides, the exercise of the intellectual faculties is naturally delightful; after a good lesson a child is sensible of a far higher satis- faction than he knows after a good dinner, or after a good game of play. Distaste for lessons must be produced either by the dry ness of the study, that is to say, the want of interesting ideas associated with it, or by the pupil's inability to see the use of what he is taught ; or the lessons, instead of being insensibly progressive, are confused, and take uncomprehended strides; or the pupils are given too much to learn at a time, or too little, or too irregularly; so that they are discouraged by getting on too slowly in the former case, and by forgetting what they once knew in the latter; or lessons are not properly balanced with 34 THE INTELLECT their natural relief of physical exercise ; or the pupil lacks that strong sense of duty which should come to his aid on those occasions when his interest or perseverance flags ; or, lastly, the pupil has not the sympathy of fellow-scholars. It is often found that children who dislike lessons at home take a new start at school. The truth is, they catch from their teachers and schoolmates a sympathetic ardour. At school the life of both the grown-up people and the young people is lessons ; at home the grown-up people have other pursuits, which a child finds more to its taste than lessons; it prefers to these last the drive, or the shopping with its mother, or such-like pastimes. Away from these, at school it finds learning the one thing valued ; and it takes up the ambitions and pursues the objects which it sees others aiming at; and, under this stimulus of sympathy, the progress in learning ac- quires quite a new rapidity. I use the word sympathy, not emulation, which latter, in opposition to the received authority of the world, though in deference to a higher authority, that of St. Paul, I hold to be one of the bad means which people think justify the end. Emulation is not a noble motive ; it is only a form of selfishness. The wish to excel a rival is vanity and ill-nature combined. Another power that comes into play where there are numbers learning together is the force of example. When example produces its right effect, it does not lead us to copy actions, but reveals to us the high source of these actions, and through sympathy awakens in us 35 THE INTELLECT the better spirit. "Never point out any one as an example to your child," says an author, " for the same action will have quite a different motive when original and when copied." That is true; but when our con- ceptions reach to the spirit of a man's actions, we derive a very sensible inspiration therefrom. The only way in which example really profits the beholder is when the mind is led up to the source or principle from which the exemplary person acts. Lessons, we repeat, may be made, and ought to be made quite as delightful as any occupation whatever. If it unfortunately happens that a child does not like to do a lesson, the teacher's best course then is to encourage him to get the lesson done for duty's sake. But it is a pity, and shows something wrong in the mode of instruction, when lessons are a battle-field in which dislike and conscientiousness struggle for mastery continually. It would be better that self-control were brought into play on the less important matters of life ; every day of a child's existence he is told to do a number of things he either does not care or does not like to do, but does from obedience ; it would be better if lessons could be taken out of this sphere of obedience, and moved into that of pleasant duty. You must ask yourself what is your object. Do you desire your child to do his hated, ever-hated lessons because it is his duty, and so make his studies a moral discipline ? Under such a system the child's life is embittered, his health more or less suffers, and the amount he learns is a mere nothing compared to what it might be. OF THE UNIVERSITY THE INTELLECT Or do you, on the contrary, wish him to do his lessons partly for the sake of duty, partly for the sake of acquiring learning ? Then make study pleasant. And how is that to be accomplished ? First, by good teaching ; secondly, by letting the child often taste the sweet satisfaction of an approving conscience. This last he cannot do if he is badly taught. The duty in that case becomes too hard, too full of disgust and struggle. A certain amount of drudgery there must be technical and mechanical skill cannot be acquired without ; but the wise teacher proportions these efforts of perseverance and will to the child's strength, encourages him to do his duty, as all duty should be done, bravely ; and, when it is done, rewards him with his sympathy. The child feels also the ap- probation of his own conscience ; and this, with the teacher's sympathy, and the sense of something new acquired, will induce him to work on perseveringly and happily. Let him feel that lessons are the duty of his young life ; give him such only as he can do with proper effort ; rigidly exact that amount from him that is to say in other words, help his shrinking will with your resolute will ; and, when the lesson is triumphantly mastered, the child will have gained not only a little bit of useful knowledge, but, what is of infinitely more value to him, will have felt the satisfaction there is in doing right. There should be just enough of effort of will about the lessons to procure the child the daily satisfaction of feeling he is doing his duty well. When the lessons are in a chronic state of being ill done, or not done, or 37 THE INTELLECT done with painful effort; to all the other ills attached to this unhappy state of things, is added the great evil of the child's being under the deadening influence, the hurtful consciousness, of an unsatisfied or dissatisfied conscience. It follows that he either becomes callous or despairing ; and in childhood, the season of growth, when every day should be marked by joyousness, he loses hope and heart ; and the little mind, which should be gaily gathering golden truths, falls into fruitless stagnation, cheerless gloom, or sullen irritation. All this is the consequence of bad teaching ; hated lessons betoken bad teaching. The teacher's duty is to reduce the pain of learning to a minimum, to raise its pleasures to a maximum. This can hardly be accomplished without a knowledge of the laws of the human mind ; and we cannot wonder that the art of education is in its present imperfect state, when we reflect how rarely educators act upon principles of mental philosophy known to them. The husband- man tries to learn something of the nature of the soil he is about to cultivate ; but the far nobler, subtler, more complex organism of the mind, is it not aban- doned to persons who in their utter ignorance rush into the field of education, and try all manner of methods blindly, in the dark, on the delicate culture committed to their rash, presumptuous hands ? There is no more useful study than that of the laws of mind applied to practical education. Let me take one or two of those laws, just to show what light they throw on the educator's path, how surely they point out to him, step by step, how he should walk. 38 THE INTELLECT LAW I. The senses are the first inlets of knowledge. The great and good Pestalozzi, whose genius flashed over Europe the light of new and vivifying truths relating to education, made large use of this law of nature. His pupils began every science by some sort of appeal to the senses, and Froebel in his Kinder-garten bases his system on this law. Ideas, some of them at least, are remembered sensations. When the child's ideas were as much a portion of his mind as the sensations, Pestalozzi withdrew the objects of sense, and the child worked with his ideas. Carry out this principle as far as possible into every department of knowledge. Always begin with the senses if you can. In learning a modern language, for instance, teach the child the names of the objects in the room and out of doors, that in looking at them he may recall the foreign word. Let him copy from books in that language, that his eye may become familiar with the words ; let him read aloud, so that through the ear he may learn the words. Verbs, and all those parts of a language which have to be learnt by heart, should be read, said, and written ; then you call in the aid of eye, ear, and hand. Let the teacher rest assured that the more he can use the natural door of the senses, the greater will be the throng of ideas that will enter the pupil's mind; and they will not only be numerous, but of the most precious value, because of their distinctness. 39 THE INTELLECT LAW II. Usefulness is attractive, uselessness is repulsive. A great deal of the dislike to lessons which children feel arises from their opinion that they are "no good." Children are not judges of the matter, and have only to learn what is given them. Neverthe- less, remove this stumbling-block in their way as much as possible; take the child with you in your plans, get him to see what you are aiming at, and, ten to one, he will work with you instead of against you. Pestalozzi taught his pupils geometry by send- ing them out to measure the mountains and take surveys of the country. As soon as a child uses its knowledge it will lose it no more. Therefore let a child teach; there is no better way of applying his learning. And there is another advantage in setting a child to teach, viz. that he learns to sympathise with teachers; he knows how he likes his pupil to behave, and insensibly acquires the docility and energy of a good learner himself. Let a child practise arithmetic and tables of weights and measures on the weekly bills ; sing his new song to some bed- ridden old woman; write a French letter to an absent French friend ; play his new sonata at a concert for the poor; get up an historical play; as much as possible let him apply what he knows to practical life. This will give precision and zest to knowledge; and the child will feel it to be delight- ful that from the dry desert of study there should bloom such pleasant roses. 40 THE INTELLECT Even lessons themselves should teem with imaginary applications of knowledge to real life. Mental arith- metic is such an application. In geography, suppose a child to have learnt by heart what are the products of various countries, how refreshingly to the memory, wearied with a string of words, would it come, were the teacher to take up the daily newspaper, and turning to the article " Ship News," call upon the pupil to say what those vessels sailing from different ports might be carrying. Even a very little child would be pleased to bring a few currants from Zante in a tiny paper boat across the map; and might remember henceforth the distance that separates England from that island, and the waters a ship must pass over in such a voyage. Children are eminently practical beings; they love to feel themselves in the living world, taking a part in what is going on in it; and the teacher should make this charming sociability of nature, if not the body of his instruction, at least its wings. LAW III. As in the world of matter the greatest results are produced by the gradual aggregation of infini- tesimal atoms, so in mind the increase in knowledge should be by constantly occurring, but minute, acquisitions. The steps of the ladder of learning should be like those by which you ascend to the Cathedral of Lausanne and the top of St. Paul's in London, very gradual. Michelet relates that, when he was a young boy, he used, on his way to the printing-office where 41 THE INTELLECT he worked, to call at the house of a priest, who gave him a line or two of Latin to learn, which he repeated to himself at the leisure moments which chanced to come in between his work. In this way he acquired Latin without fatigue, and with intense pleasure. He makes the remark that children are like narrow-necked bottles ; pour little or pour much, they will only take in a certain quantity at a time. Early childhood is the time for learning a great deal that would only be learned with tedium at a more advanced age. Reading, writing, tables of weights and measures, historical dates, foreign languages, the piano, needlework, these are subjects requiring drudgery and repetition : if begun early and pursued steadily and slowly, much may be accomplished (almost imperceptibly), both in actual acquisition and in the development of the faculties. The rules to observe are, give very little new to do at a time ; let that new always be based upon the old, let there be a great deal of repetition, let the child apply his knowledge, and associate all the interesting ideas you can with the sub- jects taught, teach brightly and cheerfully; no child can like to learn if the teacher does not love to teach. Repetition is too little used ; children without it are like the snail that crawled up three feet of a wall by day and slipped back two at night; a child should never be allowed to lose what it has once gained, and repetition should fix in the mind what has once been planted there. It gives a child a great sense of power to have the things which it has committed to memory spring out when needed for use. THE INTELLECT But the purpose of the early education should be rather to develop the faculties than to fill the mind with stores of facts. Much as I rejoice to see the system of examinations which are most useful as a test of what may be the fund of varied knowledge in the mind of a boy or girl of sixteen yet I must remark that the tendency of examinations has been to introduce a system of cramming. Now really a far better test of the education of a young child is in the questions he asks rather than in those he answers. Examinations hold out to teachers temptation to do exactly what I have been deprecating, hurry on the accumulation of producible knowledge, whilst some of the finest powers of the mind are either strained till they give way, or, on the other hand, lie dormant. Rousseau was not so very far wrong when he defined good education to be the art of losing time. The phrase, "art of losing time," implies just what I advocate, that very slow development which proceeds unceasingly, in which the teacher rather follows nature and assists her than forces or even guides her, which treatment she bounteously rewards in the fulness of time, when the carefully-nourished but unforced intellect puts forth its healthy, vigorous powers, and branches out in this and that direction ; as the plant hidden in the snow- covered earth there matures, and astonishes us in the spring by the rapidity and vitality of its growth. Let the teacher remember that in early childhood it is not so much what the child learns, but the faculties he employs in the learning, which are of consequence. THE INTELLECT LAW IV. Physical exercise is the natural restorative after mental exertion. Elihu Burritt, the American blacksmith and linguist, knowing I am afraid to say how many languages, tells us that, when he had nearly ruined his health by over- study, he went back to his forge, and, working at it all day long, quite regained his physical and mental health. Many years since there was a school in Nottinghamshire in which the boys worked from five in the morning till nine or ten at night without feeling the slightest fatigue. They had four hours for meals, gymnastics, and play; their lessons were each fifty minutes long, and they always ran out for ten minutes in every lesson hour to their playground or their work- shops. Two afternoons a week, and on Sunday after- noon, they took long walks of many miles in the lovely country about Sherwood Forest. The boys were the picture of health, notwithstanding their close and severe studies; it was the judicious interchange of these with games and exercise that made such work compatible with robust health and the most joyful youthful spirits. Not only the amount of time devoted to lessons, but the time of day for them, ought to vary with the age of the pupil. A large part of a child's life ought to be passed in the open air. The middle of the day in summer when it is too hot, winter evenings when it is too cold to be out of doors, are periods when young children will be glad of intellectual occupation ; 44 THE INTELLECT as they grow older, more of the day should be given up to study and less to out-of-door pursuits; but exercise and lessons should follow each other in quick succession, if you wish to keep body and mind in tone. Before concluding the subject of lessons, I would observe that a change of rooms and a change of teachers is good for children. At the above-named school there was a room for each study, and a master who taught one subject only. This change of lesson, room, and master, with exercise between the lessons, was very refreshing to the boys. And the masters here were not overworked. When not teaching they were in their own library studying. Study has been found by teachers the most reviving influence, so much so that it seems as if all teachers ought to take up some study as a refreshing counter- action to the exhaustion of teaching. No tired teachers ought to be with children. It is very bad for both parties. If the teacher is happy, fresh, and bright, the lesson almost always goes well ; and the recreation time will be pleasantly spent if the teacher is in good health and spirits. Pleasure is an exaltation of the powers of life. The teacher's intellect and emotions must be keen if she would inspire interest. Speaking of persons of strong emotion, Mr. Bain says, " Their presence is a moral power ; they carry others before them ; to sail with them is easy to oppose them arduous. The man of strong feeling adequately expressed is likely to be the favourite. Being made to feel is the final end 45 THE INTELLECT of all our labour, and he that can effect this for us is the man after our own heart." Too much is in general expected of one and the same person. A task which requires so much exertion of will, of intellect, of sympathy, and of physical strength as education, ought not to be continued all day long by one person with the same set of children. And the supervision of the hours of study and the hours of recreation ought not to be undertaken by one individual; for so there is no time for the teacher's mind and body to recruit. Fancy a girl of twenty years of age spending eleven hours of every day with a set of spoiled children, not seeing anybody else, not even the father and mother of her pupils, separated from her own family by the whole length of England. Such cases there are ; and these show how lamentably ignorant parents must be of what it is reasonable to expect from an educator. The latter is not the only sufferer; the children are punished for their parents* ignorance and unkindness ; for, from a jaded solitary, no good education can proceed. 