indicating the limits of a day's lesson. What a ruthless way they had with us children in those days! When I look at those appalling columns of arid words I applaud my childish determination of never learning to read if the art were to be acquired only by traversing those fearful deserts of unintelligible verbiage. Fancy a child of tender years confronted with antitrinitarian, consubstantiality, discontinuation, excommunication, extraordinarily, immateriality, impenetrability, indivisibility, naturalization, plenipotentiary, recapitulation, supererogation, transubstantiation, valetudinarian, and volatilization, not one of which is as difficult to spell as one quarter the words of one syllable, and not one of which could be understood by a child or would be used by a single man out of a thousand in all his life. The country had penal settlements then, why in the name of mercy did they not send children to the settlements and give them a chance to keep their reason and become useful citizens when 'their time of punishment had expired? I am happy to say I find no pencil marks among

those leviathan words above. I suppose I never got into the deep waters where they "wallowing, unwieldy, enormous in their gait tempest the ocean."

I wonder was the foundation of a lifelong dislike to Cobbett's writings laid in me at that early time of my existence? Anyway I do not remember the day when I did not dislike everything I read of Cobbett's, and I dislike everything of his I read now. I wonder, also, was it at that early date the seed of my hatred of fable or allegory was sown? To me the fables in the back of that Spelling-Book were always odious, now they are loathsome. With the coldblooded "morals" attendant upon them they are the worst form of literary torture I know. I am aware that the bulk of them are not original, but Cobbett inserted them in his book, and I give him full credit for evil intention. Yet in later years it was not his taste for fable that repelled me but his intense combativeness. He is never comfortable unless he is mangling some one. It was a pity he ever left the army. He would have been a credit to his corps at close quarters with a clubbed musket. Even in

the Spelling-Book, intended for young children, his "Stepping-Stone to Cobbett's English Grammar" takes the form of a dialogue, in which he, the "Teacher," smashes the unfortunate Scholar and Mr. William. Cobbett sprang from the people and was a Saxon pure and simple, and the Saxon is the element in the English people which has been most undistinguished when unmingled with other blood. The Saxon of fifteen hundred years ago is the yokel of to-day, and he never was more than a yokel intellectually. The enormous intellectual fertility of England is owing to successive invasions, and chiefly to the Norman Conquest. All the great and noble and sweet faces in English history are Norman, or largely Norman. The awful faces of the Gibbon type make periods of English history like a night spectral with evil dreams.

Does any one past the condition of childhood really like fables? Mind, I do not say past the years of childhood. But does any one of fully mature intellect like fables or pleasantly endure allegories? I think not. In the vigour of all lives there must be lacunae of intense indolence,

backwaters of the mind, where one is willing to float effortless and take the things that come as though they were good things rather than work at the oars in pursuit of novelties. At such times it is easier to persuade ourselves we are amused by books that we admired when we lacked experience and discernment than to break new ground and encounter fresh obstacles. I am leaving out of account the dull worthy people who say they like a book because other people say they like it. These good people live in a continual state of self-justification. They are much more serenely secure in what they imagine to be their opinions than those travailing souls that really have opinions of their own. Their life is easy, and in lazy moments one sighs for the repose they enjoy. But do not the people with active minds often adhere to childish likings merely from indolence? A certain question they settled in their own minds when they were ten; it is too much trouble to treat it as an open matter at thirty. Consistency in a politician is invariably a sign of stupidity, because no man (outside fundamental questions

of morals) can with credit to his sense remain stationary in opinion for thirty years where all is change. The very data on which he based an opinion in the year one are vapourized in the year thirty. The foundation of all political theories is first principles of some kind, and the only support a philosophic mind rejects with disdain is a first principle of any kind. Now, the fables we tolerate, nay, admire as children, are in imaginative literature what first principles are in that branch of imaginary philanthropy called politics. It is much easier to say every man has a right to eight shillings a day than to find out what each particular man has a right to, or if man has a right to anything at all. It is much easier to say one does like Fontaine than at thirty years of age to acquire a disgust of him and his fables.

The lying insincerity of fables and their morals always shocks me, and the gross blindness of the fabulist to any view of transactions but that adopted by him to point his precept, fills me with contempt for him as an artist.