power: No smooth Album verses, no precocious stanzas in the Poet's Corner of newspapers heralded the way of that tremendous Brotherhood: Not a man of them but burst out (as some one said of Swift) like the Irish Rebellion, forty thousand strong.

The parish schools of Scotland are not quite what they ought to be, and what they might easily be made, were the teachers better paid, and the standard of qualifications raised; but upon the whole they are wonderfully well. Let the system be improved, but not materially changed. Of all the pompous follies which this pragmatical age has given birth to, I detest and fear none so much as the bringing together of large masses of our British children into overgrown schools, for the purpose of what is called intellectual and moral training. "If a principle is good for anything," says Benjamin Franklin, "go through with it." Let us go through with this principle of modern education: Let us take for granted that what is good in any one case, is good in all: Let us suppose the whole of our British youth taught in such a manner, and where is the man that would bless himself for the result? Nay, lives there the man who would venture on such an experiment? Were it tried, we should miss a generation of men. For now I come to my point. The question by no means admits of demonstration; but, if I know human nature at all, I make bold to say that, instead of a society of men, indomitable lovers of freedom, ardent and enthusiastic, and blent into one harmonious whole from every variety and contrast of individual character, we should, by the discipline referred to, have a country of pedants—call them not men!-tame and dull as a Dutch canal; having no strength of individual character; ready, from the habits of incessant monitorship and exact simultaneous movements, to follow a few leaders in the most important affairs of human life, and therefore ready to be slaves; expert at the formulas of morality and religion, but totally incapable, from the blunted sensibilities of a drilled life, of kindling with the flame of holy inspiration. God forbid that our children should so be taught and trained! Let us leave

their immortal spirits freedom and leisure to fall back on their own ruminating depths of wonder and curiosity; let them not be made machines and automata by that dreary process which overlays and smothers the earliest promptings of the self-enquiring mind, the first feelings of selfreliance, by a weight of cut-and-dry information crammed in and down upon them, and by the weary necessity of moving dependently in the routine of the squares and parallelograms of a vast school, where the mass is everything and the individual unit nothing. Our good old parish schools have it in their constitution to give teaching and training enough, while at the same time they let the vigorous springs of individual character in each and all of our village pupils have perfect play. And O! the glories of the fireside and the parental knee for teaching religion in its deep and sacred modesty, unhurt by the sturt and strife of classes going by rote, and good by rivalship! The fine, trembling tender-heartedness of religious childhood is destroyed amidst the confident bustle of multitudes, with their ostentatious displays of holy knowledge, sentiments, and feelings: Thoughtful, reverent, solemn minds can scarcely there be nurtured. Notwithstanding all the boasted wisdom of the present age, I subscribe to the rule of the Ancients, that the first five or six years of childhood should be wholly exempt from any stated tasks of the mind-that the body may be laying up its stores of health; that curiosity, the spring of all mental exertion, may be acquiring the habit of spontaneous healthy exercise; and that the bloom of young sensibility may not be rubbed off by a forced process of endeavouring to teach ere the child is competent to learn.

Having watched the growth of the young mind a good deal, I am less and less in love with precocity, which, indeed, is often a mere manifestation of disease-the disease of a very fine but very weak nervous organization. Your young Rosciuses, and all your wonders of that kind, generally end in the feeblest of common-place. There is no law, however, precise and absolute in the matter. difference of age at which men attain maturity of intellect,

The

and even of imagination, is very striking. The tumultuous heat of youth has certainly given birth to many of the noblest things in music, painting, and poetry; but no less fine productions have sprung from the ripeness of years. Chatterton wrote all his beautiful things, exhausted all the hopes of life, and saw nothing better than death at the early age of eighteen. Burns and Byron died in their thirty-seventh year, and I think the strength of their genius was over. Raffaelle, after filling the world with divine beauty, perished also at thirty-seven; Mozart earlier: These might have produced still greater works. On the other hand, Handel was forty-eight before he " gave the world assurance of a man." Dryden came up to London from the provinces, dressed in Norwich drugget, somewhat above the age of thirty, and did not even then know that he could write a line of poetry: Yet what towering vigour and swinging ease all at once in "Glorious John!" Milton had indeed written his Comus at twenty-six; but blind, and "fallen on evil days and evil tongues," he was upwards of fifty when he began his great work. Cowper knew not his own might till he was far beyond thirty, and his Task was not written till about his fiftieth year. Sir Walter Scott was also upwards of thirty before he published his Minstrelsy, and all his greatness was yet to

come.