46 IV ON CERTAIN FACULTIES THE cultivation of the faculties is the special object to be aimed at in childhood. Among the most important of these are the faculties of reason, attention, memory, imagination, the religious and moral faculties, and also habits of industry, quick- ness, helpfulness, &c. It seems needless to enlarge upon the necessity of training the reason; every lesson, every circum- stance of life, should be the means of developing that noble power, until the time arrives when it can grapple with those speculative studies or scientific researches that are more particularly its province. A great nicety in education consists in giving such information as the child ought not to lose time in searching out, and in allowing him to discover what he should find out for himself. Under the first head are words. The system of teaching a foreign language by interlinear translation is a sensible saving of time ; one acquires a copia verborum much better so, than by looking out words in the dictionary. Words we cannot spend too little time in acquiring. But when you wish to cultivate the reasoning powers, make 47 CERTAIN FACULTIES large use of the Socratic method, questioning. It is one of the mental laws on which a teacher should act that the pupil's mind is much more active when he gives you ideas than when you give him ideas. Grammar and the analysis of poetry, and arith- metic and geometry, are all excellent subjects on which to exercise, and by which to cultivate the reason; but everything in education should tend to its development. That this is not generally aimed at we must suppose ; for the numbers of good reasoners to be met with is small, particularly among women. The attention is a power which should be sedulously cultivated. Some persons can abstract their thoughts so entirely as to pursue abstruse studies in a room where conversation is going on ; others have difficulty in fixing their thoughts for a moment. Children of this latter kind are often clever, imaginative, and quick, and only need training to have good in- tellectual powers. Begin by observing what are the ideas to which by nature they are the most willing to attend ; and in the first instance work these, developing thus habits of attention which by degrees can be applied to other than their favourite studies. Volatile children should have their reason and their memory much exercised ; for both these develop, and require fixed attention. The secret, however, of gaining the attention is to gain the will. Inspire a child with ambition to do his lessons well and quickly ; set him or better, let him set himself a task to be done in a certain time ; the attention will follow as a matter of course. 48 CERTAIN FACULTIES Be content at first with small efforts. These, con- stantly repeated, will work wonders. Pestalozzi at one time undertook the charge of some children of the lowest class, waifs and strays wandering along the high- roads seeking a new home, their native town having been burnt by the French. These poor little refugees, the children of beggars and in some cases of thieves, were utterly ignorant and unruly. He got them to pay attention whilst he held up his finger, during which time he would tell them something interesting, or which he wished them to remember. Then he re- leased them to their play and romps. By degrees he trained them to attend for longer and longer periods ; and at last they became thoroughly disciplined and apt scholars. I may mention, by the way, that these same children grew rapidly in their morals, as well as intel- lectually, under Pestalozzi's fostering care. Some months after they had been with him, when he told them of other children driven from home like them- selves by the chances of war, they exclaimed, " Do, Mr. Pestalozzi, let them come here to us ! " "But the Government won't give me more money than now to buy food.'" "They shall have half ours," answered the children; and the orphaned children were received. To return to our subject. Encourage lawn tennis, cricket, croquet, and similar games ; you can find higher use in the study for the faculty of attention deve- loped in games. In class, let one child read a para- graph and another tell the substance of it; nothing, perhaps, more trains the attention than accustoming a 49 D CERTAIN FACULTIES child to relate or to write a recollection of what he has read to himself, or what he has heard in a lecture or sermon. Children should write their recollection or sermons ; it will prevent the habit of inattention during service ; and Sunday afternoon or evening could hardly be better spent by the teacher than in looking over and enlarging in conversation upon the subject-matter of such recollections. Out of such conversations often arises the opportunity of making ineffaceable im- pressions. Children's recollections of sermons will be fragmentary ; but let not that discourage either them or the teacher : it will be the teacher's task to link the thoughts and show their connection. Practice will improve the power of memory and expression, till the child's recollection will be what a girl once called her own. In answer to her sister's question on leaving their place of worship, " Could she remember much of the sermon ? " " Oh," said she gaily, " I have a nice little packet neatly tied up." It seems scarcely necessary to add a caution that nothing touching religion should be in the nature of task-work. To obviate the fatigue of writing, a young child, until he could use his pen with ease, might give his recollections viva voce ; and as writing much with a pen spoils a hand unless quite formed, the recollec- tion might be done on a slate, or with pencil in a book, even when the child is pretty well advanced in penmanship. (Always require neat writing on every occasion whatever, whether pen or pencil be used.) An opinion given by the teacher at the end of each recollection, written or spoken, always in the kindest 50 CERTAIN FACULTIES spirit, will stimulate the child to do his best. He will have many more ideas than he can write ; but he will learn to condense them if the teacher shows him occasionally how he could have said the same thing more briefly. Yet it needs skill not to alter the child's style too much; he is discouraged if he sees his theme turned topsy-turvy. Two little girls whose voluntary poems were over-corrected ceased altogether to compose verses ; they were so discouraged. If done sympathetically, the Sunday teaching (in which the parent or teacher, from the treasury of his mind, will bring forth those highest thoughts, which in the hurry of work-a-day life do not shape themselves into words), far from being a task, will excite in the child at the time the most delightful emotions, and in manhood be found among the most precious of child- hood's memories ; and the solemn, tender words uttered on these occasions will be such " as the blest heart records For many an after moment's long delight/' The imagination is a power of first-rate importance. On its proper cultivation and direction the moral and intellectual development greatly depend ; through this faculty we feel the sufferings and joys of others; through it we grasp the truth of religion, science, and the fine arts. Some imagination is necessary to carry on even the humblest processes of the mind, and it enters largely into the workings of the sublimest. If people wish to have their children good, they should keep them as much as possible during all the 51 CERTAIN FACULTIES first years of life from a knowledge of evil. This treatment gives a noble stamp to the soul which nothing afterwards can efface. The child that has learnt that God is good by feeling that the world is beautiful and happy, and human beings in its little world kind and good, will preserve this impression of God and men and things through life, and not easily lose hope and faith when beset by suffering, and made feelingly conscious that bad people exist, and that much suffering falls to the lot of each one of us in this mortal life. Show the bright, fair side of things to childhood for this world has two sides : not only will the child be saved a thousand painful exaggerated fears, and horrible imaginings, but will grow up with the impression that good is the real lasting thing that which lives and grows that for which God created the world; and therefore in manhood will feel that evil is the accident, the transitory circumstance, which must decay and perish. And the man brought up with this high, pure standard will not rest, but he will do battle for the right, and strive to realise the dreams of childhood, at least in his sphere. When I say, show children the fair side of the world, I mean do not expose to them the sins of it. Physical suffering they may and ought to see in order to alleviate it. The privations of poverty, the suffer- ings of disease, have in them nothing degraded or degrading. It is the ignorance, the vice, the moral squalor, which I would hide from children till their souls could feel all the sadness of it, yet grapple with that sadness in the only efficient way, viz. in religious 52 CERTAIN FACULTIES faith and trust, setting to work at some sort of reform. But what do we do ? We give our children such books as "Jack the Giant-Killer" and "Cinderella," filling their imaginations through the first with inhuman cruelties, and through the second with jealousies and injustices of which children should form no conception. Some people think that to inure children to tales of horror is to inure them to pain. No; by associating evil with fun, you render children callous to the pain of others ; Nature takes care they shall not be callous to their own ; so the consequence is that most grow up careful of their own, careless of other people's happiness. Depend upon it, children should not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ; they should dwell in innocence in Eden as long as possible. Put the knowledge of evil off till the child is able to know it as a thing to be hated and destroyed because contrary to the will of God, and the evil-doer to be pitied because separated for the time being in spirit from God ; and do not, by an early initiation into knowledge of moral evil, deaden the sense of it, so that at the last it comes to be looked upon either as a matter of fun, or as a matter of course. History is a study which is healthful or noxious, according to the spirit in which it is taught. Read in one way, it is a mere catalogue of human crimes ; read in another, it affords the most convincing of all proofs that a God of goodness is at the helm of human affairs. For what do we see? That the 53 CERTAIN FACULTIES stable things are not the temporal, but the spiritual powers. Where are Greece, Rome, Macedon ? Gone. But the words of the Son of God remain; and still does their sway steal on with ever-gathering power, encroaching more and more on the doleful regions of sin and woe, till at length " all the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ." Books of imagination for children should not be tales of moral evil looked upon as fun, or hopelessly left unchallenged as a thing that must be. Evil should always be looked upon as a thing to be pitied, battled with, and terminated. The best imaginative books for children are tales of moral beauty, books of adventure true to nature "Robinson Crusoe," for example personifications as in fables and in Andersen's stories, poems setting forth natural, moral, and heroic beauty. If spirits are introduced in fiction they should always be represented as good. A child should ever have the idea that whatever is spiritual is good. Children soon learn to divide the world into good and bad people, and become aware of the fight that is going on between the two principles. Now the spiritual world, the unseen, should ever be associated in the child's mind with good ; else it has a haunting fear of unknown, invisible influences that may hurt it. Whereas all that is above it should be pictured to the child as friendly, beneficent, and powerful. " Till I was about seven years old," said a lady to me, "I used to suffer horribly from vague, imaginary fears, especially in the dark. My mother 54 CERTAIN FACULTIES cured me of these once and for ever. I do not recall her exact words, I have lost them entirely ; but she herself seemed so fully certain of the ceaseless watch- fulness of God that I have felt Him near me from that hour, and nothing since has ever been able to make me afraid. I always feel under His protection." All spirits should in fiction be represented as servants of Him whose name is Love. The above anecdote shows us one reason why a child's life is sensibly embittered by a darkened imagination. When very young he is crushed by a sense of evil; as he grows older he becomes familiarised with the thought of evil. Now good education would just reverse this process; it would so familiarise the young child with good that he should be gay, open, and unsuspicious ; and, as he grew older, and the knowledge of moral evil dawned on him, he should shrink away from evil as an abhorred thing, pity it as an unhappy thing, and know it to be a transitory thing. There comes a time for all things, therefore a time when a child must learn the existence of moral evil in order that he may defend himself from it ; and, accord- ing to circumstances, this knowledge should be withheld or imparted ; the evil day being put off as long as it safely can be postponed. There is danger that a sen- sitive child, who had been brought up in a sort of moral hothouse from which evil had been successfully excluded, would suffer intensely when he first came to know the truth, and learn what an amount of sin abounds in the world. But if he had also, as I am supposing to be the case, not only been told that God 55 CERTAIN FACULTIES is good, but felt that He is so from his own delightful experiences of happiness in the love of parents and friends, his sense of the beauty of nature, his knowledge of natural history and science offering so many proofs of benevolent contrivance, the enjoyment he has had from mere good spirits, merry games, and good health ; all this would enable him to look through the cloud of evil and behold God behind. It is " the pure in heart" who " see God," our Lord Jesus Christ tells us ; and we see that it must be so ; for the impure in heart look upon evil as the regular order of things ; the good see the hand of God subduing all things to Himself, to His own purpose. I am not theorising, I am speaking what I know to be facts, viz. that it is possible to keep children from a knowledge of evil ; that intense de- pression will be the result of awakening to the fact of the existence of evil; that afterwards from that depression there will spring a firmer clinging to God, and an enthusiastic perseverance in well doing, and devotedness to every duty which affects the good of others. I think it impossible that such morality should result