he [the pupil] can orderly decline his noun house, or his favourite watering-place. and his verb." His noun ! Wherever he goes this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boyrid, sick of perpetual boy. The fine dream is fading away fast; and the least concern of a teacher in the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules. The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of everything, because his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneumatics; of chemistry; of whatever is curious or proper to excite the attention of the youthful mind; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a touch of statistics; the quality of soils, &c., botany, the constitution of his country, cum multis aliis. You may get a notion of some part of his expected duties by consulting the famous Tractate on Education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib. All these things-these, or the desire of them he is expected to instil, not by set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural instructors), with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him is to be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora fandi. He must seize every occasionthe season of the year-the time of the day -a passing cloud-a rainbow-a waggon of hay-a regiment of soldiers going by-to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a casual glimpse of Nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. He must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot relish a beggarman, or a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe-that Great Book, as it has been called-is to him, indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys.-Vacations themselves are none to him, he is only rather worse off than before; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him at such times; some cadet of a great family; some neglected lump of nobility, or gentry; that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on the one side than on the other.-Even a child, that "plaything for an hour," tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies-as I now hearken to them, by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell-by distance made more sweet-inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so -for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh proseaccents of man's conversation.—I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime. I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own-not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life-but the habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another man's grounds. You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame. As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upward, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates. The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility. Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster ?-because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is under the restraint of a formal or didactive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society than the other can his inclinations. He is forlorn among his coevals; his juniors cannot be his friends. him with a parent's anxiety, never could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when I praised; he was submissive, when I reproved him; but he did never love me-and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me, is but the pleasant sensation which all persons feel at revisiting the scenes of their boyish hopes and fears; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to look up to with reverence. My wife, too," this interesting correspondent goes on to say, "my once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster.When I married her-knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged sometimes to threaten to fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death-I expressed my fears that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her; and she, who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What wonders "I take blame to myself," said a sensible will not woman's love perform ?-My house man of this profession, writing to a friend is managed with a propriety and decorum respecting a youth who had quitted his unknown in other schools; my boys are well school abruptly, "that your nephew was not fed, look healthy, and have every proper acmore attached to me. But persons in my commodation; and all this performed with situation are more to be pitied than can a careful economy, that never descends to well be imagined. We are surrounded by meanness. But I have lost my gentle helpyoung, and, consequently, ardently affection- less Anna! When we sit down to enjoy an ate hearts, but we can never hope to share an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I atom of their affections. The relation of am compelled to listen to what have been master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings! my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men whom I have educated return after some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their education. A holiday is begged for the boys; the house is a scene of happiness; I, only, am sad at heart.-This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish years-this young man-in the eight long years I watched over her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the master's wife, and she looks up to me as the boys' master ; to whom all show of love and affection would be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situation and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake she submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it?”— For the communication of this letter I am indebted to my cousin Bridget. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything. Those natural repugnancies do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch.-Religio Medici. THAT the author of the Religio Medici, their mode of proceeding. We know one mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, another at first sight. There is an order of conversant about notional and conjectural imperfect intellects (under which mine must essences; in whose categories of Being the be content to rank) which in its constitution possible took the upper hand of the actual; is essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners should have overlooked the impertinent indi- of the sort of faculties I allude to, have vidualities of such poor concretions as man-minds rather suggestive than comprehensive. kind, is not much to be admired. It is They have no pretences to much clearness rather to be wondered at, that in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that species at all. For myself -earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my activities, Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices-made up of likings and dislikings-the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses sympathy, will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot like all people alike.