rd to the last
article. The scenery-and-natural-history mania was now somewhat at
a discount. He had discovered a new natural object, including in
itself all--more than all--yet found beauties and wonders--woman!

Draw, draw the veil and weep, guardian angel! if such there be.
What was to be expected? Pleasant things were pleasant--there was
no doubt of that, whatever else might be doubtful. He had read
Byron by stealth; he had been flogged into reading Ovid and
Tibullus; and commanded by his private tutor to read Martial and
Juvenal 'for the improvement of his style.' All conversation on the
subject of love had been prudishly avoided, as usual, by his parents
and teacher. The parts of the Bible which spoke of it had been
always kept out of his sight. Love had been to him, practically,
ground tabooed and 'carnal.' What was to be expected? Just what
happened--if woman's beauty had nothing holy in it, why should his
fondness for it? Just what happens every day--that he had to sow
his wild oats for himself, and eat the fruit thereof, and the dirt
thereof also.

O fathers! fathers! and you, clergymen, who monopolise education!
either tell boys the truth about love, or do not put into their
hands, without note or comment, the foul devil's lies about it,
which make up the mass of the Latin poets--and then go, fresh from
teaching Juvenal and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor
Peter Dens's well-meaning prurience! Had we not better take the
beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the
Jesuit's?

But where is my description of the weather all this time?

I cannot, I am sorry to say, give any very cheerful account of the
weather that day. But what matter? Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who
only take their sport when the sun shines? Is it not, on the
contrary, symbolical of our national character, that almost all our
field amusements are wintry ones? Our fowling, our hunting, our
punt-shooting (pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants)--our
golf and skating,--our very cricket, and boat-racing, and jack and
grayling fishing, carried on till we are fairly frozen out. We are
a stern people, and winter suits us. Nature then retires modestly
into the background, and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer,
leaving us to think and work; and therefore it happens that in
England, it may be taken as a general rule, that whenever all the
rest of the wo