overcome, the successful overcoming what then was sheer obstacle was real progress; but now that all harmful individuality is impossible, a continuance of that course follows the law of all human action that passes its term and object, and becomes retrograde.

XXXI.

CHILDHOOD.

OYS are inexperienced men, only more clear of crotchets, and with quicker general powers of observation than in after-life. A shrewd adult may often learn as much from a child as the child from him, only of a different kind. The child has his knowledge, although he be not so sure of it, and it lies on the fresher side of things. The adult is surer of his, and he dives deeper, and, too often, misses many a truth that floats on the surface. Much might be gathered, for instance, as to the phenomena of language, by carefully noting the early struggles of the child with his mothertongue. The attempts to express itself, strange and feeble as they be, may probably belong to that broad field of thought-utterance in the human race, of which each vernacular idiom is but an elaborate variety.

A real child is worth kidnapping; for, to say the truth, they be rare. Most of them cease to be children in this respect, years before they have any pretensions to be men. This is partly from the hurried pace at which life is everywhere set, and partly from the injudiciousness of those about them at an early period. A child may be jeered and laughed at, or knuckle-rapped, or otherwise punished, and exposed to the derision of his schoolmates, for asking

a question, in itself very pregnant, but to which there is no answer in Pinnock, and therefore past the self-satisfied Dominie's ability to appreciate; who thereupon snuffs out the querist, to the great encouragement of originality in the boys. And for the lad himself there is risk that he will think for himself no more, but try to look as he can through such spectacles as are offered him, whether they suit his sight or no. How many young minds have been put out of all active existence in this world by such moral Herods is sad to think of.

menon.

The child, the real child, untampered with, and unspoilt, and with the freshness of childhood upon him, may often see the little cloud "as big as a man's hand," though it be for the man's prophet-experience to interpret the phenoOur prepossessions cloud our judgment even on surface-matters, and our faculties, one or so, get sharpened at the expense of the rest, which are allowed to rust. In a child's mind there is more balance; none of his faculties have the artificial strength of the adult's exclusive exercise of one, but all of them are in play. I am not drawing comparison between the two states in preference of either, but calling attention to the fact of their difference, and the nature of it. A child is born, perhaps, with an aptitude for all the occupations of maturer life, but the man will be found to have lost that aptitude, or exchanged it, rather, for one more intense in that which he selects as his lifelabour. Not only do the general aptitudes for lack of exercise, not grow, but they wither and all but disappear, like the muscles of the body, which dwindle if out of use. The development of the dancer's leg, and the blacksmith's arm, and the student's brow, are distinctions that use hath wrought out of an equality in all these when the boys were born.

Whatever an adult's experience, and practised power, it would often profit him to be able to view things without the

The

bias of that experience, to take fresh observations of the sun at different points of his life-voyage, clear of the clouds of his prepossessions, that float between him and it. This, however is impossible. Ubiquity of mind is, in some respects, as impossible as ubiquity of body. No one can, in this sense, be a man and a child at one and the same time. man's experience cannot be cast from him as a cloak, and still less, God be thanked, can it be thrown upon the child; nor can the child's freshness be in the man. But the child may use the adult's experience, or rather quicken his own by it, and the adult, if he be wise, may profit by the child's freshness of observation, by registering and noting what the young can report of how things strike these little strangers in this worn world of ours, this inexhaustible, myriad-faced world, which some of us, in our weariness, yet fancy we have exhausted.

But this profiting is not so easy as one might suppose. It is not so easy to catch real children. Their observing power is great; but much is done by those about them to abridge it early, by foolish wonderment at a phenomenon, from which its commonness should by this time have banished wonder, but that in every household the phenomenon is fresh. The family wonder is perpetually renewed, though as a state matter it be stale enough. As things run at present, the young mother, to whom her child is not a marvel, is herself a miracle.

The result is natural, but not the less disastrous. And it happens more among the middle class than the lower, because of the larger leisure that the mothers have for wondering at their children and spoiling them. The business of a child, that nature itself puts on it, is to observe, and ask. It is no more wonderful than feeding, sleeping, and breathing, though quite as necessary to his mental, as those to his physical growth. But this mental growth is presently stopped. The child at first asked questions from a yearning

to know. The fond mother, or aunt, or nurse, marvels at his questions. The child soon sees his importance, and the source of it, and thenceforth sets himself to ask questions, not for the knowledge that he desires to have, but to be admired for asking them. His progress is then stopped, as far as anything in our elastic nature can be ; and he may go on, asking fifty questions for one, that he cares to have answered, until the weariness of the adults puts an end to it. And then,-what then? He gets on but the freshness of life is somewhat The questions, which the view of things at one age would have suggested to him, to the profit of his after-life, will not recur at a later stage, and he will go on with more or less of ignorance of what he ought to know, according as the season of fresh contact with things was neglected, or otherwise.

as well as he can, tarnished for him.

XXXII.

LEGEND AND LANGUAGE.

HE yearning for novelty, the eager curiosity, that marks our race, hath yet the miser's stamp upon it of not willingly parting with anything. The craving for novelty is a growing one, and may be exampled any where, but tenacity of the old, though still strong, was perhaps more characteristic of past times.

On two points this tenacity is remarkable, legend and language. The people, of themselves, change neither. The change is always from some powerful extrinsic agency. A poet of a people could no more change its legends than

he could alter its tongue. The pertinacious literalness with which a people will adhere to both, and the intenseness of that pertinacity in ancient times, may be appreciated at this day by reflection and experiment. Let a

man among the people hazard a new word, or a new pronunciation of an old one, and a chorus of laughter will greet his experiment. They will none of it. If it were otherwise a language would not last a generation. If he tell one of their legends, and vary from the received form, he will be greeted with interruption on all sides, and set right here, and set right there, until he fall into the orthodox channel. Were it otherwise the legend would vary with the caprice of every individual, and cease to be a legend or story received by a whole tribe or people. The tendency to be literal, even to self-correction, on the part of the narrator, in minutiae of no moment to the point of the story, is too common among the simpler and less informed to need insisting on further.

But for this pertinacious adherence to a common standard, how could such intangible things as sounds be transmitted so uniformly and so accurately, from generation to generation, that a whole tribe shall pronounce them exactly alike? How, too, could they so nicely and permanently discriminate between sounds that are often so similar that foreigners have to spend weeks in even understanding the difference?

And, as to the legends of a people, an individual were powerless in effecting a change in them. The contrary belief is, methinks, an error bred of too hasty reference to ourselves in the matter. We read an ancient poet, who tells what we know to be false, and which we know the people believed; and we fancy that the poet invented, and made them believe it. But the fact is that the poet,

less than the people, believed it; and their fathers