erior to other
examples of this class of literature. But sermons are among the least
"scarce" and "rare" of human essays, and many parents would rather see
their boy patiently acquiring the art of wicket-keeping at school than
moralising on the uncertainty of life at home. Some one "having
presented to the young author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar
subject of the Ploughboy," he replied with an ode on "The Potboy."

"Bliss is not always join'd to wealth,
Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof
For poverty is bliss with health,
Of that my potboy stands a proof."

The volume ends with this determination,

"Still shall I seek Apollo's shelt'ring ray,
To cheer my spirits and inspire my lay."

If any parent or guardian desires any further information about _Les
Enfans devenus celebres par leurs ecrits_, he will find it in a work of
that name, published in Paris in 1688. The learned Scioppius published
works at sixteen, "which deserved" (and perhaps obtained) "the admiration
of dotards." M. Du Maurier asserts that, at the age of fifteen, Grotius
pleaded causes at the Bar. At eleven Meursius made orations and
harangues which were much admired. At fifteen, Alexandre le Jeune wrote
anacreontic verses, and (less excusably) a commentary on the Institutions
of Gaius. Grevin published a tragedy and two comedies at the age of
thirteen, and at fifteen Louis Stella was a professor of Greek. But no
one reads Grevin now, nor Stella, nor Alexandre le Jeune, and perhaps
their time might have been better occupied in being "soaring human boys"
than in composing tragedies and commentaries. Monsieur le Duc de Maine
published, in 1678, his _OEuvres d'un Auteur de Sept Ans_, a royal
example to be avoided by all boys. These and several score of other
examples may perhaps reconcile us to the spectacle of puerile genius
fading away in the existence of the common British schoolboy, who is
nothing of a poet, and still less of a jurisconsult.

The British authors who understand boys best are not those who have
written books exclusively about boys. There is Canon Farrar, for
example, whose romances of boyish life appear to be very popular, but
whose boys, somehow, are not real boys. They are too good when they are
good, and when they are bad, they are not perhaps too bad (that is
impossible), but they are bad in the wrong way. They are bad with a
mannish and conscious vice, whereas even bad boys seem to