a to any school, and put her through the whole
programme of the last educational prospectus sent to me,--"Philology,
Pantology, Orthology, Aristology, and Linguistics."

For what is the end to be desired? Is it to exhibit a prodigy, or to
rear a noble and symmetrical specimen of a human being? Because Socrates
taught that a boy who has learned to speak is not too small for the
sciences,--because Tiberius delivered his father's funeral oration at
the age of nine, and Marcus Aurelius put on the philosophic gown at
twelve, and Cicero wrote a treatise on the art of speaking at
thirteen,--because Lipsius is said to have composed a work the day he
was born, meaning, say the commentators, that he began a new life at the
age of ten,--because the learned Licetus, who was brought into the world
so feeble as to be baked up to maturity in an oven, sent forth from that
receptacle, like a loaf of bread, a treatise called
"Gonopsychanthropologia,"--is it, therefore, indispensably necessary,
Dolorosus, that all your pale little offspring shall imitate these?
Spare these innocents! it is not their fault that they are your
children,--so do not visit it upon them so severely. Turn, Angelina,
ever dear, and out of a little childish recreation we will yet extract a
great deal of maturer wisdom for you, if we can only bring this deluded
parent to his senses.

To change the sweet privilege of childhood into weary days and restless
nights,--to darken its pure associations, which for many are the sole
light that ever brings them back from sin and despair to the heaven of
their infancy,--to banish those reveries of innocent fancy which even
noisy boyhood knows, and which are the appointed guardians of its purity
before conscience wakes,--to abolish its moments of priceless idleness,
saturated with sunshine, blissful, aimless moments, when every angel is
near,--to bring insanity, once the terrible prerogative of maturer life,
down into the summer region of childhood, with blight and ruin;--all
this is the work of our folly, Dolorosus, of our miserable ambition to
have our unconscious little ones begin, in their very infancy, the race
of desperate ambition, which has, we admit, exhausted prematurely the
lives of their parents.

The worst danger of it is, that the moral is written at the end of the
fable, not the beginning. The organization in youth is so dangerously
elastic, that the result of these intellectual excesses is not seen
until years