ladies of the same age. All things alike, females talk about half as quick again as men, or in the ratio of about 18 to 12. The proverbial "nineteen to the dozen" is therefore a pretty correct approximation. Persons, under the influence of passion, invariably speak quick. Hence a decisive rule for the composition of passionate texts, such as the conclusion of the quarrelling duet, "Madama brillante," in Figaro, Cimarosa's "Orà vedete che bricconata," in the Matrimonio segreto, and hundreds of other instances. Comic songs are, for evident reasons, generally composed in quick, or at least brisk time: e. g: "Papa tacì"-" Capellini, Capelloni" "Non più andrai farfallone amoroso," &c. In this department we must admit the defective state of English music. Not that we are destitute of what are called comic songs: rattlers there are without number, the vulgarity and coarseness of the melody of which, quite corresponding with the low trash of the words, are a disgrace to the national taste. But of comic songs of any musical value we possess few, if any, good specimens. A text in which the predominant character is fear, or other mental agitation (Angl. flutter), requires naturally an accelerated tempo; and the frequent intervention of isochronons (equally-timed) rests of momentary duration tends greatly to pourtray the quick pulsations of the heart which commonly attend such a state of our frame. An appropriate illustration of this remark will be found in the beautiful introduction to the Magic Flute: "Zu hülfe, zu hülfe, sonst bin ich verlohren" (Ah help me, oh save me, I'm doom'd to destruction); better known under the name of "Ajuto, ajuto," &c. It is impossible to depict the sobbing ejaculations of extreme fear in a more forcible and natural manner. Another fine specimen of mental agitation, not of fright, but of amorous distress, occurs in Cherubino's air in Figaro, "Non sò più cosa son', cosa faccio." The whole of the music is a continuity of breathless flutter, as it were, until towards the conclusion the lovesick boy, the emblen of androgynism, sinks, from exhaustion, into languor and défaillance. For poetry of a pompous character, of affected grandezza, ludicrous gravity, although generally comic, a quick tempo would scarcely be suitable. People of that complacent stamp are wont to measure their words; they speak a sort of leisurely full-mouthed German text. A corresponding gravity, with great precision of measure, should therefore be adopted in the musical colouring of their sesquipedalia verba. It is thus that Winter makes Don Alonzo, the luminary of the law, speak in Gli Fratelli rivali, especially in the air "In Palermo voi vedrete ampia turba di clienti." Cimarosa's aria, too, in the Matrimonio segreto, "Údite, Udite, Udite, le orecchie spalanchate," is composed precisely upon the same principle. Of the solemn, the sublime, the heroic, the martial, the prayer (preghiera), and innumerable other kinds of characteristic expression in music, it would scarcely be necessary to treat in this cursory sketch, even were our purpose and limits more extended; nor do we think it requisite to quote any examples by way of illustration. Nature and an attentive observation of mankind furnish, in every possible case of musical character, the best models for imitation. DAINTIE PASTORALS. Thaddy Mahone and Silvia Pratt. In the bar of a coffee-room sat, The widow received with a smile; you wish to-day's paper to read? It has scalded the top of my tooth. My whiskers are singed by the steam. You may shut those sweet eyes of your own, And never see one that loves you, Like myself Mr. Thaddy Mahone. "Come join your estate to my own, And then what a change we shall see! When you are the flesh of my bone, "I have fields in my farm at Kilmore,”— But scarce did the widow begin When, alas! a bum bailiff came in, VOL. VII. NO. XXX. 2 P EDUCATION. "L'envie de placer la morale partout nuit à nos recherches. On veut prêcher, endoctriner, commander, sans connoître les principes de sa doctrine." Bonstetten, Etudes de l'Homme, Tom. 1. AMONG the many unintelligible cants of this hypocritical age (for hypocritical it is par excellence) there is none to me more incomprehensible than that, which is in every mouth, concerning the happiness of childhood. Without dwelling upon the peculiar liability to disease of this period of our existence, and insisting on the long gauntlet of maladies, measles, hooping-cough, small-pox, et id genus omne, through which the youthful sufferer has to pass, it is sufficient to notice the perpetual restraint to which children are subjected, the hourly contradictions they encounter, and their total incapacity for comprehending the reason and