from a different experience. An unhappy child- hood often produces a sceptical manhood; but those who have been nurtured in innocent joyfulness, in parental love, in purity of heart, can have faith in God because they have tasted some of His best blessings. But an imagination profaned by images of evil not only brings fear into childhood, but, by a law of our nature, actually throws the shadow of guilt upon it. Many nervous, imaginative children, when they 56 CERTAIN FACULTIES hear of evil, realise the guilt so strongly that they in a measure share the feelings of the guilty person, from the very same psychological law which causes an epidemic in crimes, when the imagination pictures the deed so vividly that the brain becomes so affected by the thought of the crime as to re-enact it. Now precisely the same thing, at a humble distance fortu- nately, is done by vivd voce relations of evil, or books which revel in it ; for even if a child does not wish to imitate the evil, its peace is disturbed by the uncom- fortable consciousness of wrong brought so near to it by the fancy. Keep all such thoughts of evil from the plastic minds of children, and let no impressions be made on them but such as are happy and good. I now come to the consideration of the religious faculty, or that by which we believe in and commune with God. In the development of the religious senti- ment nothing is so powerful as the influence of the teacher's own feeling. That feeling may long refrain from words ; but, if it is there, it will be felt by the child, in every look and tone and act of the teacher. Few know the power and fewer still dare trust the powers of being; and yet a child is far more influenced by what a teacher is than by what he does or says. It is the expression of countenance, the accent of the voice, all which betrays the soul, that the child feels, and by which he is either moralised or demoralised, as the case may be. God should be felt by the child through its parent's unexpressed devoutness of heart long before the idea of God is given in words. Children who are not too early introduced to this idea receive it with 57 CERTAIN FACULTIES something like adequate reverence and love ; those who hear of God, before they can attach fitting associations to that Name, are all the longer in acquiring true notions of God because of the precociousness and imperfection of their first ideas. God can only be seen by us through His works ; and in his parent's face the child should see an expression which shall lift his thoughts to something above himself, to a superior Being ; and later on he will recognise this as the thought of God manifesting itself in the parent's face. This is a kind of thought-reading which is true, and which children possess. Nothing can compensate for the want on the parent's side of this religious sentiment ; the clear-headed intellect, the purest morality, will fail to fashion a man in all his true proportions if religion is wanting in the teacher. As Wordsworth says, ' ' 'Tis God diffused through all that makes all one." No system of education can succeed which shuts out God, which, in fact, does not make Him the centre and soul of all its doings ; for neither science nor morals have any noble meaning apart from the idea of God. Every teacher will take his own method of religious instruction. From experience, I must advocate putting off all mention of God, all prayers, as long as possible, provided the teacher feels and lives religion, in which case he will find that the child has unconsciously im- bibed it, and has ripened into a fitness to have his impressions put into words. A friend remarkable for her piety, conscientiousness, and devotion to good works, told me two or three anecdotes about her early 58 CERTAIN FACULTIES education, which are an illustration of the effect of silent piety on a child, and of the effect of a few words spoken in season also. She was never taught to pray till she was about seven years old, when she happened to pay a visit to some relative, from whom she learnt the Lord's Prayer. On her return home she asked her mother when she ought to say this prayer. " I am always praying," answered the mother, " when I am walking, or at home, whatever I am doing, always." " This gave me," said my informant, " an idea, though I could not put it into words, that I had got hold of a principle much vaster than I had anticipated ; it raised my thoughts at once to the Infinite. I had felt rather proud of having found out a new duty ; but this speech of my mother's made my little bit of mechanism shrink very much in my estimation. " My next religious impression," proceeded she, " was some years later, when my mother told me she could never be jealous of my love for others ; that, provided they were good, a mother was the more delighted the more her child loved others and was loved by them. Though she said nothing about God, I felt that His love must be like this, a love not for self; it gave me a deeper and truer impression of His nature than any- thing which had occurred before to me. "As I grew older," she rejoined after a pause, "my affliction was that I could not love God as I knew He ought to be loved. I spoke of this sorrow to my mother. She put my mind quite at ease. 'Do not trouble yourself, 1 said she. 'Do not reproach yourself ; 59 CERTAIN FACULTIES do not think about it at all. You are still young. 1 Then she spoke to me encouragingly of my nature, which she praised; and instead of thinking myself wicked, as I had done, I felt hopeful and peaceful, my mother telling me that God, who had given me good dispositions, would grant me more and more of them as I grew older, and could receive them, and in time bring me into that relation with Himself in which I knew good people habitually were." A very young child's life should be happiness, the full enjoyment of all the pleasures natural to his age : industry in the performance of all his little duties, loving, implicit obedience to the authority of his parents and all others who are over him. In such a life, a life of industry, obedience, and happiness in childlike pleasures, will be found the influences which will pre- dispose the mind to welcome and understand the idea of God ; for in an atmosphere of love, duty, and hap- piness the soul participates in a divine happiness, re- sembles, in its little measure, the divine nature, or to use the words of our Lord, is "of the kingdom of heaven. " Every parent must judge for himself as to the moment and the way in which such a child must be led to the consciousness of the Source of all his happiness and duty. I have said that I think it better postponed as long as possible ; but unless the child is very isolated, he will probably pick up wrong ideas on religion ; and therefore the parent must, in that case, hasten to convey that pure knowledge of God he wishes his child to have, if he sees him in danger of receiving erroneous impressions from others. 60 CERTAIN FACULTIES Nor must the child be left ignorant of that " pure religion and undefiled," whose duties St. James enume- rates. He should early be initiated into the practice of them. Taking advantage of that love of partaking in real life to which I have before adverted, let the parent allow the child to share in his charitable works. Let the child carry some delicate food to the poor, sick invalid, make some garment for one poor child, teach another, read a story-book to a third, and so on. If children see their parents interested in these things, they will love to do likewise, be delighted to help, and will acquire invaluable modes of thought and habits of life. Of course these sorts of things may be made ex- ceedingly disagreeable to children. There are persons who cannot bear to contribute to missionary funds, because, as children, they were obliged to sacrifice a larger share of their pocket-money to this object than they wished. A few years later, the same individual would have counted it no sacrifice at all to give to missionary purposes ; but, this being required of them before their minds had grasped the object, and there- fore before their hearts were moved to pity, the subject has ever since been distasteful. Deeds of charity by young persons should be entirely volun- tary; if sacrifices are made, they too must likewise be entirely voluntary. If small beginnings are made, such as accompanying parents in their good works and giving any little help, the spirit will grow ; especially if the children see it living and acting in the parents. 61 UNIVERSITY ) CERTAIN FACULTIES It is partly for want of this active form of religion that many pious parents see their children fall away in youth both from religion and morality. The tenderness of the girls, the energy of the boys, should early be pressed into the service of mankind; else these noble faculties will in youth seek vent in some undesirable fashion. " Bring up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." As Christians we acknowledge the duty of bene- volence; as parents we often neglect to cultivate the feeling and the habit. I have heard a young girl of thirteen sharply rebuke a wretchedly thin, miserable- looking beggar-woman, and ask in the hardest tone why she did not work ? This young political economist may have been right in fact ; but the hard tone and callous heart proved that she had never learnt to understand the poor and all their difficulties, nor to feel for them, nor to help them. The reason of the frequent neglect of this most important part of education is that parents really do not distinctly aim at developing and exercising this part of the moral nature. They do not bring up their children to feel that the true purpose of life is to conduce to the good of mankind. The girls are to marry, the boys to enter some profession, but main- tenance in the former case and money-getting in the latter are too often the objects in view ; worldly ease and prosperity being the end sought through these means. What a different world should we have if children and young persons were taught that the good of others should be the object of our lives, the will of 62 CERTAIN FACULTIES God their motive, self-sacrifice and exertion the means. Such principles can never be instilled by dry precept ; they must be acted to be understood, and lived to be loved; they must be hallowed by the sympathies of parental example and companionship, and endeared by the memories of happy childhood. Thus, to sum up, religion should come to the child first through religious feeling in the parent ; secondly, through distinct instruction ; thirdly, through active benevolence; and if this theory is right, the whole matter, as far as human influence goes, rests with the parent. He must be religious, wise, and charitable. If he makes his child happy, that child will love and trust God; if he instructs him judiciously, not heap- ing doctrines on him before he can understand them, but letting him drink in the facts and spirit of the Gospel ; if he himself is sensible that to work for the good of mankind is the aim of life ; if he acts up to his principles, and lets the child join in his good works to the extent that it can ; then there is every reason to believe his child will know true religion and never depart from it. " As the twig is bent so grows the tree." It is hardly needful to point out that the preceding remarks are but a statement of the conditions which favour the growth of religion in a human being. No parent can make a child religious that is the work of the Holy Spirit; but the parent can do much to fib the child for the reception of the gift of the grace of God, as he can do much on the other hand woefully to unfit him for the same. 63 V ON SOME FAULTS AND HABITS IN regard to truthfulness, experience has shown me that it is possible to bring up children so that they will never think of telling an untruth. It is very unnatural to children to utter falsehoods; if they have just and loving parents, and are well brought up, it will never enter their heads to say anything but the truth. We must remember that very young children are easily shaken as to matters of fact ; they literally don't trust their own convictions in opposition to the doubts and suspicions of their elders. I have known a child to speak the truth to her parents, and when urged by them to confess the contrary, she yielded ; yet it was found that her first assertion was the true one. Again, children seem to tell untruths sometimes be- cause they don't know how to express what is in their minds. But how to cure untruthfulness when the habit has been formed? That is the question, and it is best resolved by going back to the origin of the fault. All untruth has its root in some selfishness. Either the child dreads the shame attached to some fault it has 64 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS committed, or fears the pain of its punishment, or desires some good obtainable by a lie, or in some form or other desires its own good, or to be screened from Us own pain. To cure untruthfulness, then, you must turn away the child's thoughts from self, and direct them to facts. Let its sorrow be for the fault, for the fact, not for its own self. A child breaks a looking- glass ; let it be grieved for the mischief, not for the punishment it is about to receive. You will always find the generous and unselfish truthful, because they are so grieved for any wrong they have done, that they are only too glad to tell what they have done ; it eases their mind, and perhaps some remedy is possible which they are eager to secure. Love of approbation is one form of selfishness which is a very usual source of untruth. Well ! teach a child to see that untruth does not alter facts, and that to deny the truth does not make the looking-glass whole, nor undo the child's carelessness. Let parents remember, too, that nervous children, as well as those who are fond of approbation, will tell a lie to save themselves from an angry look, a sharp speech, quite as painful to them as a blow or punish- ment. Whoever is investigating anything about which a child may be tempted to speak falsely should have a very calm manner ; should appear, as the child ought to be, much more occupied with the fact than with the child's faultiness, and by mingled gravity and kindness should win confession. Expect to hear the truth, and you will hear it ; expect to hear a falsehood, and you will hear it. 65 E SOME FAULTS AND HABITS The parent should consider what is the child's temptation: is it love of approbation? or fear of punishment ? or nervous timidity ? He should reason with the child ; explain to him what a heinous fault untruth is, what a noble thing truth is, so noble that it is one of the attributes of God ; tell him that the important thing is to be good, not to seem so : that a lie is the most cowardly of all things, since " it faces God and shrinks from man.*" Then tell him what you think is the special temptation in his case, and beg him to try and conquer that. It is well, too, to counsel a child not to answer hastily. If it takes but a moment or two to reflect, it very probably will speak the truth. Most of the untruths of children are im- pulses, not deliberate falsehoods. Falsehood must be punished. It is far better punished by disgrace, by marked disapprobation, than by pains and penalties of a coarser kind, which turn the sorrow for the fault into smarting under punish- ment. Don't whip the child, nor send it to bed, nor lock it up in a room or dark closet, nor deprive it of its usual meals. Let everything be just as usual, except your deportment towards the child. Let him feel that he has by his fault separated himself from you: don't have him with you, don't receive his ad- vances towards reconciliation, till he is fully sensible how much he has grieved your love, and until he feels your estrangement insupportable. Let me advert to one or two faults which are often met with in children, though I must first observe that it is far easier to prevent faults than 66 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS to cure them. Love of approbation is too readily developed, especially in eldest or only children, because they find themselves so very much the object of their parents 1 attention. The prevention, therefore, lies with the parents, who must check in their own hearts an overweening affection, and in their own ways an ex- cessive demonstrativeness. If the love of the parents is a holy love, and they feel the child is not theirs but God's, given them that they may nurture another angel for heaven, they will be in no danger of erring by selfish fondness. Love of approbation is sometimes defended as an amiable weakness, if not a virtue ; but it really is only a very mischievous form of self-love. Vanity seeks to exalt self, and is the antagonist of that virtue on which all others must be based, humility. Humility and reverence are the Alpha and Omega of goodness, and love of approbation is counter to these. This feeling likewise is the more dangerous that it apes another quite permissible, and indeed the very one on which all good education is founded, sympathy. The child ought to desire to be in sympathy with the good. As a child is born utterly unconscious of good and evil, it only learns to dis- tinguish them by the approbation and disapprobation attached by its parents to each. The consequence is that to be good is to be in sympathy with the parents, to be naughty is to be out of sympathy with them ; and the step is only too easy from a desire to have the parents'* satisfaction in the goodness of an action to the desire for their admiration of the actor. 