how smooth, how graceful! what sweet contrast between the downy white within and the tender green of its mossy edge! what order, what skilful blending of incongruous and refuse material into an exquisite and perfect whole. And the four small eggs so wondrous bright, and smooth, and round! And all this is his! he has found it he may keep it-he may place it by his bed-side, and find it there when he wakes next morning! The dingy garret is brightened to his imagination already, by its presence; he thinks how his sisters will admire-how the boys will gather round and envy him his prize; and forgetting that he makes one little pair disconsolate, he carries off the spoil. It may be he hears a feeble twitter, and his heart misgives him; but it is too late, he thinks, now; and birds will get over their sorrow like men, and build another nest. Happy those who can admire things within their reach without wanting to have them! it is a rare and a noble virtue: but at least, a bird's nest is a temptation, and if men will not think so, they have forgotten their childhood, or have had a very peculiar one. But to return from a long digression to our books, which in this instance, as they relate to boys' pleasures and pursuits, seem rather in harmony with it. The Boy's own Library' contains a good deal that may amuse them; many lively stories of quaint characters, and village incidents, some of which we recognise as having amused our own childhood, and some information on natural history and country matters, told in an animated manner. Indeed, the cheerfulness of this series is something quite remarkable, reminding us of that determined hilarity to be found in the corners of country newspapers, as the bright season of the year comes on—and which is often constrained to express itself in quaintnesses and other singularities of style. The author, in sympathy with his youthful readers, and in remembrance of his own boyhood, can hardly restrain his own gladness of heart, into which everything, animate and inanimate, is supposed to enter, and which must be his excuse for certain unchristian objurgations (by Jove!' for example,) and occasional familiarities and vulgarities of style. We suppose this resolute happiness affords an example of 'the healthy tone,' which is now so frequent a subject for commendation with reviewers, when they wish to condense strong approval of a publication into the fewest words. The boyfriends of the author are led to suppose all they see as happy and prosperous as themselves. When the hay-makers are described as loading waggons with mountains of hay as heavy as themselves, he exclaims, Theirs is a happy life!' an immunity from care, which the village labourer would hardly take to himself; 6 --and the travelling chair-mender is described as exempt from every trouble of humanity. It is thus that he and his friend the tinker, to adopt the phraseology of Mark Tapley, 'come out strong,' under adverse circumstances. 'What is that has arrested your attention now beside the rustic cottage up the lane?-The old chair-bottomer. He leads a happy life enough, no doubt. You see the small rushes which he every now and then mixes up with the larger ones?-Those are of English growth; such as we saw beside the river, and waving above the bank where we beheld the waterhen. He can always have plenty of those for the trouble of cutting them; the larger come from Holland. His is not so good a trade as it once was, for there are not so many chairs bottomed with rushes since cane seats came into fashion. Watch how nimbly and strongly he twists the rushes with his fingers; now in this corner, then in that, plat after plat is laid down; and every time he goes round the corner of the chair the hole in the middle grows less. How merrily the ragged fellow whistles! What cares he? He carries his shop upon his back, and finds employment in every village he comes to. If he does his work well, he is sure of a glass of beer and a crust of bread and cheese. That woman keeps the village alehouse, and she has come to talk with him about mending and bottoming her chairs before the club-feast is held at her house. Rare quarters will he have there, and you will hear him singing in the kitchen in an evening, after he has done his work, like a linnet; and, perhaps, his old crony, the tinker, is at work somewhere in the neighbourhood and will join him at night, when they will talk over the pleasant trips they have had together, the many beautiful villages they have seen in their rambles, and which is the pleasantest road to take if you wish to reach them. Wonderful things have these two happy old fellows seen in their travels; nests, and snakes, and water-newts, and great gledes, that carried off young chickens. They have chased young foxes and hunted young hares, and taken rooks'-nests from the topmost branches of many a tall elm-tree; and when they could get no work in autumn you never saw what quantities of brown nuts and ripe blackberries they would bring home. No two boys were ever happier than they are when out in the country together.' From the successes and failures of individuals, with their narrowness of views, their partial aims, their limited experience, we turn now to a work written for the enlightenment of young children-free from all these hindrances to perfection-the product of united wisdom, and careful consultation, and enlarged philosophy. Children have hitherto been left to see, and feel, and touch, very much as instinct guides them; their senses have been supposed able to do their work without the aid of formal written documents; and, as the common law of England exists in the memories, and experience, and customs of men rather than in books, so those great principles of our physical being, the five senses, have been thought able to act without formal treatises to inform them that they see, and feel, and touch, and smell. We all know that we see, and we also know in a sense what we see, without the assistance of a book to tell us. However, it has been discovered that infants should not be left, as they have been, to their own discoveries and conclusions, but that they should take up these earliest pursuits more selon les règles— that they should not only see the sun, but know that they see it, and also be brought to a distinct statement of where they see it,—in the heavens out of their reach-and not, as in uninstructed ignorance they might have imagined, in a room, or lying on the road.' To rectify the prevalence of such common and natural errors, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, under the sanction of the fifty distinguished gentlemen who form its Committee, have published a very profound work, entitled, Exercises for the Improvement of the Sensesfor Young Children;' the aim of which seems to be to throw discredit on intuitive knowledge, and not to admit anything to be known until it has been taught by this learned Society. We quote, verbatim et seriatim, the following questions on the body,' which occur early in the volume:·- 'Where is your head? 'Where is your neck? Is your head above or below your neck? 6 'Which is nearest to your neck, your shoulders or your head? 