discoveries; descrying new properties in | rather a blinking fashion for fear it should the thing and new capacities in myself. burn us.

He also takes his similes from objects of "Wilhelm Meister." The queen was Louisa of whence we would not borrow ours; as, for example, from books. Printing had al

ready been discovered for more than a century, yet a book was still regarded as a sacred object, as may be gathered from the bindings of that time; and hence it came that the high-minded poet regarded it as something dear and venerable; but our books are merely stitched together, and we are rarely conscious of respect for either cover or contents.

men and women who honour us with their presence when we give a juvenile entertainment, who come to criticise our Christmas-tree, which they seldom find good enough to praise, to pronounce our dance a bore, and our supper a sell; not among those unhappy little ones whom fond parents dress up in picturesque costumes for fancy balls, teaching them a self-complaThe most foolish of all mistakes consists cency, a self-consideration far beyond their in young men of sound talents fearing to years, and only too easily learnt; and lose their originality by acknowledging least of all are they among those still truths which have already been recognized more unhappy little ones who act plays by others. for the amusement of a grave and grownScholars have usually an invidious man-up audience, and are stimulated by apner of refuting others; an error in their eyes assuming at once the proportions of a crime.

It is impossible that beauty should ever distinctly apprehend itself.

plause and excitement into a state of

moral intoxication wherein all that makes youth lovely is lost forever. For the cleverer they are for their years, the more disastrously their talent works on their natures; and one of the saddest sights No sooner had subjective, or so-called known to us is that of a bright, pretty, visentimental poetry been placed on a level vacious little girl acting her saucy part with poetry of an objective and realistic with aplomb and assurance, failing in all tendency, a consummation not to be avoid- that makes childhood most lovely just in ed unless we choose to condemn all mod-proportion as she succeeds in her attempt ern poetry, than it was to be expected to be some one else than herself. that, even in the case of the advent of men of true poetical genius, they would thenceforth prefer depicting the intimate experiences of the inner life to that of the great and busy world around them. And this method now prevails to such an extent that we actually possess a poetry without tropes, to which one must concede, however, certain merits of its own.

From The Saturday Review.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

CERTAIN things, once the possession of humanity, have been lost to the world forever-books, arts, and even lands; but we are in danger now of losing something more valuable than any of these - namely, the childhood of our children, the maidenliness of our maidens. Where are the children, as we knew them in days gone by, when simplicity and innocence were part of their charter, and to be a child meant to be fresh, unspoiled, and free from the taint of dangerous knowledge? Gone with the dream of the things that were and are not. They are not to be found in the precocious fledglings dragged about the Continent on autumn tours, or sitting at tables d'hôte with the governess at Nice while the father and mother are killing time and something more at Monaco. They are not among the miniature

By the very nature of things it is difficult for the children of the London fashionable world to preserve their innocence and childishness, victims as they are, now by association and now by exclusion, to the fast social life of their parents. From their cradles they are subjected to the closest intercourse with nurses highly recommended by ladies anxious to get rid of them, and whose relations are to be found mainly in doubtful circumstances and shady quarters. Admitted to the questionable gossip of the monthly nurse when she enters the nursery circle on authorized occasions, and to the continued confidences of the resident nurses, who perhaps are gross through ignorance rather than through vice, the children are reared from the beginning under the shadow of the tree of knowledge, and are made free of the blossoms before their time comes to eat of the fruit. But if the nurses are not the wisest or best rearers of our children, fine-lady mothers are not much better; and the dressed-up dolls whose velvet and point-lace are shown off to visitors in the drawing-room not unfrequently hear there more than is good for them of what, if they do not understand it to its fullest extent now, they think of hereafter and meditate on till they have found out the riddle. One kind of fine-lady mother certainly leaves her children to be brought up by nurses without much assistance from her even for the show-hour in the

drawing-room. They are circumstances | never close again, and what the mind has of her existence which she takes care once received the memory can never reshall give her no trouble-conditions of ject. In the more advanced schools the her married life which represent a certain dangers attached to unlimited confidences loss of time and so much personal annoy- are so well understood that experienced ance, reduced by wise management to a matrons have recourse to various strataminimum; and she has no desire to inflict gems to prevent their possibility. Two on her friends a corvée repudiated by her- girls will not be allowed to consort toself. So far her visiting world has cause gether for any length of time; and whisfor gratitude. But the mother whose ma-pering and low voices are expressly forternal instinct is large and her reasoning faculties small, who prides herself on her love for her offspring, and insists that her acquaintances shall partake in her glory, adopts the foolish plan of having the children brought down to see all her visitors, and of converting her drawing-room into a small bear-garden, where every one is uncomfortable alike. The children are the axis on which all the conversation turns. You are expected to be interested when you are told of their gifts and graces -how Mary writes verses and Tommy makes music, and how sweetly Ellen and Harry repeat their poetry-just as you are expected to be polite when they pull your whiskers and fight for your watch, and to smile, as at a good acrobatic feat, when Jacky makes a flying leap into your hat, Harry scrambles on to your knee and informs the company that you wear a wig, and that he can see gold in your mouth. The natural sequel to such a course is that the position becomes untenable even for the most indulgent mother, and that the darlings are sent in the end to school, there to continue their education.

