exception-takings to king Solomon's rule, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old his feet will not depart from it." Generally speaking it will be found so; but, Southey asks, is there any other rule to which there are so many exceptions? Ask, he bids us, the serious Christian, or "the professor," whether he has found it hold good, whether his sons when they attained to years of discretion (which are the most indiscreet years in the course of human life) have profited as he expected by the "long extemporaneous prayers to which they listened," rather than in which they joined, night and morning; the "sad sabbaths which they were compelled to observe, and the soporific sermons which closed the domestic religiosities of those melancholy days." Ask him, the doctor bids us, if this discipline has prevented them from running headlong into the follies and vices of the age; from being birdlimed by dissipation; or caught in the spider's web of sophistry and unbelief. "It is no doubt a true observation," says Bishop Patrick, "that the ready way to make the minds of youth grow awry is to lace them too hard, by denying them their just freedom." At the universities, the straitlacedness and simplicity of a first term, where the freshman is just emancipated from a hitherto unrelaxed restraint, and the excesses which amply redeem them in his third, have passed into a proverb. It is a suggestive fact, as remarked by Mill in his review of Grote, that a Spartan out of Sparta was not only the most domineering and arrogant, but in spite of, or rather by a natural reaction from, his ascetic training, the most rapacious and corrupt of all Greeks no one fell so easy a victim to the temptations of luxury and splendour.

The autocrat of the breakfast table adverts more than once to the tendency "occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other eminently worthy people," to dissipated courses, a tendency by many ascribed, he goes on to say, to that "intense congenital hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the brute," but, he submits, perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the "yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in one moral

posture." The late F. W. Robertson was fervid in his opposition to that "consistent" Calvinism which some parents enforce, in teaching their children that the children of God they cannot be until certain feelings have been distinctly developed in them; which instructions the children in question follow out with fearful fidelity. They take for granted what has been told them, that they are not God's children. "Taught that they are as yet of the world, they live as the world; they carry out their education, which has dealt with them as children of the devil, to be converted: and children of the devil they become. No wonder that the children of such religionists turn out ill.” The only son of the celebrated Grimshaw of Haworth became a confirmed sot, "notwithstanding," says his father's biographer, "he had been favoured with a religious education, and had been prayed for by some of the holiest men in the land." Possibly, prayed at, too. Dr. Holmes dilates on the doubts and perplexities which are sure to assail every thinking child bred in any inorganic or not thoroughly vitalised faith, as he holds to be too often the case with the children of professional theologians. The kind of discipline they are subjected to he compares to that of the Flat Head Indian papooses: at ten or fifteen years old they put their hands up to their foreheads, and ask, What are they strapping down my brains in this way for? and so they tear off the sacred bandages of the great Flat Head tribe, and there follows a mighty rush of blood to the long compressed region. "This accounts in the most lucid manner for those sudden freaks with which certain children of this class astonish their worthy parents at the period of life when they are growing fast, and the frontal pressure beginning to be felt as something intolerable, they tear off the holy compresses." Experience, or rather, as an essay writer on the subject of Youthful Promise puts it, the demand for independent action, every day gives rise to conduct which astounds us, and mystifies all our calculations; so impossible is it to be quite sure how a boy or a young man will turn out after he has looked out upon the world. "Lads who have been angels

with pure white wings up to one-and-twenty, not seldom develop, by a process, we suppose, of natural selection, into imps with horrid horns and hoofs before they have left home a twelvemonth." The profligacy of the sons of too austere fathers is an old story, observes a writer on the inter-relations of Imagination and Conduct: minds with any elasticity or fertility or impulse cannot tolerate the stiff, narrow bounds of so "grey, colourless a life": hence the "disastrous rebellions" against it in so many households. "They long for an atmosphere of growth and movement, and as they do not find it in any form of virtue with which they are acquainted, they very commonly seek it in the more genial shape which vice may present"; and thus it is shown that the powers of imagination which might have been made the very salt of character only serve to hurry the character the more rapidly to degradation.

When a man awakes to the conviction, as an acute analyst of Prejudices remarks, that he has been the dupe, through youth and dawning thought, of a string of absurd restrictions, superstitious observances, and useless sacrifices, the reaction of independence is a dangerous transition. We no longer, says an essayist on Domestic Autocracy, wonder how it is that the sons of men of the most rigid piety so often turn out the most incorrigible scamps, and that the daughters of devout mothers grow into the boldest flirts and friskiest matrons. Mr. Motley begins one of his paragraphs descriptive of Philip III. with the remark, that "it was not probable that the son of Philip II. would be a delinquent to church observances." 1 One might suggest the omission of the not before "probable," as an amended reading, taking human nature as one finds it, and remembering how another son of that very Philip II., Don Carlos, turned out. For very potent and extensive is what a French philosopher styles the genre d'influence qui s'est vue souven ten pareil cas, et qui peut