the necessity of submission. The clumsiest and the coarsest tyranny in social life is that which is imposed on the infant, not only through the superior intellect of the parent, and his solicitude for the welfare of his offspring, but from his wilfulness, his caprice, his love of domination, his obstinacy, and his mistakes concerning human nature. Accordingly, if there be an uncle, an aunt, or a grandmother in the family, he, she, or they almost always run away with the affections of the children, from the parents, who are compelled to exert an habitual superintendence and control over the actions of the rising generation. For my own part, I can safely say, that the bitter sense of indignation which in my earliest childhood I conceived at certain overt acts of real or of fancied injustice in my elders, was among the most painful feelings of my existence; and I have, consequently, never been hasty and unreasonable in my conduct towards children, without the severest self-reproach. It is on this account, perhaps, that my attention has been so much turned to the mode in which a brother I have, and his wife, manage, or rather mismanage, a somewhat numerous family; and that my cynicism has been roused at the multifarious whimsies with which, under the notion of education, they torture their unfortunate offspring. Bred to trade, my brother received himself an education neither extensive nor well-grounded, and the lady he married had, unfortunately, just enough of boarding-school "accomplishments" to call forth a great deal of vanity, without rendering her accomplished in any particular. Although she is sensible that her own stock of French is insufficient for even a short conversation, and that she can neither sing nor play so as to be tolerated in society, although she is absolutely without information on every point of literature and science, and never read three books through in her life, yet she conceives herself to possess a great natural turn for educating others, and believes herself a competent judge on every disputed point in the theory and practice of communicating instruction.. It was a wise precaution in Doctor Cornelius, the worthy and learned parent of Martinus Scriblerus, to prepare beforehand his "daughter's mirror" and his "son's monitor ;" and so “in utrumque paratus,”* to be * Dialogue.-My wife is brought to bed-What has she got?-Guess.-A son?— Guess again. A daughter?-By Jove you've hit it. ready for whatever might happen. But my brother's wife, more fortunate than her great predecessor, like Minerva, came into the world ready armed, and was, or thought herself, innately fitted for the parental office, and capable, by her spontaneous and self-directed energies, of superintending, no less her son's education, than her daughter's. Her husband, who is a "thriving man," and still remembers that When house and goods and land are spent, Then larning is most excellent, spares no expense in carrying into execution any and all the plans which the fertile imitativeness of his good lady suggests, (expense indeed seeming to be one of the chiefest ingredients in the forming and storing the infant mind); and as he has himself no time for any thing but business, my sister-in-law has that sort of autocratical sway over the nursery and school-room, which is bounded only by the obstinacy of servants, and the still greater inflexibility of the party least consulted in the affair,-Dame Nature herself. 66 Scarcely had their eldest boy attained to the completion of his fifth year, when he was provided with à private tutor; and his sister, who is less than a year younger, was at the same time saddled with a governess. "We can never begin too early," said the lady. Ay, ay, I hate idleness: train up the child in the way he should go," reechoed the papa :-and so to it they went, TUTTO-ing on one side the house and j'aime-ing on the other, from morning to night, let the sun shine as delightfully as it pleased, and the smiling fields invite as they might the poor little sufferers to lay up a stock of health and vigour, to fortify their tender organs for the rough shocks of a rude world, which await their riper years. What progress my young nephew and niece made in precocious learning, I knew not; for I never cared to make myself that bore of a rising family-an examining friend; but I was soon aware that their health declined, that their heads were visibly too large for their bodies, (either from an actual developement of the overworked part, or from the shrivelling and emaciation of the other members), that their cheeks were pale, and their appetite failed them. When I pointed out this circumstance to the mother, she assured me it was nothing but