Charles Lovejoy), through the freezing of his naval trousers, and the coddling which of course ensued. Charlie's heart lay open through all the stages of catarrh, and he knew (though he could not well speak about it) whose initials were done in hair on the handkerchief under his pillow. In short, no sooner did his nose begin to resume its duty in the system, and his eyes to cease from running, than he took Cecil Hales by the hand, and said that he had something to say to her. And he said it well; as sailors do. And she could not deny that it might mean something, if ever they could maintain themselves.

This is what all young people say; some with a little, and some with less, discretion upon the subject. The helm of all the question hangs upon the man's own sternpost. There is no time to talk of that. Charlie married Cecil; and they had a son called "Struan."

Struan Lovejoy took the turn for gardening and for growing, which had failed the Lovejoy race in the middle generation. Gout descends, and so does growing, with a skip of one step of mankind; and you cannot make the wrong generation lay heel on spade, or toe in slipper.

But most of us can make some men feel-however small our circle is that there is room for them inside it. That we scorn hypocritical love of mean humanity; but love the noble specimens when we get them. That we know how short our time is, and attempt to do a little forward for the slowly rolling age. In a word that, taking things altogether, they are pretty nearly as good as could have been hoped for, even sixty years ago.

But it is quite a few years back, to wit in 1861, when the great leading case upon rights of way"Lovejoy v. Shatterlocks"

was

tried for the ninth and final time. Chief-Justice Sir Gregory Lovejoy, through feelings of delicacy, left the Bench, and would not even allow his wife-our Phyllis Catherowto be called. But Major-General Sir Hilary Lorraine marched into the witness-box; and so vividly did he call to mind what had passed (and what had been stopped) at the white gate, and where the key was kept half a century agone; that the Defendant had no leg to stand upon. Mabel (who heard all his evidence, with a grandchild Mabel's hand in hers) vowed that he made a confusion of keys, and was thinking of the gate where she came to meet him. And when he had time for more reflection he could not contradict her.

Now what says Bonny? He sits on his hill. He sees his life before him. Though he does not know that for finding that key he is to have £1000, invested already, and to accumulate, until he settles down. In fulness of time he will cast away the unsaleable portion of his rags, and wed square Polly Bottler. Their hearts are as one; they only wait for parental assent, and the band or ban-whichever may be the proper word-shouted thrice by the rector, defiant of the world to forbid those two. They are not ready yet to be joined together; but they are polishing their fire-irons.

Meanwhile Bonny may be seen to sit, in one of those wonderful nicks of the hills, which seem to be elbowed by nature and padded, to tempt her restless mankind to rest. For here the curve of the slope is so snug, that only pleasant airs find entry, with the flowery tales they bring, and the grass is of the greenest, and the peep into the lowland distance of the most refreshing blue. Lulled on a bank here Bonny sits, not quite so fair as the fairy-queen

(who perhaps is watching him unseen), but picturesque enough for the age, and provided with a donkey worthy of Titania's purest love. Jack is gazing with deep interest at an image of himself, cleverly shaped by his master on the green with snowy outline of chalky flints. Here are set forth his long tail, white nose, and ears as long and rich as the emblem of fair Ceres. He sniffs at his nose, and he treads on his toes, and not being able to explain away all things, he falls to and grazes from his own stomach.

But what is Bonny doing here, instead of attending to his rags and bones? Well, he ought to be, but he certainly is not, attending to the rector's sheep. To wit Mr Hales, growing stiff in the saddle, betakes himself freely to saddles of mutton; and has paid, and is paying, his three daughters' portions after the manner of the patriarchs. But leaving the flock to their own devices (for which, an he were satirical, he might quote his master as precedent), Bonny opens his capacious mouth, and the fresh air of the downs rings richly, with a simple

SOUTHDOWN SONG.

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"When the sheep are on the hill, In the early summer day, They may wander at their will, While I go myself astray."

Chorus (sustained by sheep and Jack.)

"We may wander at our will,

THIS is an age of education-a very paradise of educators, such as surely the world never saw before. Education is the prevailing, all-absorbing topic, the universal panacea. Society from highest to lowest is stirred by it and permeated with it; politicians make a cry of it; commissioners grow great men upon it; inspectors report upon it; School Boards quarrel over it; denominations make it their battle-field; professors prose; women declaim on it; newspapers write leaders, and the public reads them. The press in abandoning its columns to the exponents of different views, assumes an interest so absolutely universal, that the reader who hastily averts his eyes is visited with a sense of disgrace in dropping off and flagging out of the noble enthusiasm. Nor can indolence escape the prevailing theme by mere change of column. Unlikely corners are full of it. In the police reports it lights, as it were, on a fellow-delinquent-another struggler against the mighty current in the widowed charwoman haled before the magistrates for keeping her little boy from school to nurse the baby while she criminally absents herself to procure her children's merely physical necessities. But the temper induced by weariness, or any other quarrel with a subject, is necessarily peevish and captious. The charwoman, no doubt, has some certain things to say on her side of the question; and the reader looks about for reasons and becomes self-justificative. Perhaps circumstances, as little as inclination, throw him in the way of occasions arranged for the display of newly-acquired knowledge; or examinations and other contrivances for testing progress and showing

results do not impress him as conclusive testimonies of success. The ultimate end of all education, he argues, is something very different from mere acquirement: it should be a universal influence, and pervade the whole being. We should know an educated person by a sort of fragrance of cultivation. A society of thoroughly-educated persons should stand in high relief against the more slovenly or circumscribed training of a past day

the object of so much ridicule and vituperation. The grand educational effort has been going on long enough to tell upon those subjected to it. The youth of our social circles should shine out in happy contrast with the young men and women of the more careless generation gone by. We should see a conspicuous not-to-be-disputed improvement in the subjects that occupy their thoughts; and, above all, in their powers of expression. The boasted improvement in education should tell upon their diction. It should endow the scholar with words to the purpose, whatever the topic, grave or gay, trifling or important. More especially should we see advance in these respects in the female subjects of educational effort; conversation under their sweet enlightenment should have new charms.

