le in the
thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that
sentence of Moliere's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I
chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end
to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying
to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so
important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny
afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light,
and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the
classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out
of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching,
as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up
to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he
started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the
same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both
sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat
below.

90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this
place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the
depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and
intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human
creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every
advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within
ten miles of our University. Most of all is it terrific when we regard
it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is) of the temper which, as
distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation,
the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of
youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a
degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and
the grace of behavior, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to
find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in
shame.

91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
fantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man,