GESTATION, INCUBATION, AND EDUCATION. 247

Ah! leave them alone to women!*

A lovely sight

Take

to see a child rocked in the arms of a man! care, awkward idiot! It is fragile; handling it in your clownish hand, you may break it.

This is the dispute between the master and child : man imparts science by methods proper to man, and his state of fixed rules, by very precise classifications, with angular, and, as it were, crystallised forms. Well! these crystal prisms, as luminous as they may be, wound by their angles and sharp points. The child, in a soft and tender state, cannot, for a long time, receive any thing which has not the fluidity of life. The master grows angry and impatient at the slowness of the pupil, and knows not how to succeed with him. There is but one person in the world who has the delicate perception of the careful management which the child requires, and this one person is she who has borne it, and who forms for ever with it an identical whole. Gestation, incubation, and education, are three words which have been long synonymous.

Much longer than people would believe. The influence of the mother over the child, whose faculties are developing, is greater and more decisive than that which she exercised over the suckling infant. I do

terrible virgins in whose mouth thunders the word of God, he has introduced the initiation of children and mothers, in the most ingenuous manner.

* A writer, of enlarged ideas, has said, that schools for girls should be founded before those of boys; and that every girl, who will be a wife and mother, will become a school herself.

not know whether it be indispensable for the mother to feed it from her breast; but I am very sure it is necessary that she should nourish it from her heart. Chivalry was perfectly aware that love was the most powerful motive for education. That alone did more in the middle ages to advance humanity than all the disputes of school-divinity have been able to retard it.

We also have our school-divinity, the spirit of empty distractions and verbal disputes: we shall be able to combat its influence only by prolonging that of the mother, associating her with education, and by giving the child a well-beloved teacher. Love, they say, is a great master. This is especially true of the greatest, the deepest, and the purest of all affections.

How blind and imprudent we are! We take the child from its mother, at a time when it was most necessary to her. We deprive her of the dear occupation for which God had formed her; and we are afterwards surprised if this woman, cruelly separated, now languishing and idle, give herself up to vain musings; suffer anew the yoke she formerly bore; and, if, as is often the case, fancying herself to remain faithful, she listen to the tempter, who speaks to her in the name of God.

Be prudent, be wise; leave her her son. Woman must ever be loving. Leave her rather the lover whom nature gives her; him whom she

would have preferred to all others, whilst you are occupied with your business (with your passions perhaps). Leave on her arm the tall and slender youth, and she will be proud and happy. You fear, lest, having been kept too long by his mother, he may become effeminate. But, on the contrary, if you left her her son, she would become masculine. Try her, she will change, and you will be astonished yourself. Little excursions on foot, and long ones on horseback· no trouble will be too much for her. She begins bravely and heartily the exercises of the young man; she makes herself of his own age, and is born again in this vita nuova; even you on your return will think, when you see your Rosalind *, that you have two sons.

It is a general rule to which, at least, I have hardly ever seen any exception, that superior men are all the sons of their mother. She has stamped upon them, and they reproduce, her moral as well as her physical features.

I am about to surprise you. I will tell you that without her you will never be a man. The mother alone is patient enough to develope the young creature, by taking proper care of his liberty. We must be on our guard, and take especial care not to place the child, still too weak and pliable, in the hands of strangers. People of the best intentions, by pressing

too much upon him, run the risk of so crushing his faculties, that he will never be able to enjoy the free use of them again. The world is full of men, who remain bondsmen all their lives, from having borne a heavy load too soon. A too solid and too precocious education has injured something within them; their originality, the genius, the ingegno, which is the prime part of man.

Who respects in these days the original and free ingenuity of character, that sacred genius which we receive at our birth? This is almost always the part which offends and gets blamed; it is the reason why "this boy is not like every body else." Hardly does his young nature awake, and flourish in its liberty, than they are all astonished, and all shake their heads: "What is this? we never saw the like." Shut him

up quickly

iron cages.

stifle this living flower.

Ah! you were blooming,

Here are the

and display

Be wise and

ing your luxuriant foliage in the sun. prudent, O flower! become dry, and shut up your leaves.

But this poor little flower, against which they are all leagued what is it, I pray you, but the individual, special, and original element by which this being would have distinguished itself from others, and added a new feature to the great variety of human characters a genius, perhaps, to the series of great minds. The sterile spirit is almost always that plant which, having been tied too fast to the dead wood

which serves to support it, has dried upon it, and gradually become like it: there it is, very regular, and well fastened up, you may fear nothing eccentric from it; the tree is, however, dead, and will never bear leaf more.

What do I mean? that the support is useless, and that we must leave the plant to itself? nothing is further from my thoughts. I believe in the necessity of both educations, that of the family and that of the country. Let us distinguish their influence.

The latter, our public education, which is certainly better in our days than it ever was what does it require? What is its end and aim? It wishes to harmonise the child with his native land, and with that great country the world. This is what constitutes its legitimacy and necessity. It purposes especially to give him a fund of ideas common to all, to make him a reasonable being, and prevent him from being out of tune with what surrounds him; it hinders him from jarring in the great concert where he is going to take his part, and it checks what may be too irregular in his lively sallies.

So far for public education. Family life is liberty. Yet even here there are obstacles and shackles to his original moral activity. The father regulates this activity: his uneasy foresight imposes on him the duty to bring early this wild young colt to the furrow, where he must soon toil. It often happens that the father makes a mistake, consults, first of all, his