67 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS Of a parent's sympathy and love a child cannot have too much; but admiration is simply hurtful. Even the best of us, we are told, are unprofitable servants ; and if we would have a child reverent, and anxious to press forward towards the goal, we must not puff it up with self-conceit, but teach it always to look out of itself, up to some standard as yet unattained ; but to look with hope, cheerfulness, and trust. Another fault that may be easily prevented is greediness. Never permit any discussions at table about food ; but let the meal-time be a season for cheerful and interesting conversation, and do not keep a child's thoughts and wishes on food all day long, by giving it fruit, cakes, sweetmeats, &c., at odd times. Let it only eat at meal-times as a rule. Love of eating is not a very great crime ; it is natural to the young, growing creature to like nice food and plenty of it. Greediness soon vanishes of itself as other objects gain favour with a child. Children often prefer play to meals when the play has any special attractiveness. Daintiness and thought about eating are unpleasant to witness, and are wrong; the remedy is to put other and better objects of interest before the child. It is perfectly natural and right that a child should have a preference and enjoy a nice thing at the time ; it is when we see the thoughts occupied with eating that we feel there is something wrong. "Which do you take, tart or pudding?*" said a mother to her son. "Tart," he answered. "Then, sir, you shall have pudding," exclaimed the mother, 68 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS in the severest tone and with the sourest counte- nance. Apparently the boy should have deceitfully feigned to choose that which he did not like, in order to obtain that which he did like. Forbidding chil- dren to ask for things is another bad plan. One knows the story of the little boy who asked for salt at dinner, as a means of making known his sad case ; he had not been helped at all, but forgotten. Habits are of immense consequence. Some one having remarked, " Use is second nature," the Duke of Wellington rejoined, " Use is ten times nature.*" Habit is a facilitating condition; it makes life easy to act as a matter of course and without debate or struggle; and our strength of will is saved for important conflicts, and not wasted on ignoble ones. Children should be cheerfully seconded and helped to carry out any object they really choose to work for, gardening, doll-dressing, carpentering, boat- making; and in any other games, occupations, and experiments, they should be allowed to follow out their own devices. Many a boy and girl will work for hours at a plan of their own, who would soon weary of a task imposed by another. It is the way to acquire habits of industry. In childhood should be formed habits of polite- ness and respectfulness of manners. It has been suggested whether manners are not taught at the risk of teaching untruth. To this it may be answered that politeness is the expression of a certain reverence for human beings as human beings, which we all owe to each other. The command, " Love 69 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS your neighbour as yourself," implies universal respect and tenderness. Children are ignorant of these large, comprehensive principles ; but, as there is a deep truth at the bottom of the forms, it is quite right children should be taught to practise the forms when they are older they will see the meaning hidden therein. With boys especially, early habits of polite- ness are a most useful moral training in obedience and self-control and respect. Unless trained in child- hood and youth, they never acquire the instinctive, ready, deferential, universal politeness which marks the highest man, and the lofty religious nature. Habits of order, neatness, quickness, and punc- tuality, and habits of conscientious performance of duty, habits of economy and generosity in money matters, and of keeping accurate accounts ; habits of personal cleanliness and morning ablutions, habits of exercise, habits of early going to bed and early rising, habits of simplicity in food and dress ; all these and similar habits gained in childhood will be of lifelong value. Children are sometimes made to hate a truth or a principle by its wearisome repetition. Neverthe- less, it is possible to be too silent. A thought set like a gem in some sharp-cut, lucid phrase will often dwell for ever in the mind a never-forgotten rule. Such phrases come from the teacher's heart, and are usually struck out on some occasion which interests the child, and enables him to comprehend the force of the saying. The constant reiteration of sacred truth, before 70 SOME FAULTS AND HABITS the experience of life enables the child to under- stand the words, is one of the causes of the lifeless- ness of many people's religion. It is better to speak less often, but under circumstances of impressive beauty or solemnity. Children are alive to comfort, beauty, quiet, peace, as well as their elders ; and in the calm quiet of a Sunday afternoon, for instance, when their parents are at leisure, and give themselves up to the sense of peace and home, children tune themselves to the hour and the surroundings, and many a hallowed thought may then be spoken between parents and child which would be unheeded under less peace- ful circumstances. If there is anything important to say, let it be said, if possible, when external cir- cumstances harmonise. 71 VI MEMORANDA OF OBSERVATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS ON EDUCATION THE child's head rested on her arm, and his deep blue eyes were fixed upon her face, with a gaze so inquiring, and yet so confiding, that her eye fell beneath his, and her heart trembled as it would have done if some heavenly being had come under the form of childhood, and asked her to guide him, pure, and even more than ever exalted, through this mortal life. " My beautiful ! " said she, " why dost thou scan every lineament of my face, as if I were thy destiny, and thou wouldst read it before beginning to fulfil it? How thoughtful is thy brow even now, and how much stronger thy will than thy power ! the eye longs for the curl that my bending head brings near thee, but the little hand knows not yet how to reach the mark. Such is the fate that must attend thee through life ! Such is the difficulty of arriving at the good we see and desire, that even as I press thee to my heart, and vow myself to thy service, and picture to myself the being I would make thee, I know not the means by which thou art to become that being !" 72 MEMORANDA Thus spoke the young mother; and she fell into a long reverie ; and dark mists interposed themselves whenever she would have built up a system of educa- tion. At length, she resolved to try to become a child, to enter into the child's nature, and merely to lend it the aid of her physical strength and of her affection. The next morning after she had come to this determination, she heard loud cries issuing from the nursery. Upon going into the room, she saw the baby kicking and screaming, while the nurse was vainly endeavouring to tie on his cap. She reflected that it must be very bad for him to have this daily irritation ; and, upon consulting good medical authority, found that the cap might safely be left off, as the weather was hot. It was impressed upon her, however, that warmth is much needed by the young infant; and she was told that for this reason the babies in India are very beautiful, and thrive well. Having abandoned the cap during the summer, it was never resumed, notwithstanding the ill-concealed derision of her visitors, and the advice of her friends. Her eye soon became accustomed to the little bare head, and she found her child less subject to cold than is usual with children; and during the time of cutting his teeth, the feverish- ness always attendant upon that process was much mitigated. Her next care was to invent a dress so simple as to slip on in a minute, and which, leaving his limbs unfettered, should yet have that warmth which the young being requires. She suc- 73 MEMORANDA ceeded so well that beaming looks and joyful crows were substituted for the face swollen with rage and pain, and the perpetual cries which usually had accom- panied his toilet. A few mornings afterwards, there was another bustle in the nursery : the babe screamed worse than ever; and there was a running and changeful accom- paniment by the nurse, of coaxing, flattering, scolding, and singing. The reason of the uproar was, that the baby had been dipped in water which was too cold. " 1 shall bathe him myself, in future,"" said the mother to herself; " for, in this way, both mind and body suffer.'''' As soon as the baby was dressed, his food was brought in ; and " Here it is ! " cried the nurse, in a tone which implied Here comes the sovereign cure for all your wounds. " Worse and worse ! " thought the mother ; " and yet I shall never be able to make the nurse feel what I mean. I must turn nurse myself." Upon stating the case to her husband, he, like a true father, cordially agreed with her that she must dedicate herself to the child. " I have my work in the world," said he; "you should have yours: every wife, if she have no children to educate, should find something else to do, besides the poor selfishness of providing for her own and her husband's daily comforts, by settling the domestic arrangements. For my part, I shall gladly accommodate myself to any plan which will render the performance of your duty to your child easy to you ; and, by-and-by, I should think that my share of the 74 MEMORANDA business will become the larger. As it is not right, however, for both our sakes, that you should be wholly engrossed with the boy, find out some good-tempered and sensible girl, whom you can train to help you in the more mechanical part. For the first few months, perhaps, it may be advisable to trust only to yourself." So the affair was settled, and the nurse was dismissed. Beautiful human nature ! What a proof was this child that evil must be put into the young mind carefully sown and nourished there, being no plant of native growth ; but that, on the contrary, simply not to thwart nature is not to spoil. To some, the following detail may seem minute and trifling ; but such will not be the opinion of those who have learned by experience how the physical leads to the moral, and how impossible it is to alter the one without altering the other. The mother then began her labours, setting out with the resolution to watch her child's true wants to help him to satisfy them, but strictly to refrain from forcing him on to acquirements of which she might wish to see him possessed. He was every morning dipped, and every night washed, in a bath of summer heat; and so far from crying, as he had formerly done, he seemed to delight in these operations. Perhaps an infant is conscious of the moral feeling towards him, long before we are aware that he is so ; and very likely this child dis- tinguished between the light, firm, rapid, tender touch of his mother, and the rough, clumsy, angry way in which he was handled by the nurse, when irritated and 75 MEMORANDA half deafened by the screams which her own awkward- ness had called forth. His mother's watchful love perceived his wants before they had become so pressing as to require him to resort to screams and violence in order to gain attention. He was never allowed to wait too long for his food, nor was he given too much at once ; nor half-suffocated by the way in which it was administered; nor did a triumphant " Here it comes ! " announce its arrival. It was given to him regularly, moderately, slowly. When he became able to feed himself, he did not lose the good habits of his babyhood ; he never thought of his food until he saw it, and then he took it quietly and cleanly, looking about him, and talking to his mother. Often, before he was two years old, has he stopped in the middle of a meal, and, touching each flower in a tumbler that stood near him, asked, " What is it ? " and as she answered " rose," " lily," &c., he would catch up the sound ; and when he had learnt as many of the names as he wished, he would go on eating. When he cried, his mother endeavoured to discover the cause of his suffering, and to remove it ; but she never tried to amuse him when he was screaming, or even to soothe him, further than by that gentle manner of holding him, or doing whatever was to be done for him, which is peculiar to affection. She never said " Hush ! " or spoke at all when he cried. The con- sequence was, that he was scarcely ever heard to cry ; never, after he could speak his wants and feelings. He learned to bear pain better than most men. When he was teething, his flushed cheek and curled lip often 76 MEMORANDA showed that he was in extreme pain, while no sound escaped him. When he was teaching himself to walk, he often got tumbles and knocks; generally he was quite still, and, as it were, surprised to find himself in his fallen condition ; sometimes he would utter a little Oh ! "not an impatient u Oh ! " or a painful " Oh ! * but an " Oh ! " which said, " So, here I am ! well, it is very curious how I came here." All the while the mother was thinking, " I wish I could bear all these blows." If he really got into such a case as required her help, she quietly went and extricated him partly, always leaving him to help himself out a little, by which he acquired the habit, and, in a wonderful degree, the power, of righting himself when he had got into difficulties. It is often fright which makes chil- dren cry when they fall, more than pain; and his mother therefore avoided running hastily to his help. She was particularly calm in her manner when any accident happened. But accidents rarely did occur; first of all, because she never said to him, " Take care ! " and so he took care of himself, and never attempted things much or dangerously beyond his strength ; secondly, because she took pains so to dispose the furniture, his bed, and everything with reference to him, that he was safe without that constant watching which is, on various accounts, so bad for children. As his parents meant him to have, from his very birth, the feeling of liberty, all the arrangements were strictly made for that purpose; the drawing-room with its paraphernalia was not for him, so he was saved the incessant fire of " Don't, don't ! " to which children are 77 MEMORANDA for the most part subjected, and which entails many bad consequences the vanity caused by consciousness of being a constant object of attention ; the irritation of being constantly thwarted ; the sense of loss of liberty of action, &c. It was long before it was necessary to say, " Don't ! " because, without saying a word, the physical weakness of the child made it easy to put physical obstacles in the way of his doing what was hurtful ; and by the time he had sense to wish, and strength to do his wishes, such confidence and love had been generated, that from them sprung coincidence of will in parent and child, so that a " Don't ! " was never disputed. The first thing which struck him was light the candle ; then he studied his mother's face ; next he caught sight of some red curtains the colour seemed very pleasing to him. As he grew older, motion became the most interesting: an animal running, or trees blown by the wind, or flowing water. Then came the wish to know structure; everything was peeped into or torn to pieces to be better understood : and when about a year and three quarters old, the question was function : " What for ? " When he was particularly intent upon observing some object, and turned upon his mother that inquir- ing look peculiar to infancy, and so affecting, she would show him some property of it ; or if she could do nothing better for him, she would tell him its name. She never told him the name of anything unless he were looking at it, and he always tried to repeat after her. As she never suffered him to be 78 MEMORANDA stunned with the chatter with which people think it necessary to overwhelm poor babies, but as, on