to cry, being quite exhausted with the exercise; but his nurse being sent for she relieved him, and he continued to hold out his little hand in the most charming manner." This Prince was equally prematurely set on the throne by the abdication of his father, when the small-pox put an end to a life which had run through all its natural share of action and events in childhood. Equally instructive is the account of the early years of that Duke of Burgundy, the boast of Fénélon, and father of Louis XV. The forcing process had, at the age of seven, turned this precocious child into a monster; only the language ordinarily applied to adult wickedness sufficed to describe the strength and vehemence of his passions. "He was the prey of every passion, and the slave of every pleasure! He was often ferocious and cruel. Inordinately proud, he looked upon men only as atoms with whom he had no sort of similarity whatever. But the brilliancy of his mind, and his penetration, were evident, even in his moments of greatest violence. His replies created astonishment in all who heard them," &c. &c. A formidable pupil certainly to tackle with, especially as he must always be addressed "Sir." "I know not, Sir, whether you recollect what you said to me yesterday, That you knew who you were and who I am. It is my duty to inform you that you are ignorant of both the one and the other." The good bishop brings the young prince to reason and virtue, and, in his case, we may say he had the good fortune to die young-a model prince: but evidently he had outlived all this brilliancy; his short man's career was a failure. Not the least misfortune of these royal infants is the weight of learning in their tutors. Condillac, chosen preceptor to the Prince of Parma, composed a course of metaphysical les

sons for his pupil of seven years, in which he made such progress that the complacent philosopher writes, that "his Highness" of that tender age was perfectly acquainted with the system of intellectual operations, and was in a condition to substitute just ideas for the false ones which had been given him." "Your Highness knows what is meant by a system"-deriving an analogy on this abstruse subject from his Highness's little chair as compared to his own big one.

And infant princes were turned into fine gentlemen by as rapid a process as they were made philosophers. These unfortunates were the subjects of journals carefully kept by their attendants. "I find," writes Madame de Genlis, to her little pupils of the Orleans family, "by the Journal of M. le Brun, that it was the Duke of Montpensier who thought this morning of writing to inquire how I did after a slight indisposition. You left me yesterday in a calm state, and there was no reason for anxiety; but consistently with the strict duties of friendship you ought to have given orders before you went to bed for inquiries to be made at eight o'clock in the morning to know whether I had had any return of my complaint during the night; and you should again have sent at ten to learn from myself, the instant I awoke, the exact state of my health. Such are the benevolent and tender cares which a lively and sincere friendship dictates. Who can wonder at the dissimulation of the kings and princes of history, when make-believe and seeming were their earliest lessons! It is certainly necessary to filling a great part well to be pretty early initiated into a sense of distinction; but we may remark by the way that premature lessons in self-assertion-especially as they tamper with the simplicity of infancy, very naturally defeat their

own end. We are told of the Princess Louise, eighth daughter of Louis XV., that when only three years old she was served in state. It was the custom when royal personages drank during their meals, for everybody to stand up. The governess observing her supercilious demeanour towards her attendants, requested them to forego this ceremony, upon which the little Princess immediately stopped drinking, and issued the stately order, "Debout, s'il vous plait! Madame Louise boit." To judge from this example of premature dignity, it may be taught too soon for its purpose. Louise early got tired of grandeur and went into a convent; but of the demeanour of her sister princesses in later life, we have some record. Horace Walpole writes of his visit to the French Court in 1765. After King and Queen he is introduced to the four Mesdames, the King's daughters, whom he describes in easy terms as "clumsy, plump old wenches, with a bad likeness of their father. They stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knotting-bags, looking good-humoured, and not knowing what to say." They could not be so very old, for their father at this time was only fifty-five; but youth so treated is soon run through. The insight into the training of princes given us by these complacent records of processes and triumphant results, goes far to excuse all the errors and failures of after-life. Life is made a conscious piece of acting from the first. Their part is given them too soon, nor is there an alternative of wholesome neglect. Neglect can only be wholesome where it is in a manner inevitable and surrounded by natural protections. Happily for modern princes, their tutors have left off writing about them, and illustrating their theories by appeals and references to their immature judgment.

As far as obscurity is possible to lofty station, royal infancy in our days enjoys it. days enjoys it. We have to borrow our examples from a past age.

As short-lived and not less precocious is infancy in the social opposite of existence. The literature of destitution is full of the premature sagacity of its childhood. The gamin of Paris or London is a match in all the arts of dissimulation with the scion of a hundred tyrants; and the small rustic knave follows not far behind, masking his designs under an aspect of impervious stolidity. Nor are these evidences of a corrupt civilisation. Misery and bad company are the same forcing agents in the Far West, wherever the child is driven to its own guardianship. Witness Bret Harte's pictures of childhood: little Johnny more than the intellectual equal of "the old man" his father, and of the diggers, whose pet he is, and whose language he copies. "The child, whose face could have been pretty, but that it was darkened by knowledge of evil, and whose weak treble was broken by the hoarseness which vagabondage and premature self-assertion can give." It is a pathetic sketch-the child thrown entirely on his own sense and resources, at once so knowing and so ignorant, with his sad experience of sickness, and old-fashioned views of regimen. "Thar's dried appils," he says to his father's guests, "but I don't admire 'em; appils is swellin':" his long catalogue of diseases, of which he enjoys the repetition to his strong burly friends, who ask, "You ain't agoin' to turn in agin, are ye?" "Yes, I are," responded Johnny, decidedly. "Why, what's up, old fellow?" "I'm sick." "How sick?" "I've got a fevier and chilblains, and roomatiz," and, as he retreated into darkness and under his bed-clothes-" and biles!" The time is Christmas Eve. "What's Chrismiss ?" he asks his fa

ther. "What's Chrismiss any way? Wot's it all about?" "O, it's a day," is all his father can answer.