'Are your eyes above or below your cheeks? 'Where is your right cheek? 'Where is your left cheek? Is your nose to the right or left of your right cheek? 'Are your cheeks outside of your nose? Is your nose outside of your cheeks? 'Which is nearest the floor, your knee or your foot?' And again, the following questions, which we have selected, as the book advances : 'Did you ever see people walking about with shoes on their hands? Why should we not wear shoes on our hands? Did you ever hear a horse talk? 'What is the noise called that you make when you are very much pleased? What is the noise called that you make when you want me to know anything? How do you feel when you want something to eat? 'Where do you put bread and meat at dinner? 'What do you do to the things you eat, when they are in your mouth? 'Could you eat by putting bread or meat into your hand instead of your mouth? Can you bite with your hand? 'Here is a piece of bread; how do you know it is not a piece of cheese? 'Is sugar of any use? 'Can you get it in the fields and roads, like dirt and sand? 'Is a fly smaller or larger than you? 'Did you ever see a cat or a dog asleep? 'Do tables and chairs sleep-do they eat and drink? 'Did you ever hear any noise come from the church? Is the church as large as a house, do you think? 'Why are you called Jones as well as Mary? 'Are you ever called anything but Mary Jones? 'Where was the sun when you saw it—was it in a room, or lying on the road?' So long as intuition will tell us all this, we believe that most men will prefer its repose, to the bustle of more conscious knowledge. A child does not know anything more at the end of these questions, than it did at the beginning, (except in the matter of right hand and left, which we confess intuition will not teach,) the only new idea it can have acquired, is the knowledge that it knows, and so far it may be a loser in humility. Not but that there is, after all, a sort of difficulty in the questions, for the very strangeness of them. In surprise that we should be asked them, our reasoning powers are held in abeyance. What can a 'noise' coming from the church mean? And again, in that startling and perplexing query, Here is a piece of bread; how do you know it is not a piece of cheese? we feel at first, simply that we know it is not, and we suppose that the questioner also knows; but for a moment we are puzzled. Presently, however, rousing our faculties from a bewilderment which, in his eyes, will surely pass for ignorance, we discriminate, with philosophical accuracy, between cows and corn-fields, and discover that, after all, there is something clever in knowing that we know the difference. We extract the following series of questions on liquids, for the sake of the observations the author has appended to this branch of his subject : 'What do you drink with your dinner? 'Which is softest, bread or water? 'If you let fall a piece of bread, can you pick it up? Why do you not take up water in the same way as you pick up bread? 'Which is most like water, glass or wood? 'Can you drink glass? 'How is glass like water? This last exercise can be expanded in the following manner :-A piece of common window glass may be taken-the finger can be held behind the glass, and the child asked-can you see my finger? The finger should then be put before a card, and then behind a card. Repeat the experiment with the glass, and vary the experiment until the child discovers, and expresses his discovery, that he can see a finger through glass, but not through card. It is not worth while to trouble him with the word transparent at present, for no additional knowledge will be thereby obtained. When he is farther advanced, he may be told that things we can see through, are called transparent. When the difference between the card, &c., and the glass, in respect of its transparency, has been understood, take a drinking-glass and repeat the above exercise; put the finger first into, then on the opposite side of the glass; let the child evince clearly by words, that he can see the finger through two portions of the glass: then pour water into the glass, repeating the preceding exercises. That the child also may clearly understand that water is transparent, independently of its situation in a glass (for he may perchance think that the water is rendered transparent by the vessel), put something, as a shilling, into it, and show him that the shilling can be seen, notwithstanding that the water is between it and his eye; and repeat and continue the exercises on two or three occasions. Unless the examination be varied, in every possible manner, the teacher cannot be safe against some false association in the child's mind. ' Now what does a child really learn from all this parade of teaching, all these experiments, all these precautions against false impressions? Absolutely nothing. From the time that a baby flattens its face against a window-pane, it knows perfectly well that glass is a hard transparent substance. And so soon as it can see the sponge at the bottom of its bath, and stretches forth its hand through the yielding fluid to reach it, it knows that water is a soft transparent substance, though following the suggestion of our author, it does not use the word transparent at present, for no additional knowledge will be thereby obtained.' Yet some three or four years after, it may be taught to think it knows a good deal, without one addition to its stock of ideas, from finding all its unconscious impressions made the subject of question and answer in a book, and may gain such a sense of cleverness and importance as elated M. Jourdain, when he first learnt from his grammarian that he was talking prose. He had talked prose just as easily and fluently, for fifty years, as at the moment of this discovery, but he had never been proud of it till now. This method of instruction, with nothing to teach on the one hand, and on the other, of laborious learning, without acquiring any new idea-has results which reminds one of the fish dinners described in Tancred, 'repletion without sustenance;' or of another still airier banquet, which it may be in the memory of our readers to have seen infants subjected to by some careless nurse, who, to stay the cries of her helpless charge, holds the empty vessel, which once contained its food, to its eager and hungry lips. The poor babe sucks on all the more laboriously for the failure of each successive effort, till its ineffectual exertions end, as in the intellectual repast we compare to it, in painful and empty inflation. We cannot conclude our remarks on children's books without some mention of two series of volumes, which merit extensive circulation, The Family Library,' which is complete, and "The Select Library,' now in progress. They consist of both republications and new works-in neither case written for children, but not the less adapted to their taste. For the pleasure children take in books is of two kinds. Naturally, such as are written expressly for them, which are about children like themselves, which tell of joys, and troubles, and interests, just like their own, have their earliest preference; as the first stories told to a little |