weakness; adding that to remedy this evil she carefully had her children bathed in cold water every morning in summer and in winter; which she doubted not would soon restore them to their good looks. This narration explained to me the sobbing and lamentation I had heard before daylight in the nursery, when I spent the Christmas at my brother's. Never afterwards could I bear to sleep in that house. The thought of the poor little innocents shivering and coughing at the edge of the bathing-tub in a frosty morning, while I lay comfortably wrapped in my bed-clothes, recalled the misery I had so often suffered before the invention of machinery for sweeping chimnies, when I have heard some unfortunate child scraping his back along the flues in the walls of my bed-chamber, and earning a miserable existence, at the expense of disease, distortion, and hopeless slavery. At least, however," I mentally exclaimed, "those black little urchins escape the drudgery of a fashionable education." This strong call of the bathing-tub upon the feeble organs of infancy was not answered; and instead of the expected health, shivering fits, fevers, and internal complaints were the rewards of an impertinent interference with nature. "It is very odd," said my sister-in-law. "It's all worms; and yet I never failed putting all the children through a spring and fall course of Ching's lozenges." At this time it was the fashion to make children hardy; and my nephews and nieces (and they were now numerous) were kept in a state nearly approaching to nudity; their linen dresses barely meeting the demands of decency. In this plight, they were daily sent out in all weathers to walk for one hour (the canonical duration of a lesson), and to trail their listless limbs round the interior of a fashionable London square for the purposes of air and exercise. The appearances of consumption in one of the girls at length put a stop to this excess; and, a new system springing up, flannels, a full meal of meat, with an occasional glass of wine, (i.e. egregious stuffing) became the order of the day. Even this did not answer, and the girls were put under the tuition of a drill-sergeant, and taught the manual exercise; dumb bells were bought, and an elastic board mounted in the nursery, as proper substitutes for liberty and the natural use of the limbs. In one corner of the school-room may be seen Miss Jenny choaking in a monitor; in another Bobby standing fast fixed in the dancing-master's stocks. Little Biddy is chained by the hour at a time before a miserable old piano-forte, with her fingers close locked in the brass partitions of a cheiroplast. Flat on her back lies stretched on an inclined plane, the pallid Alicia, like Ixion on his wheel; while Thomas, who labours under St. Vitus's dance, carries about one arm extended on a broad board, to obviate a growing contraction of the muscles. All the girls are screwed up in a double panoply of patent stays, to reduce their bowels to the calibre of "an alderman's thumbring," the dimension which fashion once more, in its folly, has assigned to female loveliness. Surely, surely, the tread-mill might supersede these various tortures; and, being applied to education, might exempt the freeborn British child, the heir of liberty and our "happy constitution," from such inquisitorial inventions! But if the bodies of my poor nephews and nieces are submitted to an endless variety of "ingenious tormenting," their minds are not less tortured than their persons. Fourteen hours per diem they are pinned down to their language-masters, music-masters, mathematical-masters, besides attending three courses of lectures on chemistry, history, and moral philosophy. Why was this not thought upon when the act was passed for regulating the labour of children in cotton-manufactories ? Besides, every point of education is to be conducted on a better (i. e. a newer) method than that employed with other people's children. The poor things are, therefore, the victims of all sorts of experiments. Whatever is the passing whim, is incorporated into my sister's domestic system; and studies are taken up con amore, or languish in indifference, and masters are engaged and disengaged, with a rapidity that doubles the labour of learning, if it does not utterly defeat the end. Every body in the mean time learns every thing; the girls study Greek and mathematics, and the boys partake in all the girls' pursuits, except tambouring and tent-stitch. All draw, all play the harp and piano-forte, all sing, all dance, though two of the children are deaf, and one is lame; and the whole family, except the eldest girl, seem to have been born without a tincture of taste for the fine arts. But |