Near us live, a blind boy on the one side, and a deaf and dumb lad on the other. They have all the characteristic qualities which their respective defects usually give rise to. For it may be laid down as a general remark, that the blind are almost always composed and cheerful, while the deaf and dumb are of an irritable and violent temperament. The variety of shades which the keen eye of the latter detects in the features of those with whom they associate for the time, and the meaning of which they cannot always interpret, makes them naturally suspicious; while the laugh or the horror which their imperfect attempts at utterance inspire in the chance stranger, tends to make them angry at mankind. By this means a quick and violent temper may be nourished, while the difficulty

of making themselves understood gives a strong dash of impatience to the whole character. Add to this, that they are not tamed down by forlorn dependence like the blind, as they can go whithersoever they will, and help themselves to what they want. Moreover, they are not softened by music and the sweet amenities of the human voice.

So far as native temperament can be modified by circumstances, I have observed that the second son of a family is generally more spunky than the elder brother, the first-born of the house. The early sense of a greater responsibility, in being so far the expected monitor, guide, and protector of his younger brother, and in having his parents' injunctions laid on him, and their confidence placed in him, accordingly, naturally induces a thoughtful gravity in the first-born. The second boy gets more of his own way, and finding his elder brother has the prerogative of trust, he seeks and wins his distinction in a different line, and becomes an equal favourite by his frolics. In families of wealth and title, the difference I have noticed is generally brought most clearly out. The elder son here has a still graver weight of conscious privilege and duty, and the younger a still livelier conviction that he is nothing if not spirited.

An

I saw the rising generation of our Village used this spring after a manner, very old-fashioned it seems, but quite new to me. I have already alluded to our run-rig crofts. According to an old popular fancy, the rigs, lying one into another in this queer fashion, keep each other warm. Be this as it may, it is not easy ploughing them, and keeping within the marches at the same time. old Laird of the place, Laird Grippy by title and name, taking advantage of this natural difficulty, plagued all his neighbours by "gripping in." He was a litigious old sinner, however, who had constantly two or three law pleas forcing their choked way from Court to Court through a jungle of answers and condescendences, duplies, reclamations, &c., &c., &c.; and so his neighbours were fain to suffer his encroachments rather than have any words with him. Even the "Birley-men" (borough-law-men), the

great Court of Equity of the Village, could make nothing of the Laird. At last, however, other people's rigs began to disappear altogether; and so the thing was not to be borne any longer. A Land-Surveyor was appointed accordingly to set the march-stones anew; and this, be sure, was a great business in the Village. All the old were present with their recollections of the "ancient landmarks,” and all the boys were ordered to attend. When, after disputations many and tough, the main matter of the day was accomplished, three old men laid hold of a couple of boys each, knocked their heads together, and their noses till they bled again, and then pulled their ears, and cuffed and kicked them soundly; the little fellows roaring all the while like bull-calves, with looks of infinite terror at this unreasonable and incomprehensible cruelty in their usually sedate seniors. "And now, my lads," cried one of the old chaps, letting his brace of victims go, "you'll no forget the setting o' the march-stanes!" The thing was thus explained at once. And I beg to commend it as a practical illustration to our Professors of Logic and Moral Philosophy, when treating of Attention and Memory.

CHAPTER XIII.

FLORENCE ARNOT.

A BEAUTIFUL child, of the name of Florence Arnot, dwelt with her grandfather, old Laird Arnot, about a bow-shot from our Village. In his youth the Laird had fallen in love with the daughter of a West India planter who came to reside in this neighbourhood. She, again, was attached to a young squire of the district, and a match was arranged betwixt them. A quarrel, however, took place between her lover and her father, and the match was broken off. Moreover, her father died suddenly, leaving her in much poorer circumstances than even he himself supposed; and Arnot's suit being now pressed and accepted, a marriage took place accordingly. It turned out an unfortunate one. After giving birth to a son, Mrs Arnot, whose heart

G