Rab and his Friends And Other Papers, by John Brown, M.d., F.r.s.e.

We are not now going to try our 'prentice hand upon a new theory of Beauty, after so many masters have failed; but we cannot help thinking that the dispute would be at an end if it were but allowed at once, that there are two kinds of beauty, that there is a material and necessary element of beauty, and another which is contingent and relative—a natural and a spiritual delightfulness to and through the eye; and that sometimes we see both together, as in the face and eyes of a beautiful and beloved woman; and moreover, that there is no more reason for denying either the sense or the emotion of beauty, because everybody does not agree about the kind or measure of either of these qualities in all objects, than there is for affirming that there is no such thing as veracity or natural affection, because the Spartans commended lying, and the Cretians practised it, or the New Zealanders the eating of one's grandmother. Why should the eye, the noblest, the amplest, the most informing of all our senses, be deprived of its own special delight? The light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eye to behold the sun; and why, when the ear has sound for informing, and music for delight—when there is smell and odour, taste and flavour, and even the touch has its sense of pleasant smoothness and softness—why should there not be in the eye a pleasure born and dying with the sights it sees? it is like the infinite loving-kindness of Him who made the trees of the garden pleasant to the eye as well as good for food. We say nothing here of Relative or Associative Beauty,—this has never been doubted either in its essence or its value. It is as much larger in its range, as much nobler in its meaning and uses, as the heavens are higher than the earth, or as the soul transcends the body. This, too, gives back to material beauty more than it received: it was after man was made, that God saw, and, behold, everything was very good.

Our readers may perhaps think we make too much of imagination as an essential element—as the essential element—in Art. With our views of its function and its pervading influence in all the ideal arts, we can give it no other place. A man can no more be a poet or painter in the spiritual and only true sense without imagination, than an animal can be a bird without wings; and as, other things being equal, that bird can be longest on the wing and has the greatest range of flight which has the strongest pinions, so that painter is likely to have the farthest and keenest vision of all that is within the scope of his art, and the surest and most ample faculty of making known to others what he himself has seen, whose imagination is at once the most strong and quick. At the same time, if it be true that the body without the spirit is dead, so it is equally true that the spirit without the body is vain, ineffectual, fruitless. Imagination alone can no more make a painter or a poet than wings can constitute a bird. Each must have a body. Unfortunately, in painting we have more than enough of body without spirit. Correct drawing, wonderful imitative powers, cleverness, adaptiveness, great facility and dexterity of hand, much largeness of quotation, and many material and mechanical qualities, all go to form an amusing, and, it may be, useful spectacle, but not a true picture. We have also, but not so often, the reverse of all this,—the vision without the faculty, the soul without the body, great thoughts without the power to embody them in intelligible forms. He, and he alone, is a great painter, and an heir of time, who combines both. He must have observation,—humble, loving, unerring, unwearied; this is the material out of which a painter, like a poet, feeds his genius, and "makes grow his wings." There must be perception and conception, both vigorous, quick, and true: you must have these two primary qualities, the one first, the other last, in every great painter. Give him good sense and a good memory, it will be all the better for him and for us. As for principles of drawing and perspective, they are not essential. A man who paints according to a principle is sure to paint ill; he may apply his principles after his work is done, if he has a philosophic as well as an ideal turn.

"OH, I'M WAT, WAT."

The father of the Rev. Mr. Steven of Largs, was the son of a farmer, who lived next farm to Mossgiel. When a boy of eight, he found "Robbie," who was a great friend of his, and of all the children, engaged digging a large trench in a field, Gilbert, his brother, with him. The boy pausing on the edge of the trench, and looking down upon Burns, said, "Robbie, what's that ye' re doin'?"

"To bury the Deil in, Tammie!" (one can fancy how those eyes would glow.) "Ay but, Robbie," said the logical Tammie, "hoo' re ye to gel him in?"

"Ay," said Burns, "that's it, hoo are we to get him in!" and went off into shouts of laughter; and every now and then during that summer day shouts would come from that hole, as the idea came over him. If one could only have daguerreotyped his day's fancies!

"What is love, Mary?" said Seventeen to Thirteen, who was busy with her English lessons.

(Yes, Mary, you are right to keep the concrete; analysis kills love as well as other things. I once asked a useful-information young lady what her mother was. "Oh, mamma's a biped!" I turned in dismay to her younger sister, and said, "What do you say?" "Oh, my mother's just my mother.")