the contrary, short and simple sounds only were addressed to him, the consequence was, that he spoke faultlessly from the very beginning, and most beautifully, in deep, musical, true-hearted tones. She often would sing to him, but only her very choicest songs : he listened with delight to all, but particularly to such as were slow, swelling, sweet, and melancholy. From the first month of his life, he lay almost constantly on a cloak on the floor, or, in fine weather, on the lawn ; his mother judging this to be a more favourable position for him than the upright one, or than lying in bed, or on her lap. He soon learnt to raise himself upright ; and he invented many curious modes of locomotion, such as rolling, crawling, &c., before he thought of walking. At last, one day, he saw a bright-coloured ball on a chair; he rolled to the chair, and helping himself up by its leg, then, for the first time, stood upon his own little feet. His mother took the hint, and by placing various objects on a line of chairs, she induced him to exercise himself in balancing himself, and, finally, he ran alone. It is true, this great event did not occur till he was thirteen months old ; but his limbs were straight, his gait firm, and, better than all, he had neither been coaxed nor threatened into unnatural exertions. How can they say that man is naturally idle ? That free child worked from morning till night, to the very fullest extent of his nature. The tendency of his first efforts seemed to be the attainment of the use of his 79 MEMORANDA muscles ; it was just happiness enough for him, for the first three months of his life, to lie in the sun and work about his little ivory limbs, and this he did, crowing with delight. Then he began to use his eyes very much. His first words after "Papa" and "Mamma" were "What is it?" not "What is its name?" and his mother did on all occasions try to answer him in the spirit of his question. If he pointed to a cow, she would take him to pat it, and see it milked, and drink of its milk ; if to a bell, he was allowed to ring it. All his objects being his own, he understood their value, and worked for them patiently ; thus, from liberty came industry and true persever- ance. When four months old, he sat for an hour trying to unroll a ball which his mother had wrapped up in a sheet of paper ; and the little fingers and feet and mouth all worked away, and at last out rolled the ball. Luckily there was no sycophant by, to whine out "Clever little dear!" "Beautiful boy!" &c. Only the mother's eye bent in sympathy down to meet his upturned glance of joy, and the two understood each other. It was strange, and beautiful as strange, to see the perfect absence of self- consciousness in this young being third blessed effect of liberty. At first, it was the business of life, serious, and requiring all his energies, to roll a ball, move a chair round the room, watch the skeleton clock, or touch the notes of a piano ; every moment brought its work, and every work increased the power of working ; and slowly, but harmoniously, all the powers developed. No sooner could he do anything with his mother, than she 80 MEMORANDA allowed him his share ; but she most carefully guarded against letting him over-fatigue himself, and never insisted upon his doing anything. At first his natural activity, and afterwards the charm that he found there was about her, and in being with her, made the little occupations she gave him a delight. She never said to him " Do ; " it was always " Will you do ? " and too happy was he to be employed by her to shut the door, to run and call some one, to gather chickweed for the canary, or feed the poultry and pigeons ; to hold the basket whilst she cut roses, and afterwards to arrange them in the sand in the bowl ; to drop the seeds or roots into the ground when she had made the hole to receive them, or place the labels to show where they lay; or do any of those thousand daily things, which an intelligent and loving mother will always gratify her child by letting him help to accomplish. By being constantly with her, he inquired insensibly a great store of ideas, and now and then she would teach him to classify them. One day they brought in from their walk a large nosegay of wild flowers. " Will you bring me," said she, " a flower like this, out of the nosegay ? " and she showed him a marsh marigold which she was in the act of putting into the water. He brought her, successively, a marigold, buttercup, and dandelion; showing that the resemblance of colour had most struck him. He got the idea of two before he was two years old ; and also of round. His mother taught him the last by putting her finger, and drawing his, round the edge of a table, shilling, wafer, &c. He was very fond of looking at pictures, and of heaping 81 F MEMORANDA wooden bricks on each other : in a word, the day seemed too short for ? his business; and his little life was like a wreath of flowers, ever fresh and smiling. Thus did this mother lead her child through the first two years of his life ; and if he had been happy and progressing, what had she been ? Oh, who can measure her sum of joy, as she contemplated the result, or count the moments in which her heart had ached with bliss ! When she looked at her boy, there was the sunny face, and candid brow, and dimpled mouth ; there was the full eye, always sweet, but by turns serious in observation, or sparkling with mirth, or beaming with affection ; there were the nimble foot and dexterous hand, even then good instruments of the active and inquiring mind ; there was patient endurance of casual and necessary pain ; and there was that love for her, which was to be the basis of trust in man and God. Nor had these years been to her a season of mere passive reception of happiness from her child ; she had diligently been preparing for that which she had per- ceived would be required of her. She had foreseen that the outward universe would first engage the child's curiosity ; and she had been diligently studying the natural sciences, well aware that only the profoundly scientific are simple and clear, and that to them alone the commonest object in nature is instructive. It was of the facts of nature which passed before his eyes that he must first take cognisance ; and in order that she might never lose an opportunity of giving instruction, when asked to do so, or of directing his attention in a useful channel, she v. as well aware that she must herself 82 MEMORANDA be thoroughly enlightened and awakened. Besides the good at which she aimed, there were happy incidental results from these studies of hers. The first was, that they prevented the appearance (which she thought it important to avoid) of being devoted to her child. She would sit at her desk for hours, absorbed in her studies, whilst the boy worked about the room or garden in a very independent manner. The second good effect was that, through sympathy, he became interested in what his mother was thinking of, and he, too, began to examine attentively insects, flowers, &c. Thus happily had passed two years, when the mother was removed from her boy. He passed into other hands, and became an altered being; for, as yet, he had no principles, nothing but sweet impulses. To describe the cause of his deterioration is as painful as it is instructive. His next guardians were of those who believe in the corrupt nature of man, and say that the first thing to be done is to break the child's will. What! that liberty which God has given to man that power of choosing what he shall do, which is his glory, and the means through which he is to be raised to yet higher and higher glory, shall be withheld from the young, pure child ! " Try all things : hold fast that which is good," is the language of man to man ; while that of the man to the child is " Try nothing but just what I tell you is good : that believe and do." Vain man ! How many lessons of wisdom, truth, beauty, and love, might you learn from that un- sophisticated being, if you could but raise up your proud heart to his humility and purity ! if you could MEMORANDA but regain his child-like confidence in the existence of good, which, in the struggles of the cold, selfish world, you have lost ! The little hero of our tale was, then, taken into totally different circumstances. He who had never heard a command, was from morning till night tyrannised over. At first, he could not understand it. The harsh tone fell on his ear ; but he did not heed it, or obey it ; he did not know it was meant for him : it was as if the dog had barked a sound that struck his sense, but did not reach his intellect. It will be sufficient to mention one specimen of how he was treated ; the rest will be easily imagined. One day, not understanding some order which he had not obeyed, his little hands were held as a punishment, which he smilingly endured, thinking they were held in love : this smile was construed into hardened guilt, and the sharpest reproaches were uttered, to make him aware that the intention was to pain and degrade him. The miseries that flowed in cannot be told ; but among them were fretfulness, passion, idleness, cowar- dice, deceit, malice. The canker was in the bud ; or may we more truly say that the storm which tore to pieces and scattered the blossoms that had come forth, caused the tree to shoot more vigorously that this little creature was going through the process appointed for mankind and that not only as regards the human race, but each individual, it is the plan of Providence that man should work out his salvation through evil ? There is the question. However, it is needless to try to settle it : no one can tell what sort of being a man 84 MEMORANDA would be who should never have known evil. It is enough for us to be fully persuaded, that to work for good and by good is all that man should attempt. The mother was again restored to her child; her child but oh, how altered ! Scarcely was it possible to trace in him the pure and heart-gladdening being she had once known. The following extracts from her journal will give some idea of her operations, and of her remarks upon him and other children. They are loose fragments, and claim attention and derive value chiefly from the bare simple facts which they bring to light. It is some such data as these that the moral philosophers and the educators want. What would not either of them give for the true history of one human mind from birth to death ! Blessed may that hand be (if such should ever exist) that, tearing down the veils which society hangs before the emotions of the heart, and those yet more impenetrable veils with which vanity shrouds our baser feelings from our own perception, shall expose all the heights and depths, the beauty and misery, of this our nature ! But, however difficult it may be to arrive at the arcana of our human souls, there is good hope of our getting glimpses of truth by studying children, beings not wholly sophisticated; and great joy is there in communication with those from whom occasionally burst forth such " Glorious gleams of heavenly light, And gentle ardours from above," as are sufficient to convince people whose intercourse 85 MEMORANDA with the world might lead them to a belief, contrary to the fact, that " man is made " much " lower than the angels."" EXTRACTS FROM THE MOTHER'S JOURNAL. May 18. It is the common complaint of those who would reform abuses, that innovation is productive of evil ; and the timid and idle prefer the evils of abuse to those of innovation. However, it can never be, either as regards society or the individual, that supine inaction is right. The sincerely and intelligently desirous for reform may make mistakes as to the way in which they strive to attain it, or they may produce harm instead of good ; but let us hope that to intelli- gence, and benevolence, and energy, the means to the end happiness will not for ever remain obscure. Without this hope, I might well be dismayed at the mass of evil which opposes itself to my efforts; and before I can begin again to weave the bright tissue of my child's life, what an entanglement have I to undo ! and this undoing, what a delicate, difficult, and long affair it is ! Direct attacks upon the evil seldom fail to produce another and often a worse species of evil than that against which one is warring. For instance: J. said to B., "How greedy of you, B., to take three buns for your luncheon ! " The colour mounted into B.'s face, and his pained eyes sought the ground. To-day, how- ever, appetite was too strong for him; but the third bun, instead of being openly eaten, was slily carried out of the room, and greedily devoured in a corner of 86 MEMORANDA the garden. Now, in the first place, there is no harm in liking a bun ; nature has implanted the taste in us. In the second place, deceit is a crime why engender it? Loss of self-esteem is an incalculable evil why endanger it? Can you do a greater mischief to a human being, than to call that crime which is not crime? Is it not to degrade the being? Has not this very plan of action brought degradation down upon thousands and thousands of slaves trembling before their own misguided consciences ? When will men cease to blunder about the " war of the flesh with the spirit," and heed the injunction, "What / have sanctified, that call not thou common or unclean"? Nothing is bad that is natural ; if anything seems so, it is but because other parts of its nature are unde- veloped, so that one particular part stands out in disproportionate magnitude. B. is greedy, that is to say, he is very fond of things nice to eat : so much the better ; he has at least one source of pleasure, and let him enjoy it as long as he can : but strive, nevertheless, to open out to him means of higher happiness. " Overcome evil with good ; " that is to say, cultivate the faculties which are deficient in strength, until you have brought them all into proportion. Good seems to me but another name for proportion ; and bad, another name for excess or disproportion. There is no such thing as abstract bad ; everything in man's nature is good, and given for wise purposes. Those animal propensities which so often disgust us in children, are the means through which the young being is stimulated to the 87 MEMORANDA acts which continue its very existence ; and so far from lamenting to observe them in the child, let us be thankful that pleasure is annexed to the exercise of all our faculties ; and, as far as in us lies, let us endeavour to cultivate all harmoniously. Nature has done what is needful for us, without any interference on our part, in regard to the functions which maintain the being in animal existence ; she has annexed to their performance so lively a pleasure, that all we have to do is to attend to the demands of nature, and minister to them ; but with regard to the functions which develop and maintain the intellectual and spiritual existence, the case is widely different. For these, the cravings of nature are less urgent, and her directions less audible. The development of the mind is indeed almost wholly dependent on the action of the human mind upon it, while the perfect cul- ture of the mind requires a perfect knowledge of it ; whereas for the body, we shall do well if we only needfully spy into Nature's wants, and never presume to despise the indications she holds out for our guidance. Never let us despise the physical, because the physical arrangements are full of beauty and good- ness ; and because the spiritual and intellectual depend upon the physical. Let us not expect in the child the virtues, that is to say, the pleasures of the man ; each age has its own peculiar mode of existence and of happiness ; let us not despise those of any age. The caterpillar that spends its life in eating, and the butterfly that on the rose's breast suns its fluttering wings for a summer day, and dies which of these is 88 MEMORANDA the best ? When we ask that question, we merely ask which is most in accordance with the taste of the inquirer. Everything in the creation is disposed with reference to the happiness of every sentient creature according to its capacity of happiness; and every creature has its contribution to make, which it cannot but render to the happiness of the whole. Dec. 18. Mrs. G., who is come to stay with me for a week, said to me to-day, " What have you done to B. ? He is not like the same creature. What have you done to him ? " " Nothing,"" I answered. " No, no," replied she ; " that will not do. I am really interested in knowing how, in seven months, so great a change can have been wrought. The expression of his face is more complacent and less animal ; and he appears to have forgotten his peevishness, disobedience, and cunning." "Well," I rejoined, "certainly it is not true to say that I have done nothing ; but it is perfectly true to say, that I cannot describe to you the process by which any particular fault has been con- quered. It is a rule very strictly observed by me, not to crush manifestations of feelings, but to be content to let those feelings right themselves ; and I trust for this to the general influence of the whole of my dis- cipline. I am never better pleased than when a fault disappears, I know not how. I then hope it has gone naturally, and that some good has taken its place in the heart, instead of some worse evil, as is but too frequently the case after our active corrections, as we term them." " Do you really mean to say," interrupted Mrs. G., 89 MEMORANDA " that you have never prevented B. from crying in that violently impatient manner which he used to do ? " " Certainly ," said I, " I never took the slightest notice of his screams. If I did not mean him to have what he was crying for, I let him cry on without moving the muscles of my face even to show that I heard him ; if, on the other hand, I meant him to have what he was screaming for, I gave it to him, although he was cry- ing. Had I acted differently, he would have formed the false notion that crying is wrong (instead of which, it is the too impatient desire that causes the crying which is wrong) ; and he would have come at length, hypocritically, to refrain from the MANIFESTATION of impatient desire, in order to ARRIVE AT ITS OBJECT. Of course, the only right thing to do, was first so to behave towards him as to win back his affection to me that affection which, in former days, was the source of his confidence in me, which confidence was, in its turn, the source of cheerful acquiescence in my wishes, even when he could not see their reasonableness ; and secondly, so to develop his higher faculties that he should not be so eagerly craving for little things." " Ah, well ! " said Mrs. G., " it is very fine, but I dare say you got many a headache from that system of crying which he used to carry on.