As the Magi looked on the Christ-child with prophetic eye, seeing the future more than the present, so should we study every child committed to our care as parents or teachers, with the question, "What manner of child shall this be?"

It is said of that German schoolmaster, John Trebonius, the instructor of Martin Luther, that he always appeared before his boys with uncovered head. "Who can tell," said he, "what may yet rise up amid these youths? There may be among them those who shall be learned doctors, sage legislators, nay, princes of the empire. Although you do not yet see them with the badges of their dignity, it is right that you should treat them with respect." Even then there was among them that "solitary monk that shook the world."

While every life has a prophetic side to it, to be studied and regarded in education and development, the childhood of great men, as recorded in their biographies, affords the most striking and available illustrations of this important truth.

Notice first, the childhood of some of the great men of literature.

WALTER SCOTT, the poet and novelist, in boyhood loved to visit old castles, and gather up the legends about them to tell his friends. His schoolfellows often crowded around him to hear his many wonderful stories, which he had a great skill in telling.

DANTE, at nine years of age falling in love with a little girl dressed in scarlet, and being blessed by her

with a curtsey, retired to the solitude of his chamber and wrote a sonnet to her honour; and without further marks of favour, and even after her death, as the husband of another woman, dedicated his great poem to the subject of his first love-Beatrice.

MACAULAY seems to have been a great reader from childhood; and, when only three years old, he used to lie on the rug before the fire with a book in his hand. His memory from the cradle onward was prodigious. His quaint little manners in childhood amused all who came near him. Being taken out when five years of age to see the collection of wonderful things at Strawberry Hill, a servant who was waiting on the company accidentally spilled some hot coffee on his legs, scalding him severely no doubt. After a while a lady, who was all compassion and kindness, asked him how he was feeling. "Thank you, madam," said the little man most gallantly, "the agony is abated."

Macaulay began the labours of authorship very early, writing a "compendium of universal history" at eight, and "a paper to persuade the people of Travancore to embrace the Christian religion," in which his fond mother found a very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. It was a good sign that he enjoyed "Plutarch's lives" when he was thirteen years old, almost more than any other book.

A schoolmate of the poet WHITTIER showed me the little country school-house (since burned) in Haverill,

Massachusetts, where the poet obtained most of his schooling, remarking that he was famous for his great love of reading, even in his early childhood. When at the Haverill academy he wrote all of his compositions in poetry, some of them attracting special commendation from his teacher, and being counted worthy of a place in his volumes of poems.

Glance, also, at the childhood's prophecies in the lives of the great musicians.

PERGOLESI, the famous musician, was the son of a shepherd who herded his flock on the mountains behind Naples. His wild mountain life, and his father's religious teaching, developed in him at a very early age the love of sacred music, and prepared him to compose those pieces that are still reckoned among the highest triumphs of music.

A little boy, three years of age, stood listening at the fireside while his father gave a music lesson to his sister Anna.

"Thou teachest Nunnerl, papa; teach me too."

"But thou art a baby, Wolferl; wait awhile, my little man.

But when the lesson was over and the father had gone, the little fellow went to the harpsichord, and standing on tip-toe, groped among the keys with his baby fingers stretched wide apart, till he found and played a perfect chord. The father's musical ear caught the sound, and he rushed back into the room to find that his baby had indeed, all alone, found his way into the beautiful tone-world.