After the forcing-houses of the nursery and the drawing-room, their minds are now sufficiently matured to develop any seeds for evil and precocious knowledge that may drop into the untilled soil; and, on getting to their first school, it is generally enough for children to unite their experiences to get all the doubtful points cleared up which have exercised the youthful mind ever since the days of the first man. It is at this stage of their existence that we hear of mothers being shocked at the revelations made by their own children. Things which a generation ago were known only at the proper age, and when ignorance would have been folly, are whispered in corners among these callow investigators; and the one who has most to tell is the one who is king or queen of the rest. When the mother snatches her child from this unsatisfactory school, and that undesirable companion, she thinks perhaps that she has saved it; but the fruit of the tree of knowledge when eaten opens the eyes so that they can

bidden. In walking out they must go in threes, or with a different companion for each day. Governesses have directions to watch all preferential couplings, and to break them up by adding a third to the party; not ostentatiously, so as to cause suspicion of motives, which would be as bad perhaps as the evil sought to be prevented, but with the craft of quietness, the hypocrisy of concealment - which we may cite as one instance of the lawfulness of doing good by underhand methods. Those schools are the best where the social feeling is most encouraged in contradistinction to the personal and individual; and in saying this we say all that need be told. Add to this, unresting occupation, whether it be learning or amusement, business or play-at all events, the disallowance of sloth and self-indulgence in every form and the dangers of school-life are reduced to their lowest possible sum, with so much good to come from wise guardianship and well-chosen employments as shall go far to neutralize what remains and keep the girls as fresh and pure as is possible in these odd days of ours.

Emerging then from a life of full occupation at school, girls are more to be pitied then envied on their first acknowledged entrance into society. They are scolded by captious fathers weary of milliners' bills and midnight revels; measured with a commercial eye by mercenary mothers, who regard them as so much stock for profitable sale and barter; snubbed by fastidious brothers, who sometimes find them in their way, and who generally are in the state to compare them unfavourably with some Cynthia of the minute in the ascendant. Competition with other girls, who have passed before them through the fire to Moloch, drives off the lingering shyness of the seminary, and the maiden blush vanishes with the appetite for bread and butter. Rinking on the one hand, and the shrieking sisterhood on the other, divide the young womanhood of London between them, and the previous standards of right and wrong, once held so essential to the well-being of society, are completely overthrown on a

these old-fashioned qualities are reckoned. For eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve were flung out of paradise, and perhaps the analogy holds good for the children of men at the present day.

From Belgravia.

THE ART OF LUXURY.

little experience of the world and modern life. Idle gossip and questionable conversation are freely indulged in before them as a legitimate source of amusement by their mothers and their mothers' friends. The doubtful topics of the day are not only discussed in their presence, but discussed without reserve in a mixed assemblage of both sexes. The worst novels of the season lie on the drawingroom table, dogs'-eared at the strong passages; and the daily papers, whatever THERE is a luxury of the senses and a their contents, are passed freely from luxury of the imagination. The ancients hand to hand. Women of advanced - that is, the Greeks, Romans, and views make the drawing-room their forum, Scriptural races — understood both perwhere they declaim with alarming minute- fectly; but our direct ancestors did not. ness of detail against the iniquities of The ancients began with their cities, makmen, and insist on the need there is of ing them by their magnificence tempting women meeting them on their own ground, to the very strangers whom they pretended with weapons sharpened at the same to exclude. It is enough, however, to grindstone. Things which our grand-name Babylon, Athens, and Rome; for mothers went down to the grave without further expatiation would give an historicknowing are discussed in the light of day, al tinge to that which is designed as pure and in unmistakable terms, before our un- philosophy. For the same reason is remarried girls; and of all the feminine jected, though not so peremptorily, that qualities, shame, delicacy, and reticence volume of anecdote which has its alpha in are the first to be discarded. The tree Cleopatra's pearl, and its omega in poor of knowledge that upas-tree of modern Jack eating a five-pound note in a sandtimes overshadows us all alike, and the wich at Wapping. Most of these stories sweetnesses of womanhood droop and die are apocryphal, and they do not represent beneath its poisonous shade. Medical the true spirit of luxury. But, in order studies carried on in company with men; that a subject may be made interesting, it the country stumped in advocacy of wom- is essential to take all the traditions with an's rights, which mean nothing more nor it, and spill the grain of salt. Let us beless than the revolution of society and vio- lieve, then, in everything that Tacitus and lence done to nature; the country stumped Suetonius tell; in the barbaric indulgences too on questions which no woman who re- of Nero, Commodus, Heliogabalus, and spected herself should touch with her lit- the un-Cæsaric Cæsars: for they are tle finger-what chance have our girls quite as easy to comprehend as the black nowadays? Born, bred, and fostered in broth of Sparta, and the boiled peas a vitiated atmosphere from first to last, which the monks of old used to put in can we wonder if men say sorrowfully their shoes. How much is this world the that the English girl of tradition is a thing happier for doubting whether Apicius ate of the past, and if their apologists can the tongues of nightingales; that Luculfind nothing better as an excuse than that lus sent to the Danube for a trout when they are like so many boys, with no harm he dined cum Lucullo; that Sardanapain them, but no womanhood? For our- lus was fanned night and day by fifty virselves, we hold to the expediency of iggins; or that the ladies of Lesbos slept on norance of some matters-ignorance of roses whose perfume had been artificially vice, of the darker facts of human history, heightened? What should we do for ilof the filthy byways of life, of the seething under-current beneath the tranquil surface of society. We see no good to come of the early initiation of children into the knowledge that belongs properly to maturity, of the participation of women in that which belongs properly to men alone. We think that there is a charm in maiden innocence, in womanly ignorance, which no amount of bold trafficking in the secret | verities of life can make up for, and we grieve to see the small account at which

