should fail to produce the result which they desire. The reason is that the collective power of all the boys in a school is greater than that of any one boy; so that, if that one should act on parental advice and should hit another between the eyes, all the others will tell the master, and the offender will be punished as a danger to society and a corrupter of good morals-good morals consisting in making faces, putting tongues out, and kicking your neighbours' legs under the tables. A Swedish boy at a pension in Paris was called a liar by an usher sixteen years old: the youngster went straight at him, got home his right on his teeth and his left behind his ear, and then asked if he would have any more; whereupon the thirty-seven other boys in the room rushed together at the Swede, rolled him on the floor and stretched themselves upon his body as if he were a rattlesnake in a box. When the poor fellow was got out, his nose was flattened and his arm broken. Those thirty-seven boys were quite proud about it, and were ready to begin again. They had not a notion that thirty-seven to one was unfair; and as for saying, "Well done, little one! hit straighter,"-so fantastic an idea could not enter their brains. If the Swede had made scornful mimicries at the usher behind his back, or called him by a variety of uncivil titles when he was out of hearing, the others would have vehemently applauded; but going in at him in front was not the solution French boys like, so they scotched the Swede.

No social merits can make up for such a lack of fair-play and courage. A boy may sing cleverly and paint in water-colours; he may talk four languages (which none of them do), and love his dear mamma; he may polish mussel-shells for his sisters, and catch shrimps at the seaside,those polite acquirements will not make him a good fellow; and though

the French boy takes refuge in such diversions, he is none the greater for it: they don't help to make him into a man. He is pretty nearly as expansive and as demonstrative as the girls; he has an abundant heart; he is natty at small things; but he cries too easily, and thinks tears are natural for boys. No one tells him that emotions which are attractive in women become ridiculous in men ; so he grows up in them, and retains, when his beard comes, all the sensibility of his boyhood.

And yet there is no denying that, like his sisters, he contributes wonderfully to the brightness of home. His inteiligence is delicate and artistic; his capacity of loving is enormous; he possesses many of the sweeter qualities of human nature; and, provided he is not tested by purely masculine measures, he often seems to be a very charming little fellow. Children of both sexes constitute so essential and intimate a part of indoor life in France, that they naturally and unconsciously strive to strengthen and develop indoor merits; and it is fair to call attention to the fact, that when the subject of education is discussed, French parents always urge that the object of all teaching being to fit the young for the particular career which they have to follow, their boys ought necessarily to be prepared for social and family duties rather than for the rougher and hardier tasks which other nations love. But, however true this argument may seem at first sight, it is, after all, specious and unworthy. The end proposed in France is not a high one; and we have just seen how the acceptance and practice of a low standard of moral education has broken down the people as a whole, and has rendered them incapable of discipline, of order, and of conviction. Their conduct during the last sixteen months has been composed of fretful excitement, alternating

with petulant prostration. Excepting the gallant few who have nobly done their duty during and since the war, they have acted like a set of their own schoolboys, who don't know how to give a licking, and still less know how to take one. Who can doubt, amongst the lookerson at least, not only that France would have made a better fight, but would, still more, have presented a nobler and more honourable attitude in defeat, if this generation had been brought up from its infancy in the practice of personal pluck, and of solid principles and solid convictions? Who can pretend to define the principles and convictions which rule France to-day? Are there any at all? When, therefore, we hear it urged that French boys are educated for the part which they are destined to play in life, we are justified in replying, that their fitness for that destiny appears to us to unfit them for any other; and that, though they may become charming companions, brilliant talkers, loving husbands, and tender fathers, full of warm sensations and flowing emotions, they have distinctly proved themselves to be utterly incapable of growing into wise citizens or wise men.