1 "That he was devout as a monk of the middle ages, conforming daily and hourly to religious ceremonies, need scarcely be stated."-History of the United Netherlands, vol. iv., p. 355.

s'appeler l'influence par les contraires. With all his merciless contempt for George IV., Mr. Thackeray was prompt to admit that nature and circumstance had done their utmost to prepare the prince for being spoiled: "the dreadful dulness of papa's court, its stupid amusements, its dreary occupations, the maddening humdrum, the stifling sobriety of its routine, would have made a scapegrace of a much less lively prince. All the big princes bolted from that castle of ennui where old King George sat posting up his books and droning over his Handel, and old Queen Charlotte over her snuff and her tambour frame." 2 Hannah More, what she calls "hazards the assertion," that where the children of "pious parents turn out ill,” it

It may take the form of virtuous reaction from a corrupt example. "Combien de fois," exclaims Sainte-Beuve, "la vue d'une mère légère et inconsidérée n'a-t-elle pas jetée une fille judicieuse et sensée dans un ordre de réflexions plutôt exactes et sévères !". -Causeries du Lundi,

iv. 171.

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2 In one of his ablest works of fiction, Mr. Thackeray again and again expatiates on this same theme, with diverse applications. There was, he points out for instance, that young Lord Warwick, Addison's stepson: his mother was severe, his stepfather a most eloquent moralist; yet the young gentleman's career was shocking, positively shocking. He boxed the watch, he fuddled himself at taverns, he was no better than a Mohock." Old Mrs. Newcome is set forth (for a warning) as one who kept her sons, years after they were grown men, as if they were boys at school; "and what was the consequence? At home as mum as quakers at a meeting, they used to go out on the sly, and sowed their wild oats," etc. Mrs. Newcome's Clapham residence "was a serious paradise," a stifling garden of Eden." So with that gentle lady, the devout mother of Lord Kew, who kept him so carefully away from all mischief, under the eyes of the most sedulous pastors and masters; only to see her son distinguish himself very soon after his first term at Christchurch, by driving tandems, scandalising the dean, screwing up the tutor's door, and altogether agonising his mother at home by his lawless proceedings. "Very likely her mind was narrow; very likely the precautions which she had used in the lad's early days, the tutors and directors she had set about him, the religious studies and practices to which she would have subjected him, had served only to vex and weary the young pupil, and to drive his high spirit into revolt." A fortiori, when the religious "profession" of the parent is perceptibly "put on," the revulsion of the children is apt to be extreme. As Judge Haliburton's shrewd observer reasons on the subject, from particulars to generals, "a hypocrite father like Gabe Gab is sure to have rollickin' frollickin' children. They do well enough when in sight; but out of that they beat all natur'. Takin' off restraint is like takin' off the harness of a hoss; how they race about the field, squeal, roll over and over on the grass, and kick up their heels," etc.

will generally be found that some mistake, some neglect, or some fault is chargeable on the parents, and that they have not used the right methods.1 Did Luther? Dr. Jonas observed one day, that the curse of God upon disobedient children was manifest in the family of Luther, whose son John was always suffering from illness. "Ay," said Dr. Martin, "'tis the punishment due to his disobedience. He almost killed me once, and ever since I have lost all my strength of body. Thanks to him, I now thoroughly understand that passage where St. Paul speaks of children who kill their parents, not by the sword, but by disobedience. Such children seldom live long, and are never happy." Did John Howard, again, use the right method? That has been made a vexed question by his critics, or censors, and biographers; Mr. Dixon, for one, arguing stoutly against the charge of undue severity on the father's part, as utterly groundless. The fact, however explained, remains, that young Howard fell a victim to his own excesses, after systematically frequenting the worst haunts of London, while "the unsuspicious parent was engaged in his philanthropic labours." Howard's custom was to retire to bed early, after his day-long exertions; and with his "Good night,” we are told, began the day of his profligate son and the servant lad, Thomasson, who shared in the young man's dissipation. As soon as all was quiet in the house, the two associates in vice would leave their bedrooms, steal downstairs, and sally out to theatre and cider cellar, gaming house and night house, all in succession, and none too vile to

attract.

Leaving morals however apart, and considering religion rather in its intellectual aspect, and as a definite creed, to be professed, whether or not practised, nothing, affirms Hartley Coleridge, prejudices the mind so strongly against religion in

1 Though there is no such thing, she says, as hereditary holiness, no entail of goodness, yet "the Almighty has promised in the Scriptures many blessings to the offspring of the righteous. "He never meant, however, that religion was to be transferred arbitrarily like an heirloom; but the promise was accompanied with conditions and injunctions."