"It's a substantive or a verb." (Young Horne Tooke didn't ask her if it was an active or passive, an irregular or defective verb; an inceptive, as calesco, I grow warm, or dulcesco, I grow sweet; a frequentative or a desiderative, as nupturio, I desire to marry.)

"I think it is a verb," said John, who was deep in other diversions besides those of Burley; "and I think it must have been originally the Perfect of Live, like thrive, throve, strive, strove."

"Capital, John!" suddenly growled Uncle Oldbuck, who was supposed to be asleep in his arm-chair by the fireside, and who snubbed and supported the entire household. "It was that originally, and it will be our own faults, children, if it is not that at last, as well as, ay, and more than at first. What does Richardson say, John? read him out." John reads—

     * They are strange beings, these lexicographers. Richardson,
     for instance, under the word snail, gives this quotation
     from Beaumont and Fletcher's Wit at Several Weapons,

     "Oh, Master Pompey! how is't, man?

     Clown—Snails, I'm almost starved with love and cold, and
     one thing or other."

     Any one else knows of course that it is 11's nails"—the
     contraction of the old oath or interjection—God's nails.

After this, Uncle sent the cousins to their beds. John's mother was in hers, never to rise from it again. She was a widow, and Mary was her husband's niece. The house quiet, Uncle sat down in his chair, put his feet on the fender, and watched the dying fire; it had a rich central glow, but no flame, and no smoke, it was flashing up fitfully, and bit by bit falling in. He fell asleep watching it, and when he slept, he dreamed.

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He was young; he was seventeen, he was prowling about the head of North St. David Street, keeping his eye on a certain door,—we call them common stairs in Scotland. He was waiting for Mr. White's famous English class for girls coming out. Presently out rushed four or five girls, wild and laughing; then came one, bounding like a roe!

She was surrounded by the rest, and away they went laughing, she making them always laugh the more. Seventeen followed at a safe distance, studying her small, firm, downright heel. The girls dropped off one by one, and she was away home by herself, swift and reserved. He, impostor as he was, disappeared through Jamaica Street, to reappear and meet her, walking as if on urgent business, and getting a cordial and careless nod. This beautiful girl of thirteen was afterwards the mother of our Mary, and died in giving her birth. She was Uncle Old-buck's first and only sweetheart; and here was he, the only help our young Horne Tooke, and his mother and Mary had. Uncle awoke, the fire dead, and the room cold. He found himself repeating Lady John Scott's lines—

     * Can the gifted author of these lines and of their music
     not be prevailed on to give them and others to the world, as
     well as to her friends?

This love-song, which Mr. Chambers gives from recitation, is, thinks Uncle to himself, all but perfect; Burns, who in almost every instance, not only adorned, but transformed and purified whatever of the old he touched, breathing into it his own tenderness and strength, fails here, as may be seen in reading his version:—

How weak these italics! No one can doubt which of these is the better. The old song is perfect in the procession, and in the simple beauty of its thoughts and words. A ploughman or shepherd—for I hold that it is a man's song—comes in "wat, wat" after a hard day's work among the furrows or on the hill. The wat ness of wat, wat, is as much wetter than wet as a Scotch mist is more of a mist than an English one; and he is not only wat, wat, but "weary," longing for a dry skin and a warm bed and rest; but no sooner said and felt, than, by the law of contrast, he thinks on "Mysie" or "Ailie," his Genevieve; and then "all thoughts, all passions, all delights" begin to stir him, and "fain wad I rise and rin" (what a swiftness beyond run is "rin"!) Love now makes him a poet; the true imaginative power enters and takes possession of him. By this time his clothes are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant"? and then the fine vagueness of "time"! "Flowers o' every colour;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer flower," and is off in pursuit. "The water rins ower the heugh" (a steep precipice); flinging itself wildly, passionately over, and so do I long for my true lover. Nothing can be simpler and finer than

"Feather beds are saft;" "pentit rooms are bonnie;" I would infer from this, that his "dearie," his "true love," was a lass up at "the big house"—a dapper Abigail possibly—at Sir William's at the Castle, and then we have the final paroxysm upon Friday nicht—Friday at the gloamin'! O for Friday nicht!—Friday's lang o' cornin'!—it being very likely Thursday before day-break when this affectionate ululatus ended in repose.