The child born under, happily, more ordinary circumstances, not subject to either of these extremes, has neither a part to play nor any sense of responsibility as to material wants. It trusts the guardianship of its wellbeing to its parents implicitly and without a thought, and pursues its speculations on the life before it quite apart from its own share in it. Nor are these speculations too curiously inquired into. It works out the problems of life at its leisure, no wise tutor forestalling every difficulty, and watching for every opportunity for instilling a maxim or opening out a field of inquiry. It is only by chance and some naïve revelation that we learn anything of the puzzles and comical bewilderments the mind passes through in the way from partial knowledge to a clear understanding, and how it slowly disentangles them for itself, as when the little girl gravely remarked to her mother on the birth of a litter of kittens, "Mamma, I was not aware that ours was a married cat." The child may have a philosophic father to whom nothing is more interesting than to trace the course of thought and the steps of inquiry; but he has something else to do, which the tutor has not, than to urge his infant to crack hard metaphysic nuts with his first teeth. So when he hears of baby watching the horse he is used to stroke in the stable as he is being harnessed to the carriage, and still with a perplexed air turning his head to the empty stall to satisfy himself that he is not there also, he only pronounces it an interesting observation. "Baby was testing an identical proposition by experience," and leaves him to discover, by degrees, that a thing can't be in two places at once.

That

great stimulator of the faculties, a good downright passion, visits small and great alike; but on isolated royalty it is allowed to become gigantic, generating a morbid self-consuming intelligence. The child of ordinary life has his tempers quickening the intellect in the same way, and prompting the inexperienced tongue to very apt language. Duly provoked, he will rattle off a string of motives and reveal his inner mind with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired. A little fellow of three, irritated first by the refusal of his brother's toys, and then when Freddy is carried off by a somewhat ostentatious permission to play with them, lays bare the whole principle of contradiction without a pause to take breath: "I don't want it, now Freddy is gone, and I shall want it when he comes back again; and Freddy shall have it when he is naughty, and he shan't have it when he is good; and when he wants it he shan't have it, and when he doesn't want it he shall have it." Where there is no easy natural check, such a tantrum might set a formal long-worded machinery of admonition at work, or, if left to itself, possibly issue in a temper really formidable. The child, among a crowd of equals, finds his level, learns to give and take, subdued to reason and forbearance by the friendly force and pressure of circumstances. Admonition in its place is excellent, but the most telling teaching of all is that which the child acquires for himself from the favouring influences about him, and this teaching is most effectual

is, we may say, the prerogative of middle station.

But if childhood finds its most congenial home in middle station, it may be granted that Youth shows in greatest splendour when set off by rank and wealth and fashion. It is the period-the one

age-which may be said to need room, a broad, well-lighted theatre, for its more brilliant display. If people could be always young and sustain unchecked their powers of receiving and imparting pleasurable excitement, they would choose well (for this world at least) in choosing to be lords and ladies. Society is a theatre planned for their interest and to show them to the highest advantage. The heir of fame and name and fortune, every grace of person and manner sedulously cultivated, all the world indulgent, deferential, solicitous to admire, has only to be willing to please to out-top all rivals; and if the heir-what of the heiress? all art, all fancy, is inspired by high-born beauty in its early prime of imperial loveliness. Earth has not anything to show more fair to the painter or the poet than the brilliant glorified youth of the great;-of youth and maiden, trained in the school of gracious manners, in all the traditions of sentiment and home of a cultivated, far-descended aristocracy; with broad manors and marble halls in ample conformity to their high deserts. But the pity is that this reign is shortlived. The vista to this golden glory is too brilliant not to tempt to undue hurry into it; and Childhood shortened does not imply youth prolonged. The pace of life is too quick for even the feeling of youth to remain in undisturbed quiet possession. The young man has no pleasures to wait for. The only possibility of man forgetting the flight of time is to have something to do more engrossing than what is called pleasare. Business-work of some kind -is absolutely necessary to sustain the feeling of youth; for work keeps up the idea of learning and incompleteness. The distinctions of youth, what it excels in, are not accomplishments that improve; the only

VOL. CXIV.-NO. DCXCIII.

hope and endeavour is to maintain them at their present level. The beauty of a season or two has too many observers counting them up not to be aware of the passage of time; it becomes a haunting idea when it interferes so conspicuously with the prestige and hopes of life. There is a trepidation, a watching for signs when the first exultant pride of beauty in its freshness is over. Georges Sand makes one of her heroines scream at the first faint suspicion of a wrinkle. And while its glory lasts there is naturally an eager craving for its appreciation, a conscious sense of a prize to be caught ere it passes which disturbs that poetic idea of careless, gay, dazzling youth so dear to the fancy. The celebrated Lady Townsend-fortunate in another string to her bowwit succeeding to beauty-expressed herself anxious to see George the Third's coronation, as she had never seen one. "Why, Madam, you walked at the last." "Yes, child," was her answer, "but I saw nothing of it; I only looked to see who looked at me."

And there is a premature prudence engendered by this exaggerated sense of the fleetingness of youth as well as a self-absorbed vanity in conscious possession. Nature makes the blossoming season short; but, precipitating, hastening on the time of bloom, makes it shorter still. The girl ceases to feel a girl in high rank much sooner than in a middle condition; high and low alike, through different causes, entering early upon the dry experience of life. It is those who rank neither with rich nor poor, who have to recognise waiting as a condition of youth, and to be patient under it, who, by the holding out of expectation, feel young the longest. Society by no means arranges itself for the especial convenience of the youth of the middle classes. They

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