up into the air of the boy's world, and his
imagination was in abeyance for a season.

This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to
behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good
deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come
back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had
been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have
blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of
Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have
been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious
linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy
stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school.
Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His _Primitiae_ were
published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but
eleven years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this slender bark,"
as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809.
Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four read
Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him." At
seven he composed an essay, "On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but "his
taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period." His sermons,
some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these _Primitiae_
were collected.

He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecration. "I confess,"
observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state
of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury,
dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not
merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the
change." "The late Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a
remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a State, and that from a
deficiency on that head arise the chief evils which can befall society."
He then bids us "remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may destroy our
Israel is near at hand," though it might be difficult to show how
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Israel.

As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that "Edward VI. died in his
minority, and disappointed his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy
reign." Of this infant's thirty-nine sermons (just as many as the
Articles), it may be said that they are in no way inf