*" July. B. is very fond of doing what he calls his journal, that is, repeating to me at night the deeds of the day. I find it of incalculable use. I learn there- from the impression which things have made upon him ; those impressions are strengthened and made manifest to himself by the act of speaking them out to me, and 90 MEMORANDA I am enabled to help him to compare himself with himself, and to direct him to further exertions. To-night, he and S. were playing in the garden, and he wheeled S. in his wheel-barrow. S. then tried to wheel him, but could not ; whereupon N. began to scoff at S. "Never mind, S.," said B. ; "once, do you know, I could not wheel this barrow full of cones ; and, I dare say, next year you will be able to wheel me; and I shall be able to wheel the gardener's barrow full of weeds and rubbish : don't you think we shall, mamma ? " This little speech was delicious to me ; it was what I wished what I expected ; his habit of self-observation had taught him the improvability of human beings ; and so far from exulting in the superiority the moment gave him over S., he was sobered by the reflection, that as yet he could not manage the gardener's wheel-barrow. Teach the being to be emulous of himself, and he will not be the victim of the emulation of others, but will be striving after perfection. I do not say to B., "You do so-and-so better or worse than C. or E. ;" but always, "Can you manage so-and-so better than you did a month ago? How long has it taken you," or " How long do you think it will take you, to learn so- and-so ? " The fact is that he scarcely ever thinks of comparing himself with others; but he seldom closes his eyes without planning for the morrow the perfect- ing of to-day's enterprise, or undertaking some new work which to-day's labours have suggested. So we are slowly and pleasantly climbing the ladder, step by step, without noting who is above or who is beneath us. Give "the love of excellence," and "the love 91 MEMORANDA of excelling*" will not spring up and shadow the heart. Nov. I have invariably observed in children a taste for imitating the occupations of men. Almost as babies, they have dinner and tea-parties; girls have dolls, and boys drive carriages ingeniously constructed of chairs : the carpenter, the glazier, the blacksmith's forge, what a charm all these have for children ! and then, what book delights them so much as " Robinson Crusoe " ? B. has made me read to him the " Family Robinson " over and over and over again, and he is ever wishing for a desert island. If my observation on this point be correct, namely, that the individual should pass through pretty nearly the same training as the species has done, the as yet undiscovered way of naturally developing the powers may be by letting the child, in as far as it can, supply its own wants. There are many of the arts of life so simple as to be within the reach of the child's comprehension and execution. In almost all of them he might help a little ; and this experience, UNDER INTELLIGENT GUIDANCE, would not only give a quickness and truth of compre- hension and sight, aiding at the same time the de- velopment of the physical powers ; but a large fund of knowledge and science might be taught far more pleasantly than through books. For instance : V. has a remarkable talent for mechanics, and I am sure might be led to a discovery of the principles of that science, if he were afforded opportunity of seeing machinery, and his mind awakened and set to work by intelligent questions. 92 MEMORANDA May. "This is my birthday let us have a cake," said H. to-day. I had no idea of connecting the idea of feasting with that of a birthday. I proposed that the usual supper should be carried out into the wood. The children raised a turf throne for H., and strewed the place where we were to sit with bright flowers and fragrant ferns ; and whilst the rays of the setting sun gilded the bark of the birches, N.'s guitar sung him to his golden rest. It was a beautiful scene, and touch- ing. A dance concluded the evening's amusements. H. was the last to retire to rest; and when we were alone, I said to him, " We have been very happy, dear H., and have rejoiced that it is your birthday why should we do so ? The angels sung when Christ was born, and men should sing when such men as Howard and Washington are born. " He understood my innuendo, and said, " That was a foolish speech of mine about the cake : to be sure, the best way of celebrating one's birthday is to give as much pleasure as one can on that day." "Why on that day more than all others?" I answered. "It is a bad thing to mark out particular days for the performance of duties, which it is required of us to perform every moment of our lives." Oct. It would be interesting to discover the rules which govern children's apprehension of poetry. In general, that which they cannot understand charms more than that which is within their comprehension. I think I have observed that it is sound which chiefly pleases them; after that, pathos; then, horror; and then, humour. H. and W. like better than any 93 MEMORANDA other poetry, Tennyson's " New Year's Eve " ; then one of the Irish Melodies, namely, " The Minstrel Boy to the War is gone " ; after that, " Chevy Chace " ; and last of all, the usual nursery doggerel. I remember, when I was nine years old, by chance reading Collins'* " Ode to the Passions," and bursting out crying with exquisite sensation when I came to the line " And Hope enchanted smiled and waved her golden hair." It is, in truth, very beautiful, taken in connection with that which precedes. Some children are very poetical. B., when four years old, while walking in the wood at I , wished to gather some flowers for his mamma, who was going away. "There is no time now," said some one who was present, " but you can send her a nosegay in a few days." "They will hang their heads," said he; " when mamma goes, they will cry, they will all wither and waste away." One evening, while watching the sun set, he said, "The sun sinks behind the deep hills." When four years old, he would amuse him- self for hours by drawing lines, and making stories about these lines ; for instance : " Here is a steam- boat, and here is a little boat, and it goes wave W ave wave." But there is no good thing on this earth which may not be perverted by excess into bad. B.'s imagination often leads him into untruth. When three years old he said, so very gravely that, had you only looked at his countenance, and not heard his words, you would have felt sure he believed the truth of what he was speaking "Do you know, 94 MEMORANDA just now I saw a pig walking along the road with its bonnet on ! " Every day, the habit of telling marvellous falsities grew upon him. My feeling was, that he had no intention to deceive; the images passed through his mind, and he wished to communi- cate them, and knew not yet how to do so but by saying, "I saw," "There was," and the like forms of expression. However, had he meant to cheat, it is a fearful thing to begin with a child upon the subject of untruth ; and the plan we pursued from the beginning was, not to take the slightest notice of these effusions. To laugh at them, would have been fatal ; to frown on them, scarcely less so ; there- fore, there was no other course left, than to remain deaf to them. Tempted on by his imagination, he still tells stories of this kind ; but surely these stories are of a very different nature from those which are uttered in order to screen the teller from punish- ment. One cannot be too careful not to tempt chil- dren to tell untruth, especially if they are of a timid nature. Cowardice is the mother of all the vices, and her first-born is lying. The falsehoods of chil- dren arise chiefly from our expecting from them feelings not suited to their age. It has been truly said, that one part of the art of education is to lose time; so to contrive that no virtues which he has not shall, by circumstances, be required of the child ; to keep him in that simplicity of circumstances in which duty and perception of duty, and will and power, harmonise. Now, how can we expect the child (short-sighted being, and living almost entirely 95 MEMORANDA through his senses) to comprehend the majestic beauty of truth ? Is it not one of the last things that the rational being begins to learn? Is not the love of truth that love which grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength ? Is not the man who has gone the nearest to the perfect worship of truth, the one who has gone the nearest to perfection ? When one considers how difficult it is for the full- facultied man to see, much more to follow after, truth, it will appear how almost impossible it is for the child to do either. Obstinacy. Oh, to what battles have I been wit- ness ! There was X. shut up for weeks, and darkly looked on, until he sunk into a frightful sort of stupor, because he would not, in counting, say " twenty," but always " nineteen, twenty-one." There was J. in bed for three weeks, because he would not say a letter; and C. severely whipped, to make her say a word which she met with in reading, and would not pronounce. Nothing fosters obstinacy like con- tention. It has been said, and there may be some truth in the idea, that it is right to do battle once with an obstinate child ; and, by gaining it, make him aware of his habit, and also convince him of his power, and yours, to conquer it. I scarcely know : it is very questionable whether these victories do not leave behind them a resentfulness and soreness which it takes years to efface. However this may be with regard to habits already formed, certain it is, that one should try to prevent the formation of the habit a thing only to be done by analysing 96 OF THE * \ UNIVERSITY J OF ME M) ft AN DA the feeling. What is obstinacy, but resistance to a supposed injury? Is there any other cure for it, than a conviction in the child of the lovingness and good sense of its conductor? Is that conviction likely to be wrought by the tortures by which people usually seek to conquer a fit of obstinacy? Would obstinacy ever spring up under an intelligent guid- ance ? Must it not have been engendered by a loss of confidence, caused by a quantity of useless requi- sition on the part of the educator ? Here again comes in that principle of action which meets us at every turn, namely, to wait patiently till experience shall have tutored the will. No one will obstinately resist that which he sees to be his good ; it is for this seeing that the parent must be content so often to wait. June. To-day, I went to see Mrs. W., who has just lost her only son. He had been on a visit to his grandmamma, at B. She thought she could never give him enough of rich cake and jellies. The con- sequence was, that he returned home very ill : always delicate, he could not bear the unwholesome food he had at B., and the physicians unanimously attribute his death to his grandmother's imprudent indulgence. The above is an instance (one of thousands) of affection destroying the beloved object. Here follows a case of the mischievous effect of severity of dis- cipline, resolutely and dutifully persevered in. Dec. I have just heard that W. is ill with inflam- mation of the chest, owing to the person in whose care she is having insisted on her bathing in cold water. 97 G MEMORANDA In vain the poor child cried before the bath, and shivered after it. In vain did her purple cheeks and numbed limbs testify her sufferings, and the impro- priety of the treatment ; in vain did I remonstrate. The answer was, "I want to make her hardy." A pretty way, truly, of making hardy, to destroy, by overwhelming the powers ! I endeavoured to explain to L. the rationale of bathing. I told her that the object was to cause the blood to withdraw from the inner organs, and come to the skin; that this was effected by the shock of cold water, which first sent the blood inward with a force, the result of which was an immediate and great reaction; but that, if she went on shocking and shocking, she, of course, de- stroyed the power of reaction ; that, as W. shivered and looked pale, this was what had been done to her ; for that, if the bath had answered the intended pur- pose, she would, on the contrary, look rosy, and feel an agreeable glow of warmth; and I begged that she would have the bath heated to summer heat. I spoke in vain, and the consequence is, that poor W. is laid up, probably, for the winter. She suffers, and will con- tinue to suffer, in body; and of how many faults will her weak and irritable state of body be the cause ! How many hours of ill-humour and listlessness will she have, and of how many positive enjoyments, physical and intellectual, will she be deprived by a stern, strict, mechanical, unintelligent, but well-intended adherence to a fancied rule of right ! How rare it is to see children behave well at table ! 