* I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingenuous in • I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold or precision in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them-a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game peradventure-and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable and shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content t let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon their oath but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring them. I have met with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," -The cause which to that act compell'd him Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. it to market in the green ear. They delight see how that epithet can be properly applied to impart their defective discoveries as they to a book." Above all, you must beware of arise, without waiting for their full develop- indirect expressions before a Caledonian ment. They are no systematizers, and would Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you but err more by attempting it. Their minds, are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Reas I said before, are suggestive merely. The member you are upon your oath. I have brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mis- a print of a graceful female after Leonardo taken) is constituted upon quite a different da Vinci, which I was showing off to plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. You Mr. **** After he had examined it miare never admitted to see his ideas in their nutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked growth-if, indeed, they do grow, and are MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among not rather put together upon principles of my friends)—when he very gravely assured clock-work. You never catch his mind in an me, that "he had considerable respect for undress. He never hints or suggests any- my character and talents” (so he was pleased thing, but unlades his stock of ideas in to say), "but had not given himself much perfect order and completeness. He brings thought about the degree of my personal his total wealth into company, and gravely pretensions." The misconception staggered unpacks it. His riches are always about me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. He never stoops to catch a glittering him.-Persons of this nation are particularly something in your presence to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian-you never see the first dawn, the early streaks.-He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox-he has no doubts. Is he an infidel-he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with hin upon the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him-for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book!' -said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle,-"Did I catch rightly what you said? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, but I do not | Hints towards an Essay on Conversation. fond of affirming a truth-which nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected; and happened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father instead of the son-when four of them started up at once to inform me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead.” An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.* The tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one another!-In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents as happen every day; Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to and this I have observed more frequently among the omit the minutest circumstances of time or place; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture, peculiar to that country, would be hardly tolerable.— hoped to ingratiate myself with his country--Christians judaizing-puzzle me. 1 like men by expressing it. But I have always fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more found that a true Scot resents your admira- confounding piece of anomaly than a wet tion of his compatriot, even more than he Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is would your contempt of him. The latter he essentially separative. B would have imputes to your imperfect acquaintance been more in keeping if he had abided by with many of the words which he uses; "the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine and the same objection makes it a presump- scorn in his face, which nature meant to be tion in you to suppose that you can admire of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is him.-Thomson they seem to have forgotten. strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor He cannot conquer the Shibboleth. How it forgiven, for his delineation of Rory and his breaks out, when he sings, "The Children companion, upon their first introduction to of Israel passed through the Red Sea!" our metropolis. Speak of Smollett as a The auditors, for the moment, are as Egypgreat genius, and they will retort upon you tians to him, and he rides over our necks Hume's History compared with his Continu- in triumph. There is no mistaking him. ation of it. What if the historian had con- B― has a strong expression of sense in his tinued Humphrey Clinker? countenance, and it is confirmed by his singI have, in the abstract, no disrespect for ing. The foundation of his vocal excellence Jews. They are a piece of stubborn anti- is sense. He sings with understanding, as quity, compared with which Stonehenge is Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing in its nonage. They date beyond the pyrathe Commandments, and give an appropriate mids. But I should not care to be in habits character to each prohibition. His nation, of familiar intercourse with any of that in general, have not over-sensible countenation. I confess that I have not the nerves nances. How should they?—but you seldom to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices see a silly expression among them.-Gain, cling about me. I cannot shake off the story and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, visage. I never heard of an idiot being born tontempt, and hate, on the one side, of among them. Some admire the Jewish cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on female-physiognomy. I admire it—but with the other, between our and their fathers, trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrumust and ought to affect the blood of the table eyes. children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change-for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, some- I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. thing hypocritical and unnatural in them. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does I do not like to see the Church and Syna- me good for the rest of the day when I meet gogue kissing and congeeing in awkward any of their people in my path. When I am postures of an affected civility. If they are ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the converted, why do they not come over to us sight, or quiet voice of a Quaker, acts upor altogether? Why keep up a form of sepa- me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and ration, when the life of it is fled? If they taking off a load from the bosom. But can sit with us at table, why do they keck I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona at our cookery? I do not understand would say) "to live with them." I am all these half convertites. Jews christianizing over sophisticated with humours, fancies, In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces or rather masks- - that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls-these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share my meals and my good-nights with them - because they are black. |