lustrations to dress dull topics into gaiety, had the chroniclers been silent as Syrian bishops upon these decorative additions to history? It is very pleasant to think that court maidens once powdered their hair with gold, as the Merovingian kings most certainly powdered their beards; that a famous Venetian gentleman, who affected rather than felt a love of the arts, had his pictures uncovered one by one to the sound of slow music, like a murder on the stage; that Lord Berkeley's shaving

basin was of solid silver- -as why should | rings, though the statement is doubted by it not be, any more than of electro-plate? the critical Bayle and even the credulous that Queen Elizabeth's night-cap was Pliny; yet she would probably change wrought with gilded silk; that water was her dress five times a day at Biarritz, as filtered through gold-dust, not a century do the Parisian graces, born, not of divine ago, by the sybarites of Chili, as is grave- sea-foam, but of that other froth called ly attested by Señor Techo; that men, agiotage. We do not wear waistcoats according to Rabelais, who is fortified by painted with scenes from Watteau, or the authority of Montluc, drank hippo- warm idealizations from Brantome, as did cras as a morning draught, and even went the coxcombs of the ancienne noblesse; so far as to have dinner and supper on neither do we truss up our horses' tails the same day. "See that the powder I with gold and silver, but we cockade the use be rich in cassia," cries the polished creatures until they become unendurably gentlemen in Middleton's play to the valet vain-more of their adornments than of whom he has just kicked down stairs. their beauty, which is a common case; Did not the confectioners celebrated in and the first necessity of an Ulster," Featley's "Mystica" mix gold particles the tailors assure us, is that it should be with their pastry, and were they one iota "impressive." Our girls do not bathe in less absurd than our connoisseurs in eau blood; but the trade in "balms " exhibits d'or? Depend upon it, every generation a considerable hankering after artificial will have its Capua, whether on the Vol- beauty. A man now who should be seen turno or at Trouville, and luxury after all with a mirror in his hat, or a woman with is a mere affair of fashion. Marc Anto- one on her breast, would be pitied as a luny's daughter in our age might not make natic; yet these were contemporary follies the lampreys in her fish-pond wear ear- ridiculed by Ben Jonson.

66

CRINOLINE FOR IRONCLADS. - Not because of the sex attributed to armoured in common with all other ships, but for the same reason for which, according to the learned Knickerbocker, the maidens of Manhattan enveloped their ample figures in manifold plackets, it is proposed (Iron reports) to encircle our ironclads with a network of iron wire, supported by booms at a distance of twenty-two feet, and kept rigid to below the depth of the keel by heavy weights. The danger to be guarded against is the fish torpedo, one species of which can be unerringly propelled under water a distance of a mile, and if it then strikes the ship beneath her water-line she must inevitably sink; for it is understood that all the pumps on board a turret ship, working at their highest pressure, would be incapable of discharging the water which would be admitted through a hole no larger than that made in the "Vanguard" by the prow of the "Iron Duke." An experiment with this netting is about to be made on the "Thunderer "the most costly of all ironclads- and there is just a chance that, notwithstanding the crinoline, she may be sent to join what has been called our submarine fleet. The Whitehead torpedo appears to be a most effective implement of destruction; indeed, it would seem

that there is no end to the "perils that environ " ironclads.

A NEW ARTICLE OF DIET. - A report has been made by the acting political superintendent, Akalkoit, to the government of Bombay, stating that there exists in those parts a weed called "mulmunda," the seed of which is used for food by the poorer classes in times of scarcity. The seed is ground into flour, of which bread is made. The bread is said to be sweet in taste, and, although not quite so satisfying as could be desired, does very well to keep body and soul together at a pinch. It is also given to camels for forage. The result of an examination of the plant, which is of a leguminous description, by the acting chemical analyser to the government, shows that the seeds contain nearly as much nitrogenous substances as some of the chief varieties of Indian peas and beans; and hence the nutritive value of the seed should be taken as equivalent to any of the other leguminous grains. The weed is said to grow all over the Deccan and southern Mahratta country.