as attractive to the old as to the young, seems to me no less to unfit them for their proper function. Children should laugh, but not mock; and when they laugh, it should not be at the weaknesses and the faults of others. They should be taught, as far as they are permitted to concern themselves with the characters of those around them, to seek faithfully for good, not to lie in wait maliciously to make themselves merry with evil: they should be too painfully sensitive to wrong to smile at it; and too modest to constitute themselves its judges.

With these minor errors a far graver one is involved. As the simplicity of the sense of beauty has been lost in recent tales for children, so also the simplicity of their conception of love. That word which, in the heart of a child, should represent the most constant and vital part of its being; which ought to be the sign of the most solemn thoughts that inform its awakening soul and, in one wide mystery of pure sunrise, should flood the zenith of its heaven, and gleam on the dew at its feet; this word, which should be consecrated on its lips, together with the Name which it may not take in vain, and whose meaning should soften and animate every emotion through which the inferior things and the feeble creatures, set beneath it in its narrow world, are revealed to its curiosity or companionship; this word, in modern child-story, is too often restrained and darkened into the hieroglyph of an evil mystery, troubling

the sweet peace of youth with premature gleams of uncomprehended passion, and flitting shadows of unrecognised sin.

These great faults in the spirit of recent childfiction are connected with a parallel folly of purpose. Parents who are too indolent and selfindulgent to form their children's characters by wholesome discipline, or in their own habits and principles of life are conscious of setting before them no faultless example, vainly endeavour to substitute the persuasive influence of moral precept, intruded in the guise of amusement, for the strength of moral habit compelled by righteous authority-vainly think to inform the heart of infancy with deliberative wisdom, while they abdicate the guardianship of its unquestioning innocence; and warp into the agonies of an immature philosophy of conscience the once fearless strength of its unsullied and unhesitating virtue.

A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, praiseless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honourable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation,

but in peace of heart, and armour of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.

Children so trained have no need of moral fairy tales; but they will find in the apparently vain and fitful courses of any tradition of old time, honestly delivered to them, a teaching for which no other can be substituted, and of which the power cannot be measured; animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment, to behold, in later years, the mystery-divinely appointed to remain such to all human thought-of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good.-Preface to "Grimm" (O. R., II., § 125–127).

62. Study.—What the best wisdom of the Serpent may be, I assume that you all possess ;and my caution is to be addressed to you in that brightly serpentine perfection. In all other respects as wise, in one respect let me beg you to be wiser than the Serpent, and not to eat your meat without tasting it,-meat of any sort, but above all the serpent-recommended meat of knowledge.

Think what a delicate and delightful

meat that used to be in old days, when it was not quite so common as it is now, and when young people-the best sort of them-really hungered and thirsted for it. Then a youth went up to Cambridge, or Padua, or Bonn, as to a feast of fat things, of wines on the lees, well-refined. But now, he goes only to swallow,-and, more's the pity, not even to swallow as a glutton does, with enjoyment; not even-forgive me the old Aristotelian Greek, ἡδόμενος τῇ ἀφῇ pleased with the going down, but in the saddest and exactest way, as a constrictor does, tasting nothing all the time. You remember what Professor Huxley told you-most interesting it was, and new to me -of the way the great boa does not in any true sense swallow, but only hitches himself on to his meat like a coal-sack;-well, that's the exact way you expect your poor modern student to hitch himself on to his meat, catching and notching his teeth into it, and dragging the skin of him. tight over it,-till at last-you know I told you a little ago our artists didn't know a snake from a sausage,—but, Heaven help us, your University doctors are going on at such a rate that it will be all we can do, soon, to know a man from a sausage.

Then think again, in old times what a delicious thing a book used to be in a chimney corner, or in the garden, or in the fields, where one used really to read a book, and nibble a nice bit here

and there if it was a bride-cakey sort of book, and cut oneself a lovely slice-fat and lean-if it was a round-of-beef sort of book. But what do you do with a book now, be it ever so good? You give it to a reviewer, first to skin it, and then to bone it, and then to chew it, and then to lick it, and then to give it you down your throat like a handful of pilau. And when you've got it, you've no relish for it, after all. And, alas! this continually increasing deadness to the pleasures of literature leaves your minds, even in their most conscientious action, sensitive with agony to the sting of vanity, and at the mercy of the meanest temptations held out by the competition of the schools. How often do I receive letters from young men of sense and genius, lamenting the loss of their strength, and waste of their time, but ending always with the same saying, "I must take as high a class as I can, in order to please my father." And the fathers love the lads all the time, but yet, in every word they speak to them, prick the poison of the asp into their young blood, and sicken their eyes with blindness to all the true joys, the true aims, and the true praises of science and literature; neither do they themselves any more conceive what was once the faith of Englishmen; that the only path of honour is that of rectitude, and the only place of honour, the one that you are fit for. your children happy in their youth; let distinction

Make