CHAPTER VIII.

PECULIARITIES OF MANNER.

NO. II.

The joy

That enters to the spirit of a child

Is deep as his young heart; his very breath,
The simple sense of being, is enough

To ravish him; and like a thrilling touch,
He feels each moment of his life go by.
Beautiful, beautiful childhood!

AMONGST the innovations of the day, few are more striking than the change that has taken place in the management of children, and few have been more rapid and significant. As a sign of the times, it is watched by those to whom passing events supply an index of the future, and all agree that not only will the next generation be materially affected by our educational management, but that evidences of what it may produce later, are even now apparent amongst us. Already has boyhood changed its character, and anticipated the sated indifference of mature life; already does the happy animation of

early youth seem exhausted in childhood, when the boy is familiarised with all the pleasures, that from being long withheld, formerly acquired additional zest, enhanced with the charms of novelty, for the adult. The theatre, the ball, the concert, the hunting-field, and the gun, now add their excitements to the natural fever of adolescence in its earliest period, at a time when the mental capacity for utilising some of these pursuits is not fully developed, and when repeated stimulants are exhaustive to the incomplete faculties only prepared for more simple indulgences. Consequently, fatigue rather than enjoyment ensues from this substitution.

Fictitious excitements, however, of all kinds are provided for youth, till, blasé with them all, the boy begins his adult career an indifferent, if not a dejected or discontented, spectator of the world's stage. The parts there have been so often rehearsed before him, and he has seen so much behind the scenes of those in which he already acts, that illusion is ended, just at the time when it should blind him to the disagreeable realities of life upon which he is soon to enter. Like an old sage, he already exclaims, "Still falls some joy from lingering life away," and long before the time when Providence kindly renders us indifferent to the pleasant things we are so soon to relinquish he has lost his zest for them.

The young gentleman was, perhaps, pampered from the cradle by a poor misjudging mother, imbued with the extra fashionable maternal tenderness, who flatters herself that he will requite all this overweening devotion, by an unusual attachment to home and extra love for herself, the promoter of all his pleasures. She has yet to learn, from experience, that a spoilt child mostly requites love with ingratitude, and that the strict parent is often most beloved even when the other has, by unwonted tenderness, endeavoured to atone for his severity.

Another generation will test the effect of our new educational lenity, and then it will be seen if such training do not promote an amount of selfish indolence and expensive luxury, fostered by the growing conveniences and costly habits of modern times. We only hope that the egotism of our spoilt children's children thus confirmed may render them less subservient to their own progeny later, and so restore the kind of training in which the "wholesome neglect," recommended by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, will replace the morbid tenderness so prejudicial to themselves.

How strange would our philoprogenitive arrangements appear to the respected mothers of the old school, whose children are certainly less selfish than their youthful successors! What would our ancestors in corduroy suits, made to contain several years'

growth, think of the velvet-coated, plumed youngster of these times? how amazed would they be with patent perambulators, baby-jumpers, and all the luxuries of the nursery, and its staff of attendants? Even in middle life, the young masters occupy the best rooms, and occasion great expenditure in the house, for natural maternal affection, animated to additional sacrifices by the vogue with which fashion invests it, parades itself in lace, and braid, and feathers, and other elaborate decorations; so that if Rousseau called love "l'étoffe de la nature brodé par l'imagination," we now assuredly spread this embroidery over the maternal instincts.

The absence of all discomfort, the seclusion from all rough contact, are not good preparatives for the battle of life. Some may urge, in extenuation of these precautions, that, as our own habits of luxury become more deteriorating, it is necessary to withdraw children from their influence, and to establish a more healthful course of diet and regimen for their benefit. Still, while we are endeavouring to avoid what is injurious to the body, may we not practise what is prejudicial to the mind? The arrangements deemed necessary for the children of the upper classes are carried out, apart from the general routine of the house. The panniers, the pony, the precise hours, of which an infringement causes a commotion in the house, the