Now, is not this rude ditty, made very likely by some clumsy, big-headed Galloway herd, full of the real stuff of love? He does not go off upon her eye-brows, or even her eyes; he does not sit down, and in a genteel way announce that "love in thine eyes for ever sits," etc. etc., or that her feet look out from under her petticoats like little mice: he is far past that; he is not making love, he is in it. This is one and a chief charm of Burns' love-songs, which are certainly of all love-songs except those wild snatches left to us by her who flung herself from the Leucadian rock, the most in earnest, the tenderest, the "most moving delicate and full of life." Burns makes you feel the reality and the depth, the truth of his passion: it is not her eyelashes, or her nose, or her dimple, or even

that are "winging the fervour of his love;" not even her soul; it is herself. This concentration and earnestness, this perfervor of our Scottish love poetry, seems to me to contrast curiously with the light, trifling, philandering of the English; indeed, as far as I remember, we have almost no love-songs in English, of the same class as this one, or those of Burns. They are mostly either of the genteel, or of the nautical (some of these capital), or of the comic school. Do you know the most perfect, the finest love-song in our or in any language; the love being affectionate more than passionate, love in possession not in pursuit?

The following is Mr. Chambers's account of the origin of this song:—-Jessy Lewars had a call one morning from Burns. He offered, if she would play him any tune of which she was fond, and for which she desired new verses, that he would do his best to gratify her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over and over the air of an old song, beginning with the words—

Original

Uncle now took his candle, and slunk off to bed, slipping up noiselessly that he might not disturb the thin sleep of the sufferer, saying in to himself—"I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee "If thou wert there, if thou wert there and though the morning was at the window, he was up by eight, making breakfast for John and Mary.

EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES.

(reprinted from "the museum.")

"Now, in matter of the knowledge of the works of nature, I would have you to study that exactly; that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain, of which thou dost not know the fishes; all the fowls of the air; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forest or orchard; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground; all the various metals that are hid within the bowels of the earth. Let nothing of all these be hidden from thee.... But because, as the wise man Solomon saith, wisdom entereth not into a malicious mind, and that knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul; it behoveth thee to serve, to love, to fear God, and on him to cast all thy thoughts and all thy hope, and, by faith fortivied in love to cleave unto him, so that thou mayest never be separated from him by thy sins."—Letter from Garagantua to his son Pantagruel.

One of the chief sins of our time is hurry: it is helter-skelter, and devil take the hindmost. Off we go all too swift at starting, and we neither run so fast nor so far as we would have done, had we taken it cannily at first. This is true of a boy as well as of a blood colt. Not only are boys and colts made to do the work and the running of fullgrown men and horses, but they are hurried out of themselves and their now, and pushed into the middle of next week where nobody is wanting them, and beyond which they frequently never get.

The main duty of those who care for the young is to secure their wholesome, their entire growth, for health is just the development of the whole nature in its due sequences and proportions: first the blade—then the ear—then, and not till then, the full corn in the ear; and thus, as Dr. Temple wisely says, "not to forget wisdom in teaching knowledge." If the blade be forced, and usurp the capital it inherits; if it be robbed by you its guardian of its birthright, or squandered like a spendthrift, then there is not any ear, much less any corn; if the blade be blasted or dwarfed in our haste and greed for the full shock and its price, we spoil all three. It is not easy to keep this always before one's mind, that the young "idea" is in a young body, and that healthy growth and harmless passing of the time are more to be cared for than wrhat is vainly called accomplishment. We are preparing him to run his race, and accomplish that which is one of his chief ends; but we are too apt to start him off at his full speed, and be either bolts or breaks down—the worst thing for him generally being to win. In this wray a child or boy should be regarded much more as a mean than as an end, and his cultivation should have reference to this; his mind, as old Montaigne said, should be forged, as well as—indeed, I would say, rather than—furnished, fed rather than filled,—two not always coincident conditions. Now exercise—the joy of interest, of origination, of activity, of excitement—the play of the faculties,—this is the true life of a boy, not the accumulation of mere words. Words—the coin of thought—unless as the means of buying something else, are just as useless as other coin when it is hoarded; and it is as silly, and in the true sense as much the part and lot of a miser to amass words for their own sakes, as to keep all your guineas in a stocking and never spend them, but be satisfied with every now and then looking greedily at them and making them chink. Therefore it is that I dislike—as indeed who doesn't?—the cramming system. The great thing with knowledge and the young is to secure that it shall be their own—that it be not merely external to their inner and real self, but shall go in succum et sanguinem; and therefore it is, that the self-teaching that a baby and a child give themselves remains with them for ever—it is of their essence, whereas what is given them ab extra, especially if it be received mechanically, without relish, and without any energizing of the entire nature, remains pitifully useless and wersh. Try, therefore, always to get the resident teacher inside the skin, and who is for ever giving his lessons, to help you and be on your side.

