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always esteemed a capital offense." With such teaching and discipline, no wonder that the progress of the learners was uniformly rapid and satisfactory. "And it is almost incredible," adds Mrs. Wesley, "what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year, by a vigorous application, if it have but a tolerable capacity and good health."

If, therefore, it be open to doubt whether there be any definite rule for the time of commencing, or the best mode of communicating intellectual instruction in all cases, there can be no question that Mrs. Wesley's system, as carried out in her own family, was amply justified by its satisfactory results.

THE MOTHER OF LAMARTINE*

FROM Memoirs of My Youth

My education was wholly centered in the glance more or less serene and the smile, more or less open of my mother. The reins of my heart were in her hand. She asked nothing from me but to be truthful and good. I had no difficulty in being so. My father gave me an example of a sincerity carried even to scrupulousness; my mother, of a goodness rising to devotion the most heroic. My soul, which breathed only an atmosphere of goodness, could not produce anything ungenial. I was never forced to struggle either with myself or with any other person. Everything attracted me; nothing constrained me. The little which I was taught was presented to me as a recom

pense. My sole masters were my father and my mother. I saw them read, and I wished to read; I gazed at them writing, and I asked them to aid me to form my letters. All this was carried on amidst sports and in leisure moments, on their knees, in the garden, at the fireside of the saloon, and accompanied by smiles, by railleries, by caresses. I acquired a taste for it. I suggested, of my own accord, these short and amusing lessons. I thus learned everything, a little late, it is true, but without ever recollecting how I learned it, and without a brow ever being bent to induce me to learn. I advanced without being conscious of making progress. My thoughts, ever in communion with those of my mother, were developed as it were in hers, as I had received nourishment from her bosom, until the moment I was forcibly and unhappily torn from her, when about to enter my twelfth year, to live the putrid or at least the frozen life of college. A taste for reading had early taken possession of me. It was with difficulty my parents could find a sufficient number of books appropriate to my age to gratify my curiosity. These childish books soon ceased to satisfy me. I gazed with longing at the volumes which were ranged in some shelves in a little cabinet off the saloon; but my mother curbed me in this impatience for knowledge. She gave me books only by degrees, and even these she selected carefully. An abridgment of the Bible; the fables of La Fontaine, which appeared to me at once childish, false, and cruel and which I could never learn by heart; the works of Madame de Genlis; those of Berquin; passages from Fenelon and

Bernardin de St. Pierre, which delighted me at that age; the Jerusalem delivered; Robinson Crusoe; some tragedies of Voltaire, especially Merope, read aloud by my father in the evening-it was from these that I drank in, as a plant from the soil, the first nourishing juices of my young intellect. But I drank deep, above all, from my mother's mind, I read through her eyes; I felt through her impressions; I lived through her life. She translated all for me-nature, sentiment, sensations, and thoughts. Without her I could not have spelled a line of that creation which I had before my eyes. But she guided my fingers over its page. Her soul was so luminous, so highly colored, and so warm, that she left a shadow or a chill on nothing. In leading me little by little to comprehend all, she made me at the same time love all. In a word, the insensible instruction which I received was not a lesson, it was the very act of living, of thinking, and of feeling which I accomplished before her eyes, along with her, like her, and through her. We lived a double life. It was thus that my heart was formed within me, on a model which I had not even the trouble of looking at, so closely was it blended with my own.

My mother displayed little anxiety about what is generally called instruction. She did not aspire to make me a child far advanced for my age. She did not arouse within me that emulation which is only the jealousy or the pride of children. She did not compare me to any person. She neither exalted nor humiliated me, by any dangerous comparisons. She thought, and justly, that once my intellectual strength

was developed by age, and by health of body and of mind, I should learn as easily as others the little Greek and Latin, and figures, of which is composed that empty modicum of letters, which is called an education. What she wished was to make me a happy child, with a healthy mind, and a loving soul; a creature of God, and not a puppet of men. She had drawn her ideas upon education, at first from her own heart, and then from the works of J. J. Rousseau and Bernardin St. Pierre, those two favorite philosophers of women, because they are the philosophers of feeling. She had become acquainted with, or caught a glimpse of, both of them, in her childhood, at her mother's house. She had subsequently read them and admired them. She had heard, while still very young, their systems debated a thousand times, by Madame de Genlis, and by the skillful persons who were charged with the education of the children of the Duke of Orleans. It is generally known that this prince was the first who ventured to apply the theories of these natural philosophers to the education of his sons. My mother, brought up along with them, and almost in the same manner as they, naturally transferred these traditions of her childhood to her own children. She did so, however, carefully and with discernment. She did not confound what is suitable to be taught to princes, placed by their birth and their wealth at the summit of the social scale, with that which is suitable to be taught to the children of a poor and obscure family, placed close to the scenes of nature, in the modest condition of labor and simplicity. But what she

thought was that in all conditions of life, it is necessary first to make a man, and when the man is made

- that is to say, a being intelligent, sensible, and placed in just relations to himself, to other men, and to God it matters little whether he be a prince or a workman, he is that which he ought to be. What he is, is good, and his mother's work is accomplished. * By permission of Harper & Brothers.

MY MOTHER *

BY JOSEPH PARKER

And the sweet mother! So quiet, so patient, so full of hope. Seeing everything without looking, praying much, and teaching her son to pray. My wont was to sit near her with paper and pencil in hand, and to beg her to make one line of a hymn that I might try to add three lines to it. No excitement known to boys was equal to that high joy. One verse struck awe into the minds of my neighbors, and made them look at me with pride touched with reverence. That verse was shown to the minister, and he, in excess of pastoral zeal, made rash predictions concerning the rhymester. The father said nothing, but ordered it to be kept and shown to every visitor, and every visitor rose or fell in his estimation according to the view taken of that particular verse. All the neighbors heard it and one said it ought to be put in a hymn-book; another was worldly enough to "bet" that some day I would make a whole hymn; others were struck dumb