as ever with Musa, Musae, like so many
parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just
enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a
life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for
understanding AEschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be
worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a
platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around
them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to
discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.

What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our
boys' schooling interfere with their education!

XVI.

_THE POLITICAL PUPA._

I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common English
butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while
it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles
the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude,
indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be
truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which
England, and for the matter of that every other European country as
well, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in its
evolution.

But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is driving
at? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within that
impassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine.
When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by
for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly
melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp;
chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order.
Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and then
gradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if it
philosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little the
habit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted young
ladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first the
melancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over it
piecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centres
melt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, out
of which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to the
law of some internal i