What is the use of turning round upon the Empire, and of piling abuse upon Napoleon III. as the cause of the shame of France? all that is but an accident, a mere detail in the whole. If France were but beaten in battle, she would be all right again within two years, for her material elasticity is prodigious, and her recuperative power almost unlimited. But her malady is graver than defeat it is in the very heart blood of her people. They have gone in for money-making, and for easy pleasurable existence with small expense. They have been pursuing little things and little ends, and they have grown incapable of big ones. They have suddenly been

overwhelmed by a staggering disaster, and they can neither face it coolly nor deal with it practically. Two generations of vitiated education have led them unknowingly to this. The late Emperor confirmed the debasing system, but he did not originate it. It came in with Louis Philippe, if not with Charles X. If France is content to produce agreeable men and charming women, to show Europe how to talk and dress, and to set up science and art as the objects of her public life, then she can go on as she is, without a change: but if she wants to seize her place once more as a great political power; if she wishes to regain the respect and esteem of the world, instead of asking only for its sympathy; if she desires to reign, and not to amuse and please,-then she must begin by remodelling the whole education of her boys. There is no reason why her home life should be affected by such a change: it would not necessarily become graver or less lightsome; there would not be less laughter or less love; the boys need not lose their present merits because they would acquire new ones.

If so radical a modification in the whole tendencies and habits of the nation can be brought about at all, it is far more likely to be effected by the women than by the men. Frenchwomen, as has been already observed, are generally capable of noble action; they are singularly unselfish; and, despite their sensibility, they would not rest content with their present highly-strained adoration of the gentler elements of character, if ever they could be led to see that something higher could be added to it in their sons. It is to them, to their aid, that the true friends of France should appeal. They cannot themselves upset the unworthy schools where their boys are now taught how not to become real men; but they can so agitate

the question that their husbands will be forced to take it up and deal with it. The influence of women need not be purely social and moral: in moments of national crisis it ought to be exercised for other ends; and in the particular case before us, where the heart is interested quite as much as the head, French mothers might perhaps jump at the new sensation which they would experience by setting the example, as far as in them lay, of a change in the existing forms of example and teaching. Frenchwomen of our generation are not, however, Roman matrons. They attach a vastly higher price to the conservation of home joys, as they view them, than to the salvation of the State. The latter, according to their appreciation, concerns the Government. Centralisation has suffocated patriotism, in the real meaning of the word. Mothers strive to make good sons, not to make good citizens or solid men. The affections are placed upon an altar in France: all that can contribute to their development and their display is sought for not only eagerly, but naturally; all that can strengthen and adorn their manifestation is carefully watched and practised-so much so, indeed, that notwithstanding the indisputable sincerity of family attachments in France, there almost seems to be a certain amount of acting in the way in which they are exhibited. Emotions may be said to have become the object of existence; and emotions imply so much external exposition, especially where they are unchecked, that whether their direction be tragic or comic, they often assume a somewhat theatrical character, which may induce the erroneous impression that they are put on more than they are really felt. If this powerful leverage could be applied for a healthy purpose; if, by a reaction consequent upon bitter experience,

it could be set to work to elevate principles to the rank of sensations; if thereby pure duty could be raised to a par with love, and manly self-devotion to an equality with tenderness, then we might hope to see France rally. There seems to be no other way out of the mess into which she has fallen: the first step towards a solution must be made by the mothers.

If we turn from these considerations to the purely home aspect of the question, we must acknowledge that it presents a very different picture. On that side of the subject nearly everything is pleasant and attractive. The French get out of their home ties pretty nearly all that homes can give; and if they do not attain perfection the fault does not lie with them, or with their system, but in the impossibility of making anything complete by human means. The importance assigned to children, their early and constant intermingling with their parents' daily existence, the rapid growth in them of the qualities which repay and consequently stimulate affection,-all this is practical as well as charming. Boys and girls alike are taught that home is a nest in which they are cherished, and which all its inmates are bound to adorn to the best of their ability; and if we could forget that all this enfeebles men, and renders them unfit for the outside struggle, we might, not unjustly, say that the French plan is the right one. we cannot forget; the facts and the results glare at us too distinctly. We can acknowledge, if our individual prejudices enable us to do so, that the system looks excellent for girls; but we must maintain our conviction that it is deplorable for boys, and that to it must be assigned a large part of the responsibility of the past disasters and present disorder of France.