98 MEMORANDA The over-indulged are for ever tasting and impor- tunate, and sick or sulky, according as their wishes are granted or denied. The over-restrained, on the other hand, covet the good things in greedy silence, or obtain them by stealth. I knew one family in which this matter was beautifully managed : at table, no word was said on the subject of eating. No re- mark was made on the dishes. The children always fared like the rest of the company, and were perfectly unrestrained as to quantity. To my certain knowledge, these children never passed the bounds of moderation. They never thought of eating; it was daily as mechanical an operation as breathing. Some things make an indelible impression on children. M. told me lately that, when she was a child, she was in the habit of giving her father a kiss at night, until once he told her that it was very troublesome of her to do so. Naturally affec- tionate, this wounded and shocked her excessively; and she has never forgotten the feeling of that moment. By long years of similar coldness of feeling and of manners towards her, she has been chilled into indifference, reserve, and distrust of mankind. The contrary to the above is the case of N., who, when seven years old, was travelling in a stage-coach with her father. A lady, who did not perceive that her father was holding her, cautioned her against leaning against the coach-door so strongly that the child shrunk back. Her father said, in an accent MEMORANDA which has never been forgotten "Do you distrust this arm ? " In our systems of education, one great fault is, such impatience to arrive at results, that we hesitate at nothing in order to obtain them ; or, failing of that, accept any shadow or counterfeit of them ; and then "lay the flattering unction to our souls" that we have accomplished great good. Not only is this fact observable in our intellectual discipline, which, instead of being a series of steps, is a mass of rugged rocks, hard to climb, and with many a chasm between the heights, to be leapt with blind and life-consuming energy; but likewise in religion and in morals, the reproach of the old poet is deserved by us : " They strive to seem, But never care to be. 5 ' Long would it take to trace the evils which flow in from this source ! There is little of the hypocrisy so common amongst men, which has not its origin in the practical lying to which children are forced. Yesterday, I was witness to a scene which gave rise to these remarks. Mrs. T. is very anxious that her child should be religious; and no pains are spared to make him so. The boy (not four years old) was brought down to the dessert. In due time, the nurse came in to take him to bed, when the following con- versation ensued : Mamma. Say your prayers, my darling. Boy. I won't. Mamma. Oh, yes! now be good. Show 100 MEMORANDA Miss S. how prettily you can say your prayers. (Silence; pouting lips.) Mamma. Come, now, you don't know what your grandmamma has for you ! Boy. What ? Mamma. An orange ! Grandmamma. There's Shamrock (the dog); now, make haste, or we'll get Shamrock to say pretty prayer. Mamma. Yes, dear, now do, because of the orange, you know ! Will it be believed, that this chattering had the desired effect on the boy ? Worked upon by greedi- ness and vanity, he lisped the Lord's Prayer, in a sulky, muttering manner; was called a good boy, and went to bed, but without the orange. When he asked for it, "To-morrow" was the answer. And this is teaching religion ! And, after such education as this, we wonder that men are what they are. Here are lessons in plenty ! Here, in five minutes, are inculcated impressively, greediness, stupid surrender of the understanding, vanity, lying, and hypocrisy ! It is a misery to see a child a slave to its clean frock, and obliged to keep it clean at the expense of the exercise of its active enjoyments ; it is a misery to see a child a willing slave, and content to sacrifice its play to vanity ; and it is a third misery to see a child unneat and slovenly. Between these various shoals, how few mothers know how to steer ! One thing to be said for the poor mother is, that she has difficulties to encounter whichever way she turns, while there is little or nothing in the institutions and customs of society to guide her or keep her out of them. In the first place, dress is so expensive that much labour is required in 101 MEMORANDA order to afford the means of procuring it. Secondly, the fashion of dress is inconvenient and ungraceful, in spite of the time, thought, labour, and money spent upon it. Why should not we have dresses woven into convenient and elegant shape, and avoid all the fitting, cutting, and sewing, upon which many women waste their energies all their life long ? For vanity about dress, the chief remedy is, the substitution of love of excellence for love of excelling ; the development of the intellect, also, will bring about a just appreciation of the value of dress, when weighed against mental superiority. The plan adopted by S. answered very well to check the growth of vanity in that direction. C. was very vain of some jewels, the gift of an injudicious relative ; or, as she emphatically called them, her do-ills. Day after day, she asked to wear them ; day after day, S. said " No " ; but finding that to refuse was of no use, she was puzzled what course to adopt, until it occurred to her to let one fire put another out. Accordingly, the next time C. applied to her for permission to wear her do-ills, she answered, " Certainly, wear them if you please ; but you know these things are valuable because your mamma's dear friend gave them to you; they must neither be lost nor spoiled. If you have them on, therefore, you must remain in this room, and even, I think I should say, upon this chair, in order to be sure that they are safe."" C. consented to the terms, and joyfully bedecked herself with her finery, and then stationed herself upon a chair. It was a fine evening in August, and the other children were out ; however, 102 MEMORANDA for two hours, C. persevered in sitting on the chair. At length she begged to have them taken off; and from that time to this (two years), the do-ills have never been mentioned, but with an uncomfortable feeling and a blush. In the same manner, by making lace and frills and embroidered finery preventives to play, the love of them has so far been got rid of, that they rank lower as pleasures than active play does; and the simplicity of her dress prevents the habit of deriving pleasure from her toilet : for anything beyond this we must look forward a few years. At tea, last night, H. came in late : all the biscuits had disappeared, but some fresh ones came in for him. Amongst these was one with which W. was unacquainted. " It looks very nice," quoth he ; " the best in the plate." After grimacing, laughing, and hanging over the plate in indecision for some time (having eaten nearly a plateful at his own tea), W. snapped up the biscuit and ran off with it ; not that he would have been forced to replace it, but he did not like to eat it before us all. This morning, this same boy, who quite understands the power of money to procure enjoyments for himself, eagerly not only voluntarily, but eagerly spent all his store in buying a thing for S. which he knew she wanted. Which parents best understand the art of teaching generosity ; those who teach a child to seem generous, or those who permit a child to seem what it is, greedy or generous, whichever it may chance to be ? Nothing is more puzzling in education (at least so 103 MEMORANDA I have found) than to mark the point at which it is fit to struggle with Nature. A. is bookish, intellectual, very nervous, weak, and inapt in all bodily exercise, and in all the concerns of every-day life. Z. is clever in managing these best. Nobody will do your errand more quickly, or act more cleverly on an emergency ; his body is well strung, and he delights to use it. But it is impossible to get him to do his lessons ; all per- severance in studies, of which he does not see the practical bearing, is out of the question. How will these two boys most easily and readily arrive at per- fection ? By pushing their natures to the furthest extreme ? or by modifying their natures, by developing the latent dormant faculties ? For instance, by sending A. to garden, and play at cricket, and ride, and drive, and swim ; and by making Z. spend a certain number of hours daily in the schoolroom. From the cradle to the grave, all might be happiness if we did but manage well, if we would be content to help Nature, to follow her indications, instead of attempting to control and even counteract her. All kinds of knowledge are so linked together that it is impossible to go far in one study without the aid of another, which again conducts to a third, and so on. It would be a beautiful experi- ment to try never to force anything intellectual on a child, merely to let it see all kinds of pursuits going on, and then just to help it on the way it wished to go. I do believe its own goodwill would carry it on farther, and quicker, and more easily, than any un- natural discipline or training. Or, if people must train, at least let them smooth the way, instead of 104 MEMORANDA making it as thorny and impracticable as possible. Z. is made miserable by being forced to exercise facul- ties which are weak in him, to the exclusion of those which are strong. How many pronounce themselves in- capable of making acquirements, merely because these acquirements are made so difficult of attainment by those who profess to lead the way to them! For instance, S. was said to be unable to learn music. She is really fond of it, and regrets nothing so much as not having learned it in her childhood ; but it was made so irksome to her that she could not, as a child, over- come her dislike to the ennui of it. Intelligent and affectionate surveillance would, in her case, have detected the difference between want of taste and want of perseverance in conquering mechanical difficulty. No one is totally deficient in any faculty ; the differ- ence between individuals is, that the faculties exist in them in different proportions ; and probably, under a perfect education, they would be developed according to their original powers. September. Parents have a hard part to play, even the best-intentioned ; and one of the most difficult is to keep guard over their own hearts, and to prevent them from getting too engrossed and too partial. How hard it is to see the faults of a beloved child ! Yet affection is not necessarily blind. There are instances in which it even quickens intelligence. But, when a fault is clearly discerned, it is often painful for affection to inflict the pain which is necessary to remove it. There is heroism in the soldier who mounts 105 MEMORANDA the breach ; but, in the heart of the loving mother who can resolutely face the faults of her child that she may overcome them, there glows a higher and nobler heroism ! Another difficulty, which obstructs the course of the mother, is the close connection between love of sympathy and love of admiration. " Look at me," may mean, "admire me," or it may mean, "enjoy with me." Numbers of children are spoiled by notice, who are otherwise well managed : they feel themselves the point of interest to the little family group, and it makes them vain, and self-sufficient, and wayward. Such children should be left more alone left to them- selves they should have occupations which they could pursue alone ; and better would it be to allow a few follies to be committed, and awkwardnesses contracted^ than to subject them to that constant watching which spies into, and, as much as possible, controls every little act, or even attitude, word, and gesture. Besides the bad effect of producing conceit, this constant watching prevents naturalness of manner and inde- pendence of character; the parent having always supplied mind to the muscle, the child knows not how to guide its own muscles when left to itself. This ia one cause of the timidity and want of expressive grace in the manners of most grown-up people. What a beautiful eloquence there would be in the movements,, gesture, carriage, and language of a being who had never been taught or tutored at all about the matter, but whose well-cultured mind had been left free to control the muscles ! C. has ungraceful attitudes. I 106 MEMORANDA believe these will all disappear as her taste and her feel- ings develop. No one under the influence of passion is ungraceful. If those under the influence of feeling are, we have to thank for it the hypocrisy which commands us to veil our feelings. Of all the mistakes people make in education, by far the most fatal is the little use or the bad use made of that onnipotent engine affection. It is melancholy to look round and see how the affections are crushed by the stern coldness of some parents, and dissipated by the folly of others, who take them and play upon them to gain some selfish or mean end ! There is nothing which cannot be obtained by means of affection. As to learning, it has hardly ever yet been applied to it, much less has its full power been tried. Yet not to learn from one we love is no more possible, than not to see when the sun lights up with brightness an object directly be- fore the eye. S. is said to have been the naughtiest little girl that ever was seen or heard of, and very stupid too. One day, having been turned out of the schoolroom in disgrace for not saying her lesson well, she went and sat down disconsolately at the top of the staircase, her tears pattering down on the brown cover of " ChambauxTs French Grammar." "What is the matter, S.?" said R., who happened to come upstairs just then. "I can't learn these French adverbs/ 1 " Give me the book," said R. " Now say them after me." She had not repeated them after R. four times before she knew the column 107 MEMORANDA quite perfectly; and from that day she never failed in any lesson in which R. was her instructor or com- panion. S. in her turn had the happiness of training to habits of thoughtfulness and energy the mind of a child, who, when she took him in hand, seemed almost incapable of being taught. It was as* if they had given her a cloud, and told her to change it into something substantial. However, he became so fond of her, that to be and do what she wished was his dearest aim, and he attained it. We will give an epitome of THE HISTORY OF A. At seven years old, A. not only could neither write nor read, but he could not see, nor hear, nor think, like other children. He seemed completely shut up in the interior world of his own mind ; and to judge by the expression of his face, which was singularly refined and joyful, it was a pure and happy world. He was less skilful in the management of his body, less active and bold in boyish sports, than B., at two years old. You heard nervous screams, but you never observed anything like purpose in his plays. He walked about seeing nothing, wishing for nothing, content with all events that came to him. You would have pronounced him an idiot, yet the phrenologists said he had extraordinary powers of mind. He only seemed roused to clear perception by tales of the horrible, or of the supernatural. The more gifted he was, the more necessary was it to help him to 108 MEMORANDA develop and turn to account these gifts ; for we all know that unhappiness is the constant, and madness the frequent, consequence of unused energies. S. therefore undertook to teach him, and for her guide she took that beautiful sketch of practical systematic teaching, for which the world is indebted to Dr. Biber, contained in his " Life of Pestalozzi." After he had learned reading some time, he was told to find words with various sounds in them; for instance, the sound a, as in paper. He found they, day, paint, weigh, blade. Then he was led to observe the various ways in which he had obtained the sound. The practice of making sentences upon the words was very effective in inducing in him that consciousness of his feelings and ideas which he so much needed. There is something very affecting in looking over the lesson-books of this child, they are so simple and true ; and it is easy to discover from them the kind of life he led, and all that was impressing him. One singular thing is, that he never said I., or W., or H., or B., do so-and-so; but always " some boys," " some ladies." "When boys fight with sticks, and roar, and speak all together, they make a din. A dot is a little thing; it's for i. Sun is a round thing in the sky, and it is very light indeed. Lane is a little path that people go through. Some people have a round face, and some a bad face, and some a long face. Blade is a thing that knives have. Some ladies buy little boys baskets. Some boys ask other boys if they will tell their secrets. Lady 109 MEMORANDA Macbeth locked the door. Tom Thumb (his rabbit) eats groundsel ." These examples may suffice to indicate the sort of lessons by which it was endeavoured to lead this child on to thought. By the time he had gone through a copy-book in this way, he was able to read Miss Edgeworth^s "Frank," to write with ease, and he had wonderfully improved in the power of fixing his attention. His next four books were intended as a grammar course. He began with verbs "I run, I walk, I dawdle, I love,*" &c. ; he found out and wrote down twelve a day, and in this way collected four hundred verbs. The second grammar-book was a list of nouns. " I am a boy, a dawdle, a coward, a lad, a child, a wheeler, puller, peeler, runner, rider ; " and he went on in this way until he had found out upwards of two hundred nouns. The third grammar-book was of adjectives, and a very curious list he made out. There are more than three hundred of them ; and it was found necessary, in order to make plain to his teacher and himself his meaning, to require of him a sentence. A few extracts will show what must have been the effect of this lesson on the boy : " I am cowardly when I don't like fighting before I go into the bath when I'm deceitful. I am happy when I see mamma when they don't fight with me when they dance. I am made when I was a little child. I am good when I do my lessons. I am wicked when I go and see wicked people hunt the squirrel. I am round all about me. I am manageable by S. I am 110 MEMORANDA red when I'm very cold when I'm hot. I am comfort- able when I'm dead ; when I'm in bed ; when there is a dinner-party. I am gay when there is a dinner-party, and on Sunday, because then I haven't got anything to do but what I like. I am white in the globe of my eye. I am delightful to S. I am sad when somebody goes away. Don't I feel sad in my face ? I am bright when I am not dirty. I am hard in my chest. I am soft in my cheek. I am contrary to dead. I am trembling when I go into the bath. I am alive now. I am merry when S. is not angry on me. I am proud when I have got new shoes. I am sulky when S. don't take hold of my hand ; when S. is not fond of me. I am more than a bit. I am shameful when I