er to
absolve those representatives from the disrepute of mistakes which were
none of theirs; and we may hope that Pestalozzi's memory has long been
clear from the charge of torturing on the rack of cross-examination the
generation of children whom he loved so well. What it was that he did
propose is best seen by looking at his life; for, if he was not a very
practical man in the sense of wisely conducted affairs, he was still
less of a theorist. He knew very well what he meant and what he wanted;
but he had no compact system to propose, grounded on any new theory of
the human faculties. The foremost man in the educational revolution of
modern times, he obeyed his instincts, and left it for incompetent
followers to make a scheme of doctrine out of what he said and did.

What were those instincts? And how did he use them?

We first see him as a very peculiar little boy, whose best friend was
his mother's maid, Barbara. His name is Italian, but he was a Swiss. His
ancestors had been citizens of Milan; but one of them, becoming
Protestant at the time of the Reformation, had to seek a Protestant
country to live in, and went to Zurich. The father of this little John
Henry was a physician. He died so early that he left a very bare
provision for his widow and their only son; and, aware of the prudence
that their circumstances would require, he recommended them, on his
death-bed, to the care of the trusty maid Barbara, who fully justified
the confidence. She carried them through with an appearance of
respectability on the smallest means, and nourished the pride of narrow
circumstances in the boy, in striving to avoid the opposite fault of
meanness. She told him that no Pestalozzi had ever eaten the bread of
dependence, and that his mother's self-denial raised him above the
degradation suffered by many another orphan in Zurich. These lessons and
Barbara's own character, account for much of the passionate advocacy of
the claims and the independence of the poor, and of the respect for
their virtue, which were the chief features of the whole life of the
man. From six years old, when his father died, he looked upon all
orphans with an interest compounded of fellow-feeling and of lofty pity
for their inferiority in independence. His great, but as yet
unconscious, desire was to help the whole class to independence.

It does not appear why he devoted himself, as he grew up, to the study
of languages. Probably he had no choice as to t