The subject of female education has brought out with special force of acclamation the superiority of the present day over the past in the thoroughness of instruction imparted. The slipshod teaching of girls in former days, its miserable pretence and hollowness, is an inexhaustible theme; and, indeed, there is not much to be said for it. Compare the school-books of the past with any paper on teaching

addressed to the young women of the present, compare what they are expected to know, the subjects they are to be interested in, the intricacies of grammar and construction, which are to be at their finger ends, with the ignorance, or accidental picking up of knowledge, which was once the woman's main chance of acquirement, and our expectations are not unreasonably raised. The pupils of the new school ought to be more companionable than their predecessors; they ought to talk better, more correctly, more elegantly; and as their subjects of interest become more profound, as science and art open their stores to them, their vocabulary should meet the need, at once more accurate, more copious, more felicitous. We put it to our world of readers, is it so? Do our young ladies talk better than their mothers; do they express their meaning with greater nicety; nay, do they speak better grammar? Moreover, is this an aim? Are they taught to do this by the writers of their own sex who profess to portray the girlhood of our day? Is it not an understood thing that three or four epithets are to do duty for all the definition the female mind has need of, and that solecisms which would have shocked the ears of an earlier generation pass unreproved? The present régime not only does not teach people to talk, it does not-to judge by appearanceseven inspire the wish or prompt the attempt to clothe thought in exact wording. The best education can only help towards clear thinking; but fit words and plenty of them it ought to put at its pupil's command. Do the boasted systems of our day succeed in this? In the most carefully and elaborately trained girl of eighteen we do not look for more than the promise; but we reasonably expect promise. Taste, careful not to offend, we

might calculate on, and a sensitiveness easily offended. Newly freed from the seclusion of the school-room, the great interests that agitate the intellect of the world will impress her with awe as well as an eager curiosity, held in check by modest grace-the natural attitude of an intelligent listener; and by the difficulty of finding fitting words to express dawning thought. This is no unreasonable ideal of youthful culture feeling its way. We approach the object of so many cares: she is not listening, but talking with rapidity and dash. What are the words that first greet our ears? Two or three hackneyed epithets, which we had supposed mere schoolboy slang, and perhaps a word or a phrase which-so widely separate is the vernacular becoming from our written language-we hesitate to expose to the ordeal of print. What promise for the future is there in this? How is it to develop into the conversation of the gifted woman? She is a good girl, we have reason to believe, and we take it on trust that she knows a vast deal of history, many languages, and some science; but what is the good of it all if she has no adjectives at command but nice, jolly, horrid, awful, disgusting, and tremendous? How can she keep what she has got? how can it fructify? Thought dies if it has no means of expres sion. It is really a grand power to have something to say, and to be able to say it. This it is to be educated; but the something to say fades out of being and consciousness, if adequate speech be wanting.

What a struggle to express thought we detect in any one who, having abandoned himself to the formulas in vogue, tries to choose words for himself, and to say really what he thinks and means. schoolboy who indolently takes refuge in slang-or what is much

The

worse than slang, the current phrase of the hour-to save himself trouble, cuts his rhetorical wings for good and all. Words are a bondage. They cannot be taken up and cast off at pleasure. The person who contents himself with unmeaning epithets or terms that merely express likes and dislikes without reason, is destroying his powers of discrimination. The girl who finds everything horrid or jolly is uneducating herself, neutralising her life's work, and putting herself intellectually below one with none of her "advantages," but who uses her mind and ear to define her thoughts with accuracy and propriety. There is something painful in watching the process of deterioration, the suppression of thought, the smothering of imagination, which are the consequences of adopting a rude and conventional phraseology one that throws the labour of interpretation on the listener. After some experience of the verbal freemasonry current among our young people, and observing how prone the young ladies of our day are to borrow the jargon of brothers and cousins, we are sometimes disposed to think the past century had something to say for itself in treating girls' schools as places in which not so much to learn as to unlearn, to be cured of awkwardnesses, and to get rid of vulgarisms; a certain amount of self-mistrust could not but be infused under the refining, snubbing process.

The peculiarity of the present time we take to be its courage.

* Who wrote

Backed by the consciousness of a careful grounding, nobody is ashamed. Ignorance used to blush

often where it need not; but nobody is ignorant now. In reaction from the severities of the schoolroom, licence is cherished and defended. Even the double negative, once an impossible solecism, will be justified as a colloquialism not to be dispensed with: "He is not gone, I don't think;" or that other prevalent vulgarism of modern speech, "Why have you done so-and-so? She told me to". an error charged by the whole press upon Watts; but one of which that respectable and ill-used shade (illused in more respects than one), a very purist in his lifetime, was incapable." If we seem to speak now of the female share in the question, all must allow the weight of female influence on the diction of society.

But, after all, it is the young men who are to blame if our young women talk so far below their powers. It is in the nature of girls to look up; and to whom should they look up but to their male friends, graced with all the prestige of a public school and college education, and glorious besides with athletic triumphs? How pleasantly playful do the few poor expletives in vogue sound when first heard from their heroes, who could, no doubt, talk profound sense in choice terms if they chose !-how easy it is to slip into them! Anybody can say "awful;" and at first there is a sense of liberty and humour in the out

VOL. CXVII.-NO. DCCXIV.

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