Now in children, as we all know, he works chiefly through the senses. The quantity of accurate observation—of induction, and of deduction too (both of a much better quality than most of Mr. Buckle's); of reasoning from the known to the unknown; of inferring; the nicety of appreciation of the like and the unlike, the common and the rare, the odd and the even; the skill of the rough and the smooth—of form, of appearance, of texture, of weight, of all the minute and deep philosophies of the touch and of the other senses,—the amount of this sort of objective knowledge which every child of eight years has acquired—especially if he can play in the lap of nature and out of doors—and acquired for life, is, if we could only think of it, marvellous beyond any of our mightiest marches of intellect. Now, could we only get the knowledge of the school to go as sweetly and deeply and clearly into the vitals of the mind as this self-teaching has done, and this is the paradisiac way of it, we should make the young mind grow as well as learn, and be in understanding a man as well as in simplicity a child; we should get rid of much of that dreary, sheer endurance of their school-hours—that stolid lending of ears that do not hear—that objectless looking without ever once seeing, and straining their minds without an aim; alternating, it may be, with some feats of dexterity and effort, like a man trying to lift himself in his own arms, or take his head in his teeth, exploits as dangerous, as ungraceful, and as useless, except to glorify the showman and bring wages in, as the feats of an acrobat.

But you will ask, how is all this to be avoided if everybody must know how far the sun is from Georgium Sidus, and how much of phosphorus is in our bones, and of ptyalin and flint in human spittle—besides some 10,000 times 10,000 other things which we must be told and try to remember, and which we cannot prove not to be true, but which I decline to say we know.

But is it necessary that everybody should know everything? Is it not much more to the purpose for every man, when his turn comes, to be able to do something; and I say, that other things being equal, a boy who goes bird-nesting, and makes a collection of eggs, and knows all their colours and spots, going through the excitements and glories of getting them, and observing everything with a keenness, an intensity, an exactness, and a permanency, which only youth and a quick pulse, and fresh blood and spirits combined, can achieve,—a boy who teaches himself natural history in this way, is not only a healthier and happier boy, but is abler in mind and body for entering upon the great game of life, than the pale, nervous, bright-eyed, feverish, "interesting" boy, with a big head and a small bottom and thin legs, who is the "captain," the miracle of the school; dux for his brief year or two of glory, and, if he live, booby for life. I am, of course, not going in for a complete curriculum of general ignorance; but I am for calling the attention of teachers to drawing out the minds, the energies, the hearts of their pupils through their senses, as well as pouring in through these same apertures the general knowledge of mankind, the capital of the race, into this one small being, who it is to be hoped will contrive to forget much of the mere words he has unhappily learned.

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For we may say of our time in all seriousness, what Sydney Smith said in the fulness of his wisdom and his fun of the pantologic master of Trinity—Science is our forte, omniscience is our foible. There is the seed of a whole treatise, a whole organon in this joke; think over it, and let it simmer in your mind, and you will feel its significance and its power. Now, what is science so called to every 999 men in 1000, but something that the one man tells them he has been told by some one else—who may be one among say 50,000—is true, but of the truth of which these 999 men (and probably even the teaching thousandth man) can have no direct test, and, accordingly, for the truth or falsehood of which they, by a law of their nature, which rejects what has no savour and is superfluous, don't care one fig. How much better, how much dearer, and more precious in a double sense, because it has been bought by themselves,—how much nobler is the knowledge which our little friend, young Edward Forbes, "that marvellous boy," for instance—and what an instance!—is picking up, as he looks into everything he sees, and takes photographs upon his retina?—the camera lucida of his mind—which never fade, of every midge that washes its face as a cat does, and preens its wings, every lady-bird that alights on his knee, and folds and unfolds her gauzy pinions under their spotted and glorious lids. How more real is not only this knowledge, but this little knowledger in his entire nature, than the poor being who can maunder amazingly the entire circle of human science at second, or it may be, twentieth hand!

