ls of Parnassus, but only after they have
been clipped and pollarded like a Dutch shrubbery. The roots which
connect them with mythic antiquity, and the fresh leaves and flowers
of the growing present, have been generally cut off with care, and
the middle part only has been allowed to be used--too often, of
course, a sufficiently tough and dry stem. This method is no doubt
easy, because it saves teachers the trouble of investigating
antiquity, and saves them too the still more delicate task of judging
contemporaneous authors--but like all half measures, it has bred less
good than evil. If we could silence a free press, and the very free
tongues of modern society; if we could clip the busy, imaginative,
craving mind of youth on the Procrustean bed of use and wont, the
method might succeed; but we can do neither--the young _will_ read
and _will_ hear; and the consequence is, a general complaint that the
minds of young women are outgrowing their mothers' guidance, that
they are reading books which their mothers never dreamt of reading,
of many of which they never heard, many at least whose good and evil
they have had no means of investigating; that the authors which
really interest and influence the minds of the young are just the
ones which have formed no part of their education, and therefore
those for judging of which they have received no adequate rules;
that, in short, in literature as in many things, education in England
is far behind the wants of the age.

Now this is all wrong and ruinous. The mother's mind should be the
lodestar of the daughter's. Anything which loosens the bond of
filial reverence, of filial resignation, is even more destructive, if
possible, to womanhood than to manhood--the certain bane of both.
And the evil fruits are evident enough--self-will and self-conceit in
the less gentle, restlessness and dissatisfaction in many of the
meekest and gentlest; talents seem with most a curse instead of a
blessing; clever and earnest young women, like young men, are
beginning to wander up and down in all sorts of eclecticisms and
dilettanteisms--one year they find out that the dark ages were not
altogether barbarous, and by a revulsion of feeling natural to youth,
they begin to adore them as a very galaxy of light, beauty, and
holiness. Then they begin to crave naturally enough for some real
understanding of this strange ever-developing nineteenth century,
some real sympathy with its new wonders, som