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it was as if the key-stone of the arch had been removed. There was a healthfulness in the glow of her fresh and young affections, which animated the rigid nerves of age, and a pleasantness and beauty in the play of her innocent thoughts and feelings, which could smooth the brow of care, and light up a smile even in the face of sorrow. To me she was not only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside me,'

Common Sense.

Common sense is a much rarer quality than genius. For one diamond of common sense that you can show me, I will show you twenty merchantable diamonds of genius. If you will reflect a moment on the number of faculties which must necessarily enter into the composition of common sense, you will not be surprised at the fact. For common sense is not, as superficial thinkers are apt to suppose, a mere negative faculty-it is a positive faculty, and one of the highest power, It is this faculty that instructs us when to speak, when to be silent, when to act, when to be still;-and, moreover, it teaches us what to speak, what to suppress, what to do, and what to forbear. Now, pause a moment to reflect on the number of faculties which must be combined to constitute this common sense; a rapid and profound foresight to calculate the consequences of what is to be said or done, a rapid circumspection and extensive comprehension, so as to be sure of taking in all the circumstances which belong to the case, and missing no figure in this arithmetic of the mind, and an accuracy of decision which must be as quick as lightning, so as not to let the occasion slip. See what a knowl edge of life, either by experience or intuition, and what a happy constitutional poise between the passions and the reason, or what a powerful self-command, all enter into the composition of that little, demure, quiet, unadmired, and almost despised thing called common sense. It pretends to no brilliancy, for it possesses none; it has no ostentation, for it has nothing to show that the world admires. The powerful and constant action of the intellect, which makes its nature, is unobserved even by the proprietor; for every thing is done with intuitive ease, with a sort of unconscious felicity. See, then, the quick and piercing sagacity, the prophetic penetration, the wide comprehension and the prompt and accurate judgment which combine to constitute common sense, which is as inestimably valuable as the solar light, and as little thought of.

SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION IN ANCIENT GREECE.

L. HOME EDUCATION.*

In a comprehensive survey of the education of a people, notice must be taken of the earliest nurture of children, their first occupations, their toys and pastimes, their nurses and attendants, and all the surroundings of home, as well as the more formal instructions of the school and teacher. Throughout Greece, education always held a prominent place in the plans and speculations of statesmen and philosophers-as the matrix in which the state was fashioned. From the germ of individual existence till death closed the modifications which various agencies, formal and informal, could make in the human being-the work of education was going on, and to a much larger extent, and to much more minute particulars, than is now generally done in modern society, these various agencies have received attention, with special reference to their educational results.

The health of parents, the diet, exercise, rest, and frame of mind of the mother before the birth of the child, were deemed proper subjects of regulation; and religion was invoked to throw a peculiar sanctity over the birth of a human being. Various systems of infant nurture prevailed and infanticide, to aid the law of natural selection in preserving only the hardy and well formed for the future citizen, was not only recognized by custom, but authorized by law.

Birth-Feast-Name-Nursery.

On the fifth day after a child was born into the family, the ceremony called Amphidromia, in which the nurse, with the infant in her arms, made the circle of the hearth, accompanied by all the females of the house-the street door being hung with symbols, in case of a boy, consisted in an olive crown; and of a lock of wool, alluding to her future occupations, when it was a girl. Athenæus, apropos of cabbage, which was eaten on this occasion, as well as by ladies 'in the straw,' as conducing to create milk, quotes a comic description of the Amphidromia from a drama of Ephippos, which proves they were well acquainted with the arts of joviality:

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* For the original authorities, see St. John's Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece. I. 107 288; and Becker's Charicles, p. 215-240.

† This and the following extracts are taken from St. John's Manners and Customs, &c.

