from the fireside, like the spinning-wheel; and the rising generation will be consigned from their birth to national establishments. Suckling of infants will be exploded, as unproductive labour. Pap will be made by contract in subscription soup-kettles. A single engine will put in motion as many cradles as spindles; and official nurses, appointed by the committee, will sing Songs of Reason' to the grinding of a steam apollonicon. Yet, notwithstanding the unquiet innovations of your all-in-all educationists, who would make your little ones read before they can well speak, spoiling their dear lisp with abominable words; which, poor things, they pronounce so right, it is heart-breaking to hear them, cramming them, it may be, with the theory of animal mechanics, when they should be feeling their life in every limb —there is still, thank heaven, and the kind, sensible hearts of English mothers, a genial feeling of old times about a nursery. When I see a numerous small family at play, my mind sinks back, through dream and vision, to the world's infancy. In the life, the innocence, the simple bliss before me, I hail a something that is not changed. The furniture of the well-littered play-room reminds me of Chaldæa, Egypt, Etruria, and the Druids; so that, were it not for the rosy faces of the darlings, and the grisette prettiness of the prim, smiling nurse-maiden, with her ringlets just out of paper, peeping so alluringly from beneath her coiffure of curious needlework, which, though very winsome, is not strictly classical, I might imagine myself in the Museum of the

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Antiquarian Society, of which I have the honour not to be a member; while the strange and affecting analogy between childhood, as it still appears, and what we conceive of man, in the simple days of yore,' when human hope was bold and strong, nor feared the cold rebuke of memory,' oft-times gives rise to reflections which leave me better acquainted with myself, and with kindlier feelings towards my species.

'The child is father of the man,

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.'"

It was evident, that my friend had talked himself quite serious, for he was running into blank verse. And truly, in his peroration, amid the umbrageous multitude of words, there were certain lunar gleams of sense. The world's infancy is something more than a figure of speech. There is an analogy between the growth of the individual mind, and the development of the public soul in communities. If we except the helpless, unremembered state of babyhood, there is no stage of the individual life which has not its parallel in the annals of the kind. There is a boyhood of nations, when the joy and pride of man is like that of a vigorous schoolboy; in bodily strength, in the pursuit and capture of animals; in running, riding, swimming, wrestling, and all perfections of bones and sinews. Then comes the amorous, romantic youth; the age of gallantry and chivalry, fond of splendour and marvel; eager as childhood, but more imaginative, more disputatious, more im

passioned. This is succeeded by the peculiar age of poetry; when its heroic and romantic themes are but just remembered, and its wonders but half believed, the poet comes and gives them a mausoleum in the imagination. Next succeeds the busy, calculating manhood of society; the age of common sense, prudential ethics, satire, and " vile criticism;" the age of the Aristotles, Horaces, Boileaus, and Popes; of all ages the most presumptuous, despising all that has gone before; wise in its own conceit, not, like noble youth, in the strong passion of imagined certainty, but in the cold vacuity of scepticism and scorn. After this, is the sere and yellow leaf; when men and nations begin to review their days, and finding little to approve in the short-sighted wisdom of latter times, recur, with something of a tender piety, or it may be with a fond idolatry, even to the green and childish issue of their nonage. Such, methinks, is the present state of Britain; and our national taste may best be typified by an old man reading again the fairy tales that delighted his childhood, the amorous stories that engaged his youth, the first plays he had seen, the poems he had first got by heart; striving to recal the age of hope by spells of memory, and loving best the things he has known the longest.

ON PRIDE.

"PRIDE was never made for man." True enough; yet pride is always born in man. It is native and indigenous to the heart; "not by might mastered, but by special grace." Humility is the congenital temperament of no human being, far less the epidemic of any particular clime or season. Pride seems to be involved in the very essence of conscious reflective individuality; it is the peculiar self-love of a rational creature, only subdued by that faith, which introduces the creatures into the presence of the Creator, and merges the finite understanding in the infinite Reason. But its modes of manifestation are numberless; its exciting causes not to be counted. Sometimes it grovels in the dust, like the degraded serpent, sometimes it tramples the firmament, like Lucifer in heavenly panoply. In the dull, it is sullen; in the melancholy, it is mad. In the gay, it flutters as vanity-in the grave, it stalks as pomp. It is foppery-it is puritanical, or republican plainness. It is voluble-it is taciturn. It scoffs; it bullies; it fawns. It loathes mankind, and sometimes affects universal philanthropy. It crowns the toper's bowl, and presides over the hermit's fast.

It does-what does it not? It never truly loves, nor really prays. Yet has it invented many an amorous lay, and many a rite of seeming holiness.

In all its shapes and operations, it lies under the curse pronounced against every creature that seeketh not God's glory but its own. Essentially idolatrous yet implicitly atheistic, it exiles man from the source of true nobility, extinguishes in him the light of Heaven, and forbids him to believe in a greater than himself. Such is the judgment of true wisdom; yet the world holds other language. Many, who agree in condemning personal or self-pride, speak with high approbation of certain modifications of the passion; which either imply sympathy with numbers, as family pride, national pride, and in general what is called l'esprit de corps, or pre-suppose a perception and reverence of abstract perfections, an acknowledgment of absolute unconditional duties; as the pride of honour, of truth, of purity, of virtue, of human, as distinguished from mere animal, nature.

Family pride, it may be argued, is intimately connected with the noblest of the affections, with the revered remembrance of parents, and the hope of posterity. It gives to man an interest in the past and in the future, diffuses his being through all the ramifications of kindred, and carries it backward and forward along the line of many generations. It breathes in historic records, in fireside traditions, in household maxims, in epitaphs and memorials of the dead. It gives a life to faded family pictures-a profitable meaning to all the jargon of heraldry.