the difficulty. A love of truth is the foundation of justice and of nobleness of character. In its largest sense it comprises every virtue. He who loves truth not only abstains from lying, and slander and all evil speaking, but he seeks truth as the best and highest object of existence. A child acquires the habit of being truthful, if we can prevent him from lying, for if he never lies, he has learned to speak the truth. As children imitate those about them, they will probably seldom lie, if they never hear anybody else lie; and as it is said that servants are sometimes guilty of lying and various kinds of deception, for which no doubt they can give sufficient reasons, it is not prudent to intrust too much of the child's education to them. If the father and mother are not very exact in the observance of this virtue, I care not how little the child sees of them.

The first thing to be attended to after this cardinal virtue is the health of the boy. If his body is not sound and strong, there is no hope for him. Even if he should have a good disposition and a large capacity, he will make but a poor man, if he is feeble and sickly. A few exceptions are nothing against my assertion. There are some men with very feeble health and great talents who do great things by the

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energy of their intellectual powers; but the mass of mankind possess only moderate mental endowments, and we cannot expect more of them than plain common sense and capacity to learn what is most necessary. Yet these men with the addition of good health and strength become useful members of society and form the really effective part of a nation, and often rise to the highest places.

The amount that a child can learn well in the first eight or ten years of his life is a mere trifle. He may learn more in a few months when he is of ripe age than he can learn even in the first fifteen years of his life. Yet the little that he can learn in his early years, if we give him only what is suited to his capacity, is the foundation of all the rest. If he can learn to read well, to pronounce his own language distinctly and forcibly, which most Englishmen never learn to do, and to put down on paper the true forms of the words which he speaks and which look so strangely different to the eye from what they sound to the ear, he has done something. This is vulgarly called spelling and it is generally taught in a way as absurd as many other things are. A child who can really write correctly all the words that he hears spoken has accomplished a very difficult thing; for

I doubt if there is any language in which the spoken and the written words are so perversely at variance as in ours. I strongly recommend that he be taught to write a bold clear hand and never be allowed to write foolish copies which only tire and disgust him. I remember well a very eminent merchant who told me that he came to London as a boy with some letters to a mercantile house, where he had very little prospect of getting employment. He was asked to show a specimen of his handwriting, which was much liked. He was taken into the house and became in time the chief partner, and a wealthy man. He had indeed other qualities of the highest kind, but he said that if he had not written a good hand, he would not have been received.

There is another matter in which young boys should be carefully taught, and that is arithmetic. There is no doing without some knowledge of arithmetic. Most people can add up a bill, but all cannot do even this well. A boy who is taught the first four rules as they are called with the reasons of them, and can apply his acquirements to the solution of most of the little problems which may be solved by these simple means, has acquired a very great power. The four rules comprehend more than the ignorant

suppose, and a great deal more than even those people imagine who have acquired some practical facility in them without understanding the principles by which they work.

If to this we add the reading of a few easy books adapted to a child's age, and some of the best specimens of our poetry which are suitable to his capacity, I would send the boy to school with confidence that he will soon learn more than those who come only with a little bit of bad Latin badly taught or worse French still worse pronounced.

OF SCHOOLS.

ET any man try to imagine how we should do without boys' schools. There would

be no peace in the house, and the state would be all in confusion; if we admit that a state consists of families; which I believe to be the truth. We see then the necessity of schools, if for nothing else, to rid us of our boys and keep quiet at home. It is generally supposed that schools have other uses too, which we shall soon come to.

I cannot find much about schools in the ancient writings of the Hebrews, though I have looked for it. Indeed I am not sure that this people had boys' schools. The Greeks and Romans, the ancients, as we often call them, had schools, and there is frequent mention of them. Herodotus tells us of a school of one hundred and twenty children in the city of Chios, a town school probably, with something wrong in the