arbarity to the rising generation. We are
not inditing a homily on humanity to animals, nor have we been appointed
to succeed the Rev. Dr Somerville of Currie, the great Patentee of the
Safety Double Bloody Barrel, to preach the annual Gibsonian sermon on
that subject--we are simply stating certain matters of fact,
illustrative of the rise and progress of the love of pastime in the
soul, and leave our readers to draw the moral. But may we be permitted
to say, that the naughtiest schoolboys often make the most pious men;
that it does not follow, according to the wise saws and modern instances
of prophetic old women of both sexes, that he who in boyhood has worried
a cat with terriers, will, in manhood, commit murder on one of his own
species; or that peccadilloes are the progenitors of capital crimes.
Nature allows to growing lads a certain range of wickedness, _sans peur
et sans reproche_. She seems, indeed, to whistle into their ear, to mock
ancient females--to laugh at Quakers--to make mouths at a decent man and
his wife riding double to church--the matron's thick legs ludicrously
bobbing from the pillion, kept firm on Dobbin's rump by her bottom,
"_ponderibus librata suis_,"--to tip the wink to young women during
sermon on Sunday--and on Saturday, most impertinently to kiss them,
whether they will or no, on high-road or by-path--and to perpetrate many
other little nameless enormities.

No doubt, at the time, such things will wear rather a suspicious
character; and the boy who is detected in the fact, must be punished by
pawmy, or privation, or imprisonment from play. But when punished, he is
of course left free to resume his atrocious career; nor is it found that
he sleeps a whit the less soundly, or shrieks for Heaven's mercy in his
dreams. Conscience is not a craven. Groans belong to guilt. But fun and
frolic, even when trespasses, are not guilt; and though a cat have nine
lives, she has but one ghost--and that will haunt no house where there
are terriers. What! surely if you have the happiness of being a parent,
you would not wish your only boy--your son and heir--the blended image
of his mother's loveliness and his father's manly beauty--to be a smug,
smooth, prim, and proper prig, with his hair always combed down on his
forehead, hands always unglaured, and without spot or blemish on his
white-thread stockings? You would not wish him, surely, to be always
moping and musing in a corner with a good book held close