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Chaffinches, turtle-doves, and good fat thrushes .
Should now be feathered; rows of merry guests
Pick clean the bones of cuttle-fish together,
Gnaw the delicious feet of polypi,

And drink large draughts of scarcely mingled wine,

But it was on the seventh day that the child generally received its name, amid the festivities of another banquet; though sometimes this was deferred till the tenth. The reason is supplied by Aristotle. They delayed the naming thus long, he says, because most children that perish in extreme infancy die before the seventh day, which being passed, they considered their lives more secure. The eighth day was chosen by other persons for bestowing the name, and, this considered the natal day, was solemnized annually as the anniversary of its birth, on which occasion it was customary for the friends of the family to assem ble together, and present gifts to the child, consisting sometimes of the polypi and cuttle-fish to be eaten at the feast. However, the tenth day appears to have been very commonly observed. Thus Euripides:

Say, who delighting in a mother's claim

Mid tenth-day feasts bestowed the ancestral name?

Aristophanes, too, on the occasion of naming his Bird-city, which a hungry poet pretends to have long ago celebrated, introduces Peisthetæros saying: What! have I not but now the sacrifice

Of the tenth day completed, and bestowed
A name as on a child?

The right of imposing the name belonged, as hinted above, to the father, who likewise appears to have possessed the power afterward to alter it if he thought proper. They were compelled to follow no exact precedent; but the general rule resembled one apparently observed by nature, which, neglecting the likeness in the first generation, sometimes reproduces it with extraordinary fidelity in the second. Thus, the grandson inheriting often the features, inherited also very generally the name of his grandfather, and precisely the same rule applied to women; the granddaughter nearly always receiving her grandmother's name. Thus, Andocides, son of Leagoras, bore the name of his grandfather; the father and son of Miltiades were named Cimon; the father and son of Hipponicos, Cleinias.

In Plato's Republic, the nurses were to live apart in a distinct quarter of the city, and suckle indiscriminately all the children that were to be preserved; no mother being permitted to know her own child.

Every one must have observed, as well as Plato, that children are no sooner born than they exhibit unequivocal signs of passion and anger, in the modera ting and directing of which consists the chiefest difficulty of education. Most men, through the defect of nature or early discipline, live long before they ac quire this mastery, which many never attain at all. Generally, however, where it is possessed, much may certainly be attributed to that training which begins at the birth, so that of all the instruments employed in the forming of character, the nurse is probably the most important.

But their cares extended beyond the person. They aimed at forming the manners, regulating the temper, laying the foundation of virtuous habits, at sowing, in short, the seeds, which in after life, might ripen into a manly, frank, and generous character. In the matter of food, in the regulating of which, as Locke confesses, there is much difficulty, the Spartan nurses acted up to the suggestions of the sternest philosophy, accustoming the children under their charge, to be content with whatever was put before them, and to endure occasional privations without murmuring. Over the fear of ghosts, too, they triumphed. Empusa and

the Mormolukeion, and all those other hideous specters which childhood associates with the idea of darkness, yielded to the discipline of the Spartan nurse. Her charge would remain alone or in the dark, without terror, and the same stern system, which overcame the first offspring of superstition, likewise subdued the moral defects of peevishness, frowardness, and the habit of whining and mewling, which, when indulged in, render children a nuisance to all around them. No wonder, therefore, these Doric disciplinarians were every where in request. At Athens it became fashionable among the opulent to employ them, and Cleinias, as is well known, placed under the care of one of these she-pedagogues that Alcibiades, whose ambitious character, to be curbed by no restraints of discipline or philosophy, proved the ruin of his country and the scourge of Greece.

Their cradles were of various forms, some of which, like our own, required rocking, while others were suspended like sailors' hammocks from the ceiling, and swung gently too and fro when they desired to pacify the child or lull it to sleep: as Tithonos is represented in the mythology to have been suspended in his old age. Other cradles there were in the shape of little portable baskets wherein they were carried from one part of the harem to another. It is probable, too, that as in the East the children of the opulent were rocked in their cradles wrapped in coverlets of Milesian wool.

All the world over the singing of the nurse has been proverbial. Music breathes its sweetest notes around our cradles. The voice of woman soothes our infancy and our age, and in Greece, where every class of the community had its song, the nurse naturally vindicated one to herself. This sweetest of all melodies

Redolent of joy and youth

was technically denominated Katabaukalesis, of which scraps and fragments only, like those of the village song which lingered in the memory of Rousseau, have come down to us.

