with the sunshine and warmth of the great folded
possibilities of excellence, happiness, and well-doing.

I.

Locke in education, as in metaphysics and in politics, was the pioneer
of French thought. In education there is less room for scientific
originality. The sage of a parish, provided only she began her trade
with an open and energetic mind, may here pass philosophers. Locke was
nearly as sage, as homely, as real, as one of these strenuous women.
The honest plainness of certain of his prescriptions for the
preservation of physical health perhaps keeps us somewhat too near the
earth. His manner throughout is marked by the stout wisdom of the
practical teacher, who is content to assume good sense in his hearers,
and feels no necessity for kindling a blaze or raising a tempest. He
gives us a practical manual for producing a healthy, instructed,
upright, well-mannered young English squire, who shall be rightly
fitted to take his own life sensibly in hand, and procure from it a
fair amount of wholesome satisfaction both for himself and the people
with whom he is concerned. Locke's treatise is one of the most
admirable protests in the world against effeminacy and pedantry, and
parents already moved by grave desire to do their duty prudently to
their sons, will hardly find another book better suited to their ends.
Besides Locke, we must also count Charron, and the amazing educator of
Gargantua, and Montaigne before either, among the writers whom
Rousseau had read, with that profit and increase which attends the
dropping of the good ideas of other men into fertile minds.

There is an immense class of natures, and those not the lowest, which
the connection of duty with mere prudence does not carry far enough.
They only stir when something has moved their feeling for the ideal,
and raised the mechanical offices of the narrow day into association
with the spaciousness and height of spiritual things. To these
Rousseau came. For both the tenour and the wording of the most
striking precepts of the Emilius, he owes much to Locke. But what was
so realistic in him becomes blended in Rousseau with all the power and
richness and beauty of an ideal that can move the most generous parts
of human character. The child is treated as the miniature of humanity;
it thus touches the whole sphere of our sympathies, warms our
curiosity as to the composition of man's nature, and becomes the very
eye and centre of moral and social aspiratio