le, the
Abbe Charles, that he was reared; and the dignified and laborious
earnestness of these governors of his was a chief influence in his life,
and a distinguishing feature in his character. The Millet family led an
existence almost patriarchal in its unalterable simplicity and
diligence; and the boy grew up in an environment of toil, sincerity and
devoutness. He was fostered upon the Bible, and the great book of
nature.... When he woke, it was to the lowing of cattle and the song of
birds; he was at play all day, among "the sights and sounds of the open
landscape; and he slept with the murmur of the spinning-wheel in his
ears, and the memory of the evening prayer in his heart.... He learned
Latin from the parish priest, and from his uncle Charles; and he soon
came to be a student of Virgil, and while yet young in his teens began
to follow his father out into the fields, and thenceforward, as became
the eldest boy in a large family, worked hard at grafting and plowing,
sowing and reaping, scything and shearing and planting, and all the many
duties of husbandmen. Meanwhile, he had taken to drawing ... copied
everything he saw, and produced not only studies but compositions also;
until at last his father was moved to take him away from farming, and
have him taught painting."

105. Now all this is related concerning the lad's early life by the
prefatory and commenting author, as if expecting the general reader to
admit that there had been some advantage for him in this manner of
education:--that simplicity and devoutness are wholesome states of mind;
that parish cures and uncle Abbes are not betrayers or devourers of
youthful innocence--that there is profitable reading in the Bible, and
something agreeably soothing--if not otherwise useful--in the sound of
evening prayer. I may observe also in passing, that his education, thus
far, is precisely what, for the last ten years, I have been describing
as the most desirable for all persons intending to lead an honest and
Christian life: (my recommendation that peasants should learn Latin
having been, some four or five years ago, the subject of much merriment
in the pages of _Judy_ and other such nurses of divine wisdom in the
public mind.) It however having been determined by the boy's father that
he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbe Charles
and the village Cure (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible
Pope did but know it, he and his _now_ a