The word baby, which we bestow familiarly on an infant, was, with little variation, in use many thousand years ago among the Syrians, in whose nursery dialect babia had the same signification. Tatta, too, pappa and mamma were the first words lisped by the children of Hellas. And from various hints dropped by ancient authors, it seems clear that the same wild stories and superstitions that still flourish there haunted the nursery of old. The child was taught to dread Empusa or Onoskelis or Onoskolon, the monster with one human foot and one of brass, which dwelt among the shades of night, and glided through dusky chambers and dismal passages to devour 'naughty children.'

Toys-Sports-Pastimes.

Amongst the Hellenese, the earliest toy consisted, as in most other countries, of the rattle, said to be the invention of the philosopher Archytas. To this succeeded balls of many colors, with little chariots, sometimes purchased at Athens in the fair held during the feast of Zeus. The common price of a plaything of this kind would appear to be an obolos. The children themselves, as without any authority might with certainty be inferred, employed their time in erecting walls with sand, in constructing little houses, in building and carving ships, in cutting carts or chariots out of leather, in fashioning pomegranate rinds into the shape of frogs, and in forming with wax a thousand diminutive images, which pursued afterward during school hours subjected them occasionally to severe chastisement.

Another amusement which the children of Hellas shared with their elders was that afforded by puppets, which were probably an 'invention of the remot est antiquity. Numerous women appear to have earned their livelihood by carrying round from village to village these ludicrous and frolicsome images, which were usually about a cubit in height, and may be regarded as the legitimate ancestors of Punch and Judy. By touching a single string, concealed from the spectators, the operator could put her mute performers in action, cause them to move every limb in succession, spread forth the hands, shrug the shoulders, turn round the neck, roll the eyes, and appear to look at the audience. After this, by other contrivances within the images, they could be made to go through many humorous evolutions, resembling the movements of the dance. These exhibitors, frequently of the male sex, were known by the name of Neurospastæ. This art passed, together with other Grecian inventions, into Italy, where it was already familiar to the public in the days of Horace, who, in speaking of princes governed by favorites, compares them to puppets in the hands of the showman.

The hoop, too, so familiar to our own school-boys, formed one of the playthings of Hellenic children. It was sometimes made of bronze, about three feet in diameter, and adorned with little spherical bells and movable rings, which jingled as it rolled. The instrument employed to urge

the rolling circle's speed,

as Gray expresses it, in his reminiscences of the Eton playground, was crooked at the point, and called a plectron.

Another less innocent amusement was spinning goldchafers, which appears to have afforded the Greek urchins the same delight as tormenting cockchafers does their successors of the north. This species of beetle, making its appearance when the apple-trees were in bloom, was therefore called Melolanthe, or apple-blossom. Having caught it, and tied a linen thread about its feet, it was let loose, and the fun was to see it move in spiral lines through the air as it was twisted by the thread.

The Muïnda was our 'Blindman's-buff,' 'Blind Hob,' 'Hobble 'em-blind,' and 'Hood-man-blind,' in which, as with us, a boy moved about with his eyes bandaged, spreading forth his hands and crying 'Beware!' If he caught any of those who were skipping around him, the captive was compelled to enact the blind-man in his stead. Another form of the game was for the seers to hide, and the blind-man to grope round till he found them; the whole probably being a rude representation of Polyphemos in his cave searching for the Greeks who had blinded him. A third form was, for the bystanders to strike or touch the blindfolded boy until he could declare who had touched him, when the person indicated took his place. To this the Roman soldiers alluded when they blindfolded our Saviour and smote him, and cried, 'Prophesy who struck thee.' In the Kollabismos, the Capifolèt of the French, one person covered his eyes with his own hands, the other then gave him a gentle blow, and the point was, for the blindfolded man to guess with which hand he had been stricken. The Brazen Fly was a variety of Blindman's-buff, in which a boy, having his eyes bound with a fillet, went groping round, calling out, 'I am seeking the Brazen Fly.' His companions replied, 'You may seek, but you will not find it'—at the same time striking him with cords made of the inner bark of the papyros; and thus they proceeded till one of them was taken. Apodidraskinda ('hide and seek,' or 'whoop and holloa!') was played much as it is now. One boy

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