mble-minded. A hand full of
employment, and a head not above it, with such principles and habits as
may be acquired without the Madras machinery, are the best security for
the chastity of wives of the lower rank.

Farewell. I have exhausted my paper.

Your affectionate

W. WORDSWORTH.[34]

[34] _Memoirs_, vol. ii. pp. 180-3. G.

* * * * *

_Of the Same to the Same_,

MY DEAR SIR,

I have taken a folio sheet to make certain minutes upon the subject of
EDUCATION.

As a Christian preacher your business is with man as an immortal being.
Let us imagine you to be addressing those, and those only, who would
gladly co-operate with you in any course of education which is most
likely to ensure to men a happy immortality. Are you satisfied with that
course which the most active of this class are bent upon? Clearly not,
as I remember from your conversation, which is confirmed by your last
letter. Great principles, you hold, are sacrificed to shifts and
expedients. I agree with you. What more sacred law of nature, for
instance, than that the mother should educate her child? yet we
felicitate ourselves upon the establishment of infant-schools, which is
in direct opposition to it. Nay, we interfere with the maternal instinct
before the child is born, by furnishing, in cases where there is no
necessity, the mother with baby-linen for her unborn child. Now, that in
too many instances a lamentable necessity may exist for this, I allow;
but why should such charity be obtruded? Why should so many excellent
ladies form themselves into committees, and rush into an almost
indiscriminate benevolence, which precludes the poor mother from the
strongest motive human nature can be actuated by for industry, for
forethought, and self-denial? When the stream has thus been poisoned at
its fountain-head, we proceed, by separating, through infant-schools,
the mother from the child, and from the rest of the family,
disburthening them of all care of the little-one for perhaps eight hours
of the day. To those who think this an evil, but a necessary one, much
might be said, in order to qualify unreasonable expectations. But there
are thousands of stirring people now in England, who are so far misled
as to deem these schools _good in themselves_, and to wish that, even in
the smallest villages, the children of the poor should have what _they_
call 'a good education' in this way. Now, these people (and no error i