enest have the least understanding of it.

The other class consists of persons who are aware of the importance of
religion and morality above everything; but, from not understanding the
constitution of our nature and the composition of society, they are
misled and hurried on by zeal in a course which cannot but lead to
disappointment. One instance of this fell under my own eyes the other
day in the little town of Ambleside, where a party, the leaders of which
are young ladies, are determined to set up a school for girls on the
Madras system, confidently expecting that these girls will in
consequence be less likely to go astray when they grow up to women.
Alas, alas! they may be taught, I own, more quickly to read and write
under the Madras system, and to answer more readily, and perhaps with
more intelligence, questions put to them, than they could have done
under dame-teaching. But poetry may, with deference to the philosopher
and the religionist, be consulted in these matters; and I will back
Shenstone's school-mistress, by her winter fire and in her summer
garden-seat, against all Dr. Bell's sour-looking teachers in petticoats
that I have ever seen.

What is the use of pushing on the education of girls so fast, and mainly
by the stimulus of Emulation, who, to say nothing worse of her, is
cousin-german to Envy? What are you to do with these girls? what demand
is there for the ability that they may have prematurely acquired? Will
they not be indisposed to bend to any kind of hard labour or drudgery?
and yet many of them must submit to it, or do wrong. The mechanism of
the Bell system is not required in small places; praying after the
_fugleman_ is not like praying at a mother's knee. The Bellites overlook
the difference: they talk about moral discipline; but wherein does it
encourage the imaginative feelings, without which the practical
understanding is of little avail, and too apt to become the cunning
slave of the bad passions. I dislike _display_ in everything; above all
in education.... The old dame did not affect to make theologians or
logicians; but she taught to read; and she practised the memory, often,
no doubt, by rote; but still the faculty was improved: something,
perhaps, she explained, and trusted the rest to parents, to masters, and
to the pastor of the parish. I am sure as good daughters, as good
servants, as good mothers and wives, were brought up at that time as
now, when the world is so much less hu