But

PERHAPS there is no intellectual gift that conveys a greater sense of power than that of ready and felicitous illustration, or one that wins its possessor a more undisputed pre-eminence. It is one of those points on which it may be said that all people know themselves, and are forced to acknowledge a superior. A man may talk nonsense and not know it, or write commonplace in full persuasion that he is original, or uphold his fallacies against the conclusions of the ablest logician; but he cannot help knowing when he is no hand at an illustration. There is no room for self-delusion or rivalry. Not only does it not come readily, but he beats his brain for it in vain. It would be a curious inquiry how many men live and die, respected and useful members of society too, without once hitting off a happy simile. We are convinced they would immeasurably outnumber that formidable array of figures telling the difference between the sexes, which causes so much anxiety in the present day. Of course it is competent to people to say that they do not care for illustration-that it proves nothing that it is a mere "toy of thought," interfering with and often perplexing the business of reason and action; but whether we like ourselves as well without this faculty or not, it is impossible not to enjoy its exercise in another. We may treat it as a superfluity; it may lack the solid satisfaction of reason and demonstration, and be only like the nard pistic Jeremy Taylor talks of, the perfume of which is very delightful when the box is newly broken, but the want of it is no trouble-we are well

enough without it;" but the sudden fresh fragrance is not the less delicious while it lasts, and invigorating to the spirits.

We use the word illustration as embracing the widest field, and including the whole figurative machinery of fancy and imagination—metaphor, simile, imagery, figure, comparison, impersonation-in fact, every method of elucidation through their agency. Of course invention may be actively and delightfully employed without any use of this charming gift, and therefore, we should say, without the possession of it; for an apt illustration, an exquisite simile, will out if it flashes into the brain. There is a certain concentration in the matter in hand

is

the scene, the situation—which stands the writer instead of any other gift, and dispenses with all ornament. This, we should say, the case with Mr Trollope, whose metaphor, when he uses it, is from the open, acknowledged, familiar stock of all mankind; and remarkably with Miss Austen, in whose whole range of writings no original figure occurs to us, unless it be Henry Tilney's ingenious parallel between partners in matrimony and partners in a country-dance. Her experience probably presented her with no example of ready illus tration, and she painted men and women as she found them, making a failure when she tried; like Lydia Bennet, who flourished her hand with its wedding-ring, and "smiled like anything;" or, adding triteness to common dulness, as in Mr Collins, whose letter found favour with Mary; "the idea of the olive-branch is not wholly new, but I think it is well ex

pressed." When we say that most men are without the gift in question, it is obvious that we mean of original illustration. Only a poet could first invest Time with wings; but we talk of the flight of time now without pretending to any share of his gift. There are certain figures incorporated in the language which we cannot speak without using. We are all poetical by proxy. Such common property is the imagery connected with sunrise and the dawn; sunset and twilight; sun, moon, stars, and comets; lightning and storm; seas, rivers, frost, and dew; the road, the path, the ladder; the rose, the lily, and the violet; the dying lamp and its extinguisher; angels, the grave; the lion, the tiger, the wolf, and the lamb; the eagle, the dove, and the parrot; the goose and the monkey. But indeed the list of incorporated metaphor is endless, and it has required a real poet these several hundred years past to hit off anything new out of the subjects of it. But they are all capable in his hands of a sudden illumination, of figuring in new characters, of imparting the surprise which is the very essence of the illustration proper. And once a surprise is always a surprise-that

noble, beautiful, and familiar in nature, are really endless, however the soil may seem exhausted to prosaic minds, which are yet quite capable of being freshened into awakened interest by a new epithet or an original collision of ideas, revealing some undiscovered sympathy with human feeling. Every poet adds something to the common stock of imagery, and so enlarges our perceptions. Shakespeare, on saluting a beautiful woman as Day of the World, quickens our sense of beauty alike in nature and in man. It needed imagination first to affix the idea of sovereignty to the morning, but it was at once adopted by the general mind

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye."

Wordsworth first endued it with "innocence," in which we own an equal fitness

"The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet."

Often as the dawn comes round, called it confident before Mr Brownwe do not know that anybody has ing in his 'Lost Leader':-"Life's night begins: let him never come back to us,

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain;

twilights,

Never glad confident morning again."

"The weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,

And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane Be shook to air."

The grandeur of the comparison when Pandemonium rose like an exhalation, never sinks to commonplace. The suggestions of what is

Or associated dew with the as Mr Tennyson does

memory

"O strengthen me, enlighten me, I faint in this obscurity, Thou dewy dawn of memory." We have always liked, for its homely freshness, Christopher North's simile of the dispelling powers of the sun upon the Scotch mist, in which, as a child, he had lost himself,-"Like the sudden opening of shutters in a room, the whole world was filled with light." And for its