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scale, are liable, in their progress from worse to better, to great roughness in the working, and appalling sounds of discord. The wiser you become, the more you diminish this jarring, and tend to produce that amelioration. Learn this, and be neither appalled nor appalling; or if your reflections do not travel so far, and you are in no danger of continuing your evil course by the subtle desperations of superstition, be content to know, that nobody illtreats another, who is satisfied with his own conduct. If the case were otherwise, it would be worse; for you would not have the excuse, even of a necessity for relieving your own sensations. But it never is so, sophisticate about it as you may. The very pains you take to reconcile yourself to yourself, may show you how much need you have of doing so. It is nothing else which makes the silliest little child sulky; and the same folly makes the grown man a tyrant. When you begin to ill-treat your child, you begin to punish in him your own faults; and you most likely do nothing but beat them in upon him with every stroke of the scourge: for why should he be wiser than you? Why should he be able to throw off the ill-humours, of which your greater energies cannot get rid ?

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These thoughts we address to those who are worthy of them; and who, not being tyrants, may yet become such, for want of refleetion. Vulgar offenders can be mended only with the whole progress of society, and the advancement of education. There is one thing we must not omit to say; which is, that the best parents are apt to expect too much of their children, and to forget how much error they may have committed in the course of bringing them up. Nobody is in fault, in a criminal sense. Children have their excuses; and parents have their excuses; but the wiser any of us become, the less we exact from others, and the more we do to deserve their regard. The great art of being a good parent consists in setting a good example, and in maintaining that union of dispassionate firmness with habitual good-humour, which a child never thinks of treating with disrespect.

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We have here been speaking principally of the behaviour of parents to little children. When violent disputes take place between parents and children grown up,-young men and women,there are generally great faults on both sides; though, for an

obvious reason, the parent, who has had the training and formation of the other, is likely to be most in the wrong. But unhappily, very excellent people may sometimes find themselves hampered in a calamity of this nature; and out of that sort of weakness, which is so confounded with strength, turn their very sense of being in the right to the same hostile and implacable purpose, as if it were the reverse. We can only say, that from all we have seen in the world, and indeed from the whole experience of mankind, they who are conscious of being right, are the first to make a movement towards reconciliation, let the cause of qua

quarrel be what it may; and that there is no surer method, in the eyes of any who know what human nature is, both to sustain the real dignity of the right side, and to amend the wrong one. To kind-hearted fathers in general, who have the misfortune to get into a dilemma of this sort, we would recommend the pathetic story of a French general, who was observed after the death of his son in battle, never to hold up his head. He said to a friend, My boy was used to think me severe; and he had too much reason to do so. . He did not know how I loved him at the bottom of my heart; and it is now too late.”

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MARRIAGES ROYAL, AND OF DOUBTFUL PROPRIETY.

THE following remarks on the little prince George, with a memorandum respecting his father, are from the Times.-A Sunday paper has headed it

A TALE OF MYSTERY.-"The arrival of a certain person in England created pain when it first took place it was anxiety for his health, no doubt, that excited the feeling the season was wet, and he was exposed to raw cold. His mother had other reasons for wishing him to stay abroad in those, perhaps, the people of England do not partake; but the supposed cause of his visit would, if it were more than a mere supposi tion, create real pain and disgust. It is said, among other things, to be the negotiation of a marriage between two children. Nature revolts at the proposition; and let us-let the people of England still adhere to nature. In barbarous and brutal times it was not uncommon to unite infants of high birth (if any birth be high, all being born alike) by what may be called pre-natural, if not preternatural, marriage; but the age of barbarism, we should suppose, is extinct, and the sacred ritual of our church is totally incompatible with any application to an union such as that which is rumoured or insinuated. Our last Princess chose

into oblivion for some eight or ten good years to come; and then-ay, but who knows what may happen then? We may here mention another circumstance of minor importance, but yet curious. A certain venerable and learned peer-whose prolonged, and we sincerely hope happy life," seems to justify the slowness with which he once decided causes-was seen pacing down St James's street on Saturday last; and who should be observed following him step for step-pari passu, as certain orators say— but Neale, the Neale who was a witness in the affair of Sellis, when the Duke of Cumberland was all but hewn in pieces: together they entered the palace where his Royal Highness now resides, and there they continued for some time. We only mention the facts: they are curious. We have not been able to learn what was the subject of the confabulation."

The consideration of the importance of a little child to a great people has always in it something humiliating; and on no occasion perhaps have the subjects of a monarchy greater reason to cast a glance of doubt and shame at the people of a republic. One cannot help fancying the legislators of the United States turning to look at one another, and joining in a smile of dignified scorn, at the necessity we are under of regarding these matters. We feel as if they must look upon us as so many little boys.