There are some admirable, though cursory remarks on "Ornithology as a Branch of Liberal Education," by the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, the great Greek scholar, in a pamphlet bearing this title, which he read as a paper before the last meeting of the British Association in Aberdeen. It is not only interesting as a piece of natural history, and a touching co-operation of father and son in the same field—the one on the banks of his own beautiful Dee and among the wilds of the Grampians, the other among the Himalayas and the forests of Cashmere; the son having been enabled, by the knowledge of his native birds got under his father's eye, when placed in an unknown country to recognise his old feathered friends, and to make new ones and tell their story; it is also valuable as coming from a man of enormous scholarship and knowledge—the most learned physician of his time—who knew Aristotle and Plato, and all those old fellows, as we know Maunder or Lardner—a hardworking country surgeon, who was ready to run at any one's call—but who did not despise the modern enlightenments of his profession, because they were not in Paulus Agineta; though, at the same time, he did not despise the admirable and industrious Paul because he was not up to the last doctrine of the nucleated cell, or did not read his Hippocrates by the blaze of paraffine; a man greedy of all knowledge, and welcoming it from all comers, but who, at the end of a long life of toil and thought, gave it as his conviction that one of the best helps to true education, one of the best counteractives to the necessary mischiefs of mere scientific teaching and information, was to be found in getting the young to teach themselves some one of the natural sciences, and singling out ornithology as one of the readiest and most delightful for such a life as his.

I end these intentionally irregular remarks by a story. Some years ago I was in one of the wildest recesses of the Perthshire Highlands. It was in autumn, and the little school, supported mainly by the Chief, who dwelt all the year round in the midst of his own people, was to be examined by the minister, whose native tongue, like that of his flock, was Gaelic, and who was as awkward and ineffectual, and sometimes as unconsciously indecorous, in his English, as a Cockney is in his kilt. It was a great occasion: the keen-eyed, firm-limbed, brown-cheeked little fellows were all in a buzz of excitement as we came in, and before the examination began every eye was looking at us strangers as a dog looks at his game, or when seeking it; they knew everything we had on, everything that could be known through their senses. I never felt myself so studied and scrutinized before. If any one could have examined them upon what they thus mastered, Sir Charles Trevelyan and John Mill would have come away, astonished, and, I trust, humbled. Well, then, the work of the day began; the mill was set a-going, and what a change! In an instant their eyes were like the windows of a house with the blinds down; no one was looking out; everything blank; their very features changed—their jaws fell, their cheeks flattened, they drooped and looked ill at ease—stupid, drowsy, sulky—and getting them to speak or think, or in any way to energize was like trying to get any one to come to the window at three of a summer morning, when, if they do come, they are half awake, rubbing their eyes and growling. So with my little Celts. They were like an idle and half asleep collie by the fireside, as contrasted with the collie on the hill and in the joy of work; the form of dog and boy are there—he, the self of each, was elsewhere (for I differ from Professor Ferrier in thinking that the dog has the reflex ego, and is a very knowing being). I noticed that anything they really knew roused them somewhat; what they had merely to transmit or pass along, as if they were a tube through which the master blew the pea of knowledge into our faces, was performed as stolidly as if they were nothing but a tube.

At last the teacher asked where Sheffield was, and was answered; it was then pointed to by the dux, as a dot on a skeleton map. And now came a flourish. "What is Sheffield famous for?" Blank stupor, hopeless vacuity, till he came to a sort of sprouting "Dougal Cratur"—almost as wee, and as gleg, and as tousy about the head, as my own Kintail terrier, whom I saw at that moment through the open door careering after a hopeless rabbit, with much benefit to his muscles and his wind—who was trembling with keenness. He shouted out something which was liker "cutlery" than anything else, and was received as such amid our rapturous applause. I then ventured to ask the master to ask small and red Dougal what cutlery was; but from the sudden erubescence of his pallid, ill-fed cheek, and the alarming brightness of his eyes, I twigged at once that he didn't himself know what it meant. So I put the question myself, and was not surprised to find that not one of them, from Dougal up to a young strapping shepherd of eighteen, knew what it was!

I told them that Sheffield was famous for making knives and scissors, and razors, and that cutlery meant the manufacture of anything that cuts. Presto! and the blinds were all up, and eagerness, and nous, and brains at the window. I happened to have a Wharncliffe, with "Rodgers and Sons, Sheffield," on the blade. I sent it round, and finally presented it to the enraptured Dougal. Would not each one of those boys, the very boobiest there, know that knife again when they saw it, and be able to pass a creditable competitive examination on all its ins and outs? and wouldn't they remember "cutlery" for a day or two? Well, the examination over, the minister performed an oration of much ambition and difficulty to himself and to us, upon the general question, and a great many other questions, into which his Gaelic subtlety fitted like the mists into the hollows of Ben-a-Houlich, with, it must be allowed, a somewhat similar tendency to confuse and conceal what was beneath; and he concluded with thanking the Chief, as he well might, for his generous support of "this aixlent CEMETERY of ædication." Cemetery indeed! The blind leading the blind, with the ancient result; the dead burying their dead.

