the stronger and more welcome for our display of real sympathy. If family government were well carried out in every home, children would be happier and better than they are now.

Then there would be even in our great towns a partial realization of the words of the prophet Zechariah, in reference to Jerusalem delivered: "And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof." We often recollect with pleasure the qualification which a friend of ours asked for in a teacher for his children-"Can you laugh and make fun?" It was strictly philosophical. The boy is not learning anything when he is amusing himself, but he is strengthening his brain that it may be better able to learn and to act when the good time comes. Is it not better to begin life with a good sound instrument, fit for the utmost duty its natural reach of power admits of, than with an enfeebled instrument which has only got a smattering of a great number of things it does not comprehend? Old and precise people like to see a quiet, grave child. In sober truth, there is nothing more alarming. It is almost sure to be an indication of some extraordinary quality of not a safe kind.

In bringing up children there are two extremes to be avoided. On the one hand, there is extravagant indulgence, vitiating the character almost before it has had time to show the first spring-flowers of its native innocence; on the other, austerity, ill-nature, and gloom, making all the May of life a November, checking the growth of the affections, and introducing distrust and fear where as yet unsuspecting confidence should reign.

We are indebted to Public Opinion for the following welldevised rules for spoiling a child :—1. Begin young by giving him whatever he cries for. 2. Talk freely before the child about his smartness as incomparable. 3. Tell him he is too much for you, that you can do nothing with him. 4. Have divided counsels as between father and mother. 5. Let him learn to regard his father as a creature of unlimited power, capricious and tyrannical; or as a mere whipping machine. 6. Let him learn (from his father's example) to despise his mother. 7. Do not know or care who his companions may be. 8. Let him read whatever he likes. 9. Let the child, whether boy or girl, rove the streets in the evenings-a good school for both sexes. 10. Devote yourself to making money, remembering always that wealth is a better legacy for your child than principles in the heart and habits in the life; and let him have plenty of money to spend. II. Be not with him in hours of recreation. Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel; chastise severely for a foible, and laugh at a vice. 13. Let him run about from church to church; eclecticism in religion is the order of the day. 14. Whatever burdens of virtuous requirements you lay on his shoulders, touch not with one of your fingers. These rules are not untried. Many parents have proved them, with substantial uniformity of results. If a fathful observance of them does not spoil your child, you will at least have the comfortable reflection that you have done what you could.

12.

"Enough," said Rasselas to Imlac; "you convince me that no man can ever be a poet." And truly, if we seriously

reflect on the duties of parenthood, we may conclude that, in this imperfect world, no one ever can be a good parent. Poor Margaret Fuller, recording in her diary the event of her child's birth, expressed a feeling of responsibility with which many parents can sympathize. "I am the mother of an immortal being! God be merciful to me, a sinner!" Was not the sense of her own unworthiness and incapacity for her sacred task the very best preparation for performing it well?

"The tone of living in England is altogether too high. Middle-class people are too apt to live up to their incomes, if not beyond them; affecting a degree of 'style' which is most unhealthy in its effects upon society at large. There is a dreadful ambition abroad for being 'genteel.'"-Smiles.

N early life Sydney Smith was very poor, but he contrived to put his poverty in such a humorous light, that it became a source of mirth rather than of misery. He had none of the false shame that more than anything else makes poverty bitter, and never shrank from saying "I can't afford it." How poor he was when living in Edinburgh, immediately after his marriage, is humorously expressed in the motto he suggested for the Edinburgh Review, then started by him in conjunction with his not less impoverished friends, Brougham and Jeffrey-Tenui musam meditamur

avena ("We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal"). In hopes of bettering his circumstances, he removed to London; but here, in spite of earnest endeavours to obtain employment, he remained poor for many years. But it was poverty in a form that was almost attractive. There was no seeming

in his little household, substantial comfort-which he called the "grammar of life"-being always preferred to outward show. "Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory." This principle regulated every detail of his establishment. Some lectures he delivered at the Royal Institution enabled him to furnish a larger house, where he established little weekly suppers as centres of attraction to his ever-widening circle of friends. Nothing could be plainer than these suppers were, yet the host's 'feast of reason and flow of soul" drew all the most celebrated people of London to share his single dish. Young couples beginning life have it in their power to halve their anxieties and double their chance of happiness if they would resolve to act upon this principle-" Avoid shame, but do not seek glory." To try to keep up vainglorious appearances is most foolish-"your glorying is not good." It makes socalled friends laugh, and brings you into debt and every kind of difficulty. But this is a very common form of social evil. The world, we know, is deceived by ornament, and thinks more of the shadow than of the substance; accordingly, people of the let-us-be-genteel-or-die class overwork and overfret themselves to keep up appearances. Having food and raiment, they are not content unless they have a larger house than Mrs. So-and-so, a greater number of servants