Nature does indeed, as the Times says, revolt at the proposition of these infantine unions or betrothments. It may have turned out well enough occasionally to bring two children together, and let an affection grow up between them, uninfluenced or uninterested; but these things are best done in the Arcadian vallies of St Pierre. The recklessness of will royal can never manage them properly : and if it could, in an instance like the present, other and very serious objections remain. The little parties alluded to are cousins. Now it is a fact well ascertained in these latter days, and notorious to everybody at all conversant with nature, that "breeding in and in," as we believe they term it, inevitably spoils any race of animals; and unfortunately human beings cannot escape this designation, por princes among them. The latter indeed, by the unlucky chances of their station, are too often rendered especially animal and corporeal; and in exhibiting little mind, have all the disadvantages of their nature brought forward in pampered promi

nence. It was probably from a sense of this law in physics, as well as our experience of the domestic dangers attending it, that incest, or the union of more immediate kindred of the same blood, was looked upon in so evil a light from the earliest periods of history. In countries even, where it was permitted, it seems (curiously enough) to have been only a licence assumed by royalty or the priesthood. It did no good in those cases (we allude particularly to the Magi in Persia, and the family of the Ptolemies in Egypt); and it never obtained among the people. If the Gipsies are accused of it, it should be recollected, first, that there is no proof; there is only a surmise; secondly, that that extraordinary people lead a life, of all others, calculated to keep them in health and vigour, and counteract the chances of deterioration and thirdly, that they have considerable intercourse with strangers. The Greeks permitted marriages with half-sisters on one side; which is remarkable, considering that no people seem to have been more earnest in proclaiming the evils of a mixture of blood. The most terrible part of their drama is occupied in rendering them frightful; though by making the parties unconscious in one instance, and loading the offspring with miseries undeserved, they subjected themselves to the satire of the poet; who says, that they wrote these tragedies, in order

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"That other men might tremble, and take warning,

How such a fatal progeny they're born in."

With brothers and sisters-in-law, the case is different. It would be ludicrous to talk of incest-in-law. In one respect, supposing the horror of real incest to be kept up, the marriage of persons in that mode of relationship might be considered as tending to diminish the chances of deterioration; because their offspring would be no longer mere cousins (whose marriage in this country is permitted) but brothers and sisters also, and thereby hindered from marrying. The connexion however, in the present state of society, is justly discountenanced; because it is likely to give rise to family troubles. Jacob himself could not live well with the two sisters he married. Not that we believe it impossible for two females to live in happy union with the same man. The novelists of China

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inform us it can be done in that country:* and to say nothing of what is repeated of other countries in the East, there is the story of Count Gleichen and his double marriage, which is said to have been allowed by the Pope: stories, similar in spirit though not in letter, have been told of several princes; and the celebrated Whig Chancellor Cowper, whom Steele panegyrizes as one of the best of men, is said to have lived many years in a like connexion; for which Swift gave him the nick-name of Will Bigamy. It implies however extreme amiableness in all the parties; would be very dangerous, on some accounts, even to them, unless they were as wise and temperate, as amiable; and is upon the whole to be discountenanced, like the family marriages before-mentioned. But doubts and hazards of all sorts will be perpetually taking place, if not on this point, yet on others connected with it, till something better is done to render the intercourse of the sexes the blessing it ought to be. We have little respect for the existing laws on that

* See the curious work lately published entitled Iu-Kiao-Li, or the Two Fair Cousins; and a tale in another version from the Chinese, whose title we forget. An accommodation of this kind seems to be a favourite winding up of a Chinese story, and is certainly a very useful one to the author.

†They say they manage these things better in Germany. We believe (startling as it may sound to the opinion entertained of themselves on that matter by our beloved and somewhat sulky countrymen) that most nations manage them better than England; or our sulkiness would be diminished. There are great faults in the system of Italy; and greater, because more deception, in that of France. Altogether, it is a subject of the very deepest importance, and well worth inquiring into, especially now that people seem agreed that the interests of humanity may be discussed on all points, without a despicable ill-construction on any. The following is an extract from an interesting work just published, which may give us an insight into the opinions of our German friends. There seems a " preferment" in them, provided the goodness is what it seems, and no health is injured, bodily or mental. But these things require a volume.—

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"The Bavarian women are celebrated for their innate kindness and goodness of heart; and there is a saying with respect to them, which has grown in some parts of the country almost proverbial Sie werden nichts abschlagen,' they will refuse nothing. Whether such an observation may be borne out in fact in its widest application I presume not to say; but their friendly natures are sufficiently evident. A young opera-singer of Munich, who travelled with me, having worn himself out by excess of joking and laughter during the day, became sleepy in the evening, and, not occupying a corner of the coach, found his head rather inconvenient; a Bavarian lady, who sat next to him, protesting that she could never sleep in a coach, surrendered her place to him, and in a few minutes his head was recumbent on her shoulder; his arm round her waist, and he slept profoundly. When the coach stopped to change horses, I walked with my musical friend to view the ruins of a little Gothic church in the moonlight; and, on asking him if he was acquainted with the lady on whose shoulder he had slept so well, he replied, I have never seen her before-but we do these things for one another in Bavaria." A Summer among Music and Musical Professors in Germany.

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