beat a little boy like B. I am unjust when I go before C. in a race." In this manner he went through all the parts of speech, learning the construction of sentences, and gaining at every step self-knowledge. It was most striking to watch the rapid development of all his faculties under this discipline. His next book was a description of his body, on the plan of Pestalozzi's Manuel des Meres. " I have a head, a face, a forehead, a right eyebrow, a left eyebrow, a right upper eyelid," and so on. After going through the body in this way, simply naming the parts, he arranged them according to their number. Next he made a list of the parts of his body which are round and roundish. Then he took other qualities, such as colour, shiningness, fluidity, solidity, movability, im- movability, flexibility, &c. When S. began to teach 111 MEMORANDA him arithmetic, it seemed as if he never could be made to understand it ; but, by using cubes instead of ciphers^ or making him put dots on his slate instead of ciphers by making everything tangible to him by beginning at the very beginning, and taking every step without presuming to omit one it all became clear and delightful to him, and he was able to answer very difficult questions in mental arithmetic. We refer those who wish to know the mode of teaching number, which was pursued in this case, to Dr. Biber's " Life of Pestalozzi." It would be tedious, and indeed almost impossible, to detail all the means which were taken to clear up this puzzled head. Whatever he saiv or felt was the material to which alone his observation was directed. He made a book containing a list of the flowers in bloom in each month, and drawings of some of them. His account of January is as follows : " In flower : primroses, wall-flowers, stocks, laurus- tinus; mosses very beautiful. We walked on the frozen pond. The birds used to be fed by the window. Most trees are without leaves." " February. In flower : snowdrops, hepaticas, daisies, primroses, wall-flowers, violets, periwinkles, crocuses, furze. The birds sing sweetly thrushes, robins, yellow-hammers, larks, and blackbirds." This lesson should be carried on through every year, growing more and more full, until from a bare list like the above, it might become connected with and made the groundwork of botany, or medicine, or poetry, or drawing. MEMORANDA His observation was excited by such questions as the following ; and we will select a few of the answers to them : " What do you see in this room ? " " Two tables, six chairs, a carpet, a rug, a mattress, four book- shelves, two doors, one window, some curious stones, a wine-glass full of flowers, four desks, many books, an inkstand, a portfolio, plaster casts, &c." " What can you do with your mouth ? " " Bite, sing, talk, chatter, laugh, speak, whistle." The above was one of a series of questions on the functions of the body, an exercise which should follow that upon structure. Sometimes he was told to describe an object; for instance, a slate. " It has red leather round it, three lines at each corner, a pencil-case, a wooden frame." In this way he was taught botany by describing minutely what he saw ; and to everything that he did, drawing was as much as possible added. "What is flat?" "My hand is flat; my book is flat ; my rule is flat ; the floor is flat ; the glass is flat ; the table is flat ; the ceiling is flat." When he was sufficiently awakened and regulated to derive benefit from the use of the knowledge of others, which is to be found in books, S. suffered him to leave the world of observation for awhile, and gave him questions, the answers to which he could partly answer ; but for their complete solution he was obliged to refer to books. The uses of animals to man were what he began with, and we subjoin some specimens. 113 H MEMORANDA " Dogs give skin to line things ; they watch the house and the sheep ; they lead the blind ; they hunt ; they point. In China the people eat them. They draw little carts and sledges. Moles give their skin, and they make drains. Squirrels give their fur ; they are eaten. 1 ' His next work was on the uses of plants; for instance " Wheat. We eat the seed, and the stalk is called straw, and it is put into farm-yards to make beds for the cattle, and it is made into hats, and mats, and other things. Rushes. The stalk is made into baskets and seats of chairs, and the pith is made into the wicks of candles." After he had gone through all the plants he knew of in this way, naming the uses of each of their parts, the lesson was turned round, and he had to answer. " What stalks are of use ? " " Rhubarb, rushes, flax, wheat, &c." " What leaves are of use ? " " Cabbage, lettuce, tea, cocoa- tree, &c." " What seed-vessels are of use ? " " Apple, orange, melon, &C." "What seeds are of use?" "Peas, walnut, coffeej corn, &c." This, carried on, would lead to a knowledge of manufactures and of science too ; but manufactures would of course precede, as being more within the reach of childish comprehension. The natural history of animals was very much to A.'s taste; and often he preferred drawing pictures, and writing descriptions and anecdotes of them, to what he 114 MEMORANDA called play. When he had got on pretty well with the above realities, S. thought it time to initiate him into the mysteries of geography, history, French, and Latin. Geography she taught him in the following manner. We quote it not as being perfect, but good in some respects, and of some value as being experimental. He would draw a map of Africa, for instance ; and then she told him things about it, of which the following is his recollection : " Africa is very hot and very sandy, and the negroes are carried to America and made slaves. Many of the Africans do not know much. The Egyptians knew more than the rest of the world many hundred years ago. There are camels in Africa, and camelopards, and lions, and elephants, ostriches, wild dogs, leopards, gazelles, buffaloes, hippopotami, rhinoceri, monkeys, locusts, ants, snakes, and many other animals. There are in Africa palm-trees (on which grow cocoa-nuts), and acacias, and tamarinds, and cotton-trees, and many other trees ; and wheat, rice, millet, and maize grow there ; a great deal of bread is made of maize root. " The river Nile is supposed to be two thousand miles long ; it runs over the banks every year, which does good to the land. It had once seven mouths ; five are nearly choked up with sand. The Sphynx, the Pyramids, the ruins of Thebes, are in Egypt." Then comes as an afterthought : " There are zebras, and crocodiles, and the largest trees in the world, the cala- bash and the mangrove, in Africa." Of whatever country he was studying he drew four maps ; the first was filled up with names of animals living therein ; the 115 MEMORANDA second with names of plants growing therein; the third was a picture of rivers, lakes, and mountains ; the fourth contained provinces and towns. A large portion of his reading consisted of travels, or rather, I should say, of his hearing about travels ; for portions were read to him carefully selected, and reduced to the level of his capacity. He was taught French on the same principle as he had been taught English. If he met with a sound formed by different letters, he was led to observe the fact. For instance, in the sentence, " Regardez les bergers des troupeaux" the sound " a," as in the Eng- lish word "pain," is obtained in the first word by " ez? in the second by " es? and in the third by " ers? After he had learned to read and spell, he went over his language lessons again : " Je suisjUs^je suis gar$on, je suis frere? Second series : " Je suis bon, je suis paresseux"^ Third series : "Je mange, je vois, fecoute" &c. ; and so on to the composition of sentences. Be- sides this exercise, he used to read a good deal every day, in order to give him a copia verborum. The literal English of each word was told him and impressed upon him by various methods: the most successful seemed to be making him find out the English derivatives, as from "bon" bun, " cueillir" scullery, " saliere" salt- cellar, &c. &c. &c. As for Latin, he learned the declensions of nouns by first being told the Latin for a word, and then making a sentence with it. At first the sentence would have but one Latin word in it, but by-and-by he was able to put in adjectives and verbs. The first sentences 116 MEMORANDA were such as these : Oculi nautarum watch t err am. We eat meltem, et pomam, et porcellas, et uvas. Columbce carry litter as. Filia est felix. Films est fortis. Manus regince parva est. Rosa puellce parva est. From these small beginnings he gradually rose up to the power of writing Latin ; and the habit of writing gave him a great facility in reading. S. was careful to give him interesting things to read, both in French and Latin ; and she succeeded so well that usually he was so anxious to get at the meaning of what he was reading that he pushed through the difficulty of lan- guage eagerly. He was very fond of looking at the prints of Shakspere, and hearing portions of him read. "Julius Caesar" one day caught his eye, and a miserable picture of Brutus killing himself. " Oh, do tell me the story, S. ! " said he. " No, you shall read it for yourself ; " and she gave him extracts from various Latin authors which told the tale ; and with a little help he laboured through it gladly. Many parts of " Cornelius Nepos " he read with the same interest and pleasure, and Caesar's account of Britain, too, was a great plea- sure to him. Another extract from S/s journal will show her mode of dealing with his difficult mind : " A. read to-day " * Ah, spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain : He lives with pleasure, and he dies with pain.' " First of all, I told him that an emmet was an in- sect. Then I asked What is rich? A. The emmet. 117 MEMORANDA S. What in ? After a long pause, he answers Grain. Then I explained 'hoarded, 1 which led me into an account of the habits of the emmet, which interested him. By this time he had quite forgotten that ' spare ' here means, 'don't kill.' After he had thought, or rather sat, for a long time, I said The lady, when she says 'spare,' tells the little boy not to do some- thing : guess what. A . Not to tease it, not to tread on it, not to hurt it, not to push it, not to kill it. S. What did she say to him? A. Not to kill him. S. Tell me not to kill him. A. 9 after some time, Don't kill him. S. Now let us have the line again. A. 'Don't kill yon.' S. What do you mean? A. I dun know. S. That. Now the line. A. ' Don't kill that emmet, rich in heaped-up grain.' S. Why should he not kill the emmet ? " A. then paused ; and S. foolishly referred him, forsooth, to the book, instead of to his own heart. After a long time it struck him that the act of death would be painful ; and then S. asked him for a second reason. He could not find it. S. then said Who ought to be pleased, the little boy or the emmet ? Suppose the little boy is yourself. The clear and instant answer was The emmet. S. And which would he like best, to live, or to die ? A. To live. S. Why? A. Because then he could make him- self happy. S. How? A. He could see his friends; he could eat ; he could pile up. S. Very well. Now tell me the two reasons why we should not kill insects. A. Because killing hurts them; and because they like to live, because they are happy. As soon as A. had sufficient command of his pen he 118 MEMORANDA used to write a journal. At first, of course, it was but a bare record of doings ; soon after came in descriptions and remarks ; and, last of all, feelings. It is a great proof of the goodness of a plan when you can see that, throughout life, it may be carried on with advantage ; and that, in proportion as the being improves, his execution of the design will improve. That is the case with all the lessons which we have reported here; there is not one of them that the man will not love better, and execute better, than the boy. After-life will be but a carrying on, not a change, of studies to A. With regard to journals, every one who has kept one for some time must observe how much his journal improves as his being improves. Two or three of A.'s journals will exemplify this : " July. I got up. I bathed. I ran in the passage. I had my breakfast. I did my plant-book. I did my journal. I did some counting. I did some reading. I drew. Tea came. A boy came with a tortoise and some white mice. I went to bed. "August. I got up, bathed, and ran. I had my breakfast. We went out said that we saw a bull. We went on. At last we got to the pond ; we might not fish, so we came back ; and as we came back we went to T . We went on. We cut some reeds. At last we came home. We had our tea. We went to bed. "January. In the afternoon we went to T . We drew the church. We went through some very beau- tiful fields. At last we got to church. drew the church. We could see for miles and miles. 119 MEMORANDA We saw the sun sink behind hill. When we were going home, both my shoes were lost in the mud ; at last we got them again. We went on. When we got home, I had tea. I went to bed, and to sleep." This journal, though so short, is a great improve- ment on the first, which had too much of the word / in them, and that / followed simply by a verb. His journals afterwards became very interesting; he drew in them, and put down his recollections of reading, and wrote down all his lessons in them, and anything which interested his head or heart. When he first came under the care of S. he was extremely nervous; but afterwards he got in some measure over it, partly because his health improved, and partly because he struggled so much against it. He was one day overheard, as he stood on the brink of a low sandbank, saying to himself, "Now I must, MUST, MUST do it!" After trying ineffectually to gain courage to take the leap, off he went at last, and practised again and again, until it was no longer difficult to him. He exercised the same strength of mind and purpose about climbing; he shook like an aspen when he first climbed, but, by dint of persever- ance, succeeded in gaining more nerve. It would not be doing justice to our hero, not to mention, perhaps, the most remarkable trait in his character, and that which more than anything else lifted him out of the state of confusion and helpless- ness in which he has been described to have been at first. This was his extraordinary affection for S. In so young a child it was very remarkable. Everything 120 MEMORANDA beautiful, which he found, was given to her; if any one spoke slightingly of her, he was sure to hear and to resent it ; if he caressed any one besides her, he was sure to go to her instantly, and give her double the caresses he had bestowed on the other person. He was so jealously sensitive about her feelings that he divined what they were towards others, and could measure them pretty nearly as exactly as she could herself. The instant question upon the mention of a new name was, " Do you like that person ? " If she had been absent from home, upon her return he would stand beside her, speaking only by happy looks ; and whereas the other children would keep on saying, " When will S. come ? when will S. come ? " he would say nothing : he would have learned the exact minute when she might be expected, and would not give himself the pain of being told again that she could not arrive before that minute. But the greatest proof of his affection was the way in which he commanded himself, in order to become what he knew she esteemed. Never would he have got over his nervousness as he did, never would he have exerted the mental energy he did, but under the strong stimulus of winning or losing her sympathy. All this is but an exemplification of the power of affection, which alone of terrestrial things is eternal and omnipotent ; by its blessed magic, guilt fades " like the baseless fabric of a vision,*" sorrow is transformed into joy weakness into strength earth into heaven. Patriot, philanthropist, philosopher, reformer, parent, sacred band who war with evil and ignorance, 121 MEMORANDA despair not: if you love the object of your struggles, they shall prevail. Not in vain did the tear of sorrow and of love fall from the eyes of Christ at the tomb of Lazarus ; nor in vain over suffering humanity did He pour the pathetic remonstrance of benevolence " How often would I have gathered ye beneath my wings, and ye would not ! " As Lazarus rose from the tomb at the sound of the voice he loved, so shall that same love subdue all things to itself, and at length raise to life, and light, and happiness, the whole human race. The warm radiance of our affections must shine on the evil and on the good. Through such agency alone can the evil be converted into good. THE END Printed by BALLANTTNE, HANSON <& Co. Edinburgh &* London UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AUG 18 1915 R 6 |i 30m-l,'15 0463: 1 66988