Now, not greater is the change we made from that low, small, stifling, gloomy, mephitic room, into the glorious open air, the loch lying asleep in the sun, and telling over again on its placid face, as in a dream, every hill and cloud, and birch and pine, and passing bird and cradled boat; the Black Wood of Rannoch standing "in the midst of its own darkness," frowning out upon us like the Past disturbed, and far off in the clear ether, as in another and a better world, the dim shepherds of Etive pointing, like ghosts at noonday, to the weird shadows of Glencoe;—not greater was this change, than is that from the dingy, oppressive, weary "cemetery" of mere word-knowledge to the open air, the light and liberty, the divine infinity and richness of nature and her teaching.

We cannot change our time, nor would we if we could. It is God's time as well as ours. And our time is emphatically that for achieving and recording and teaching man's dominion over and insight into matter and its forces—his subduing the earth; but let us turn now and then from our necessary and honest toil in this neo-Platonic cavern where we win gold and renown, and where we often are obliged to stand in our own light, and watch our own shadows as they glide, huge and misshapen, across the inner gloom; let us come out betimes with our gold, that we may spend it and get "goods" for it, and when we can look forth on that ample world of daylight which we can never hope to overrun, and into that overarching heaven where, amid clouds and storms, lightning and sudden tempest, there are revealed to those who look for them, lucid openings into the pure, deep empyrean, "as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness;" and when, best of all, we may remember Who it is who stretched out these heavens as a tent to dwell in, and on whose footstool we may kneel, and out of the depths of our heart cry aloud,

we shall return into our cave, and to our work, all the better of such a lesson, and of such a reasonable service, and dig none the worse.

Science which ends in itself, or still worse, returns upon its maker, and gets him to worship himself, is worse than none; it is only when it makes it more clear than before who is the Maker and Governor, not only of the objects, but of the subjects of itself, that knowledge is the mother of virtue. But this is an endless theme. My only aim in these desultory hints is to impress parents and teachers with the benefits of the study, the personal engagement—with their own hands and eyes, and legs and ears—in some form or another of natural history, by their children and pupils and themselves, as counteracting evil, and doing immediate and actual good. Even the immense activity in the Post-Office-stamp line of business among our youngsters has been of immense use in many ways, besides being a diversion and an interest. I myself came to the knowledge of Queensland, and a great deal more, through its blue twopenny.

If any one wishes to know how far wise and clever and patriotic men may occasionally go in the way of giving "your son" a stone for bread, and a serpent for a fish,—may get the nation's money for that which is not bread, and give their own labour for that which satisfies no one; industriously making sawdust into the shapes of bread, and chaff into the appearance of meal, and contriving, at wonderful expense of money and brains, to show what can be done in the way of feeding upon wind,—let him take a turn through certain galleries of the Kensington Museum.

"Yesterday forenoon," writes a friend, "I went to South Kensington Museum. It is really an absurd collection. A great deal of valuable material and a great deal of perfect rubbish. The analyses are even worse than I was led to suppose. There is an analysis OF A MAN. First, a man contains so much water, and there you have the amount of water in a bottle; so much albumen, and there is the albumen; so much phosphate of lime, fat, hæmatin, fibrine, salt, etc. etc. Then in the next case so much carbon; so much phosphorus—a bottle with sticks of phosphorus; so much potassium, and there is a bottle with potassium; calcium, etc. They have not bottles of oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, etc., but they have cubical pieces of wood on which is written 'the quantity of oxygen in the human body would occupy the space of 170 (e.g.) cubes of the size of this,' etc. etc." And so with analysis of bread, etc. etc. What earthly good can this do any one?

No wonder that the bewildered beings whom I have seen wandering through these rooms, yawned more frequently and more desperately than I ever observed even in church.

So then, cultivate observation, energy, handicraft, ingenuity, outness in boys, so as to give them a pursuit as well as a study. Look after the blade, and don't coax or crush the ear out too soon, and remember that the full corn in the ear is not due till the harvest, when the great School breaks up, and we must all dismiss and go our several ways.

BEAUTY, ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE.

"OH, I'M WAT, WAT."

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EDUCATION THROUGH THE SENSES.

(reprinted from "the museum.")

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