and reason is confounded and obscured, and conscience exposed to certain injury, and to the danger of decay and death. We have dwelt the more on this subject, because we would willingly induce others, who have the means for further and fuller investigation, to give their attention to what we deem the important principle, that obedience is among the most essential requisites for the highest and most valuable culture of the understanding. Nor is this subject without its importance to American education, considered under its political aspect. The child's obedience to rule, or to command, becomes the man's obedience to law; and still retains its quality and all its characteristics. It was once said, with more justice, we fear, than would belong to the saying now, that this country was distinguished from all others, by the fact, that law, as such, and for its own sake, and its own power, is here held in reverence. When this can be no longer said with any truth, corruption will have done all its work, and resistance to corruption will have ceased; and one symptom, that this melancholy consummation is more than a remote possibility, may be found in the prevailing disposition to subject all public laws to the tribunal of individual opinion. It is not enough, that they should be the expression of the public opinion, uttered by its appointed organs. It is not enough, that each man holds in common with all others the right of bringing his opinion and his feeling to bear upon the original structure and enactment of the law through our republican institutions. It is not enough, that every man not only possesses this right, but is bound to exercise this right, to the very end that the law may thus reflect the general sentiment and enforce the general wish; but a growing and almost prevailing disposition now permits the individual thereafter to submit the law to his private judgment or personal inclination, and ask of that, as of the court of ultimate sovereignty, whether the law is, for him, a law. Let this habit go on, and acquire the sanction of general usage, and nothing will remain for the country, and the whole fabric of its government, but to be swept away as a cumberer of the earth. We believe, that in this disposition lies one of the greatest dangers to which we are exposed; and we believe also, that this disposition is to be checked first, and most successfully, in childhood. Then, if education recognises the duty, the necessity, of obedience; if it places this upon its true ground, and enforces it, not with fretful anger, nor with the tyrannous violence of mere love of power, but with the mildness and the firmness of unfailing affection, and associates it indissolubly in the minds of children with all progress, all safety, all happiness, then, and then only, will the children of this republic be fitted to become its citizens, and hold in their hands its destiny. Nor is this a work to be done in the schools only; on the contrary, it is precisely that in which our schools and our homes should unite. The subject of Domestic Education, as distinct from School Education, is of great magnitude and moment; but we do not propose to enter upon it at this time. Indeed, whatever can be said of it, is perhaps comprised or implied in the principle, that the school is better in proportion as it is a home, and the home is better in proportion as it becomes a school. They are two; not two places only, but two in organization and in character, and the difference between them is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, they are one in the end which lies before them; for this is the education, the leading forth of all the physical, intellectual, and moral powers, into fulness of stature, and strength, and health, and into the utmost capacity of enjoying the happiness of usefulness. In these things they are one; and, while the patient kindness, the warmth and tenderness, of an affection like that of parents should fill the school with sunshine, and make its laws only the expression of its love, the home cannot fail in discipline and order, without mournful consequences, which no school can avert or remedy. One of the pictures of Shakspeare represents the schoolboy as creeping unwillingly to school. Like all his pictures this is true to nature, to the nature he drew from; but it is, in this instance at least, a false and injured nature, for not one jot of reason is there in the thing itself, why the child should go unwillingly to school, more than there is why he should go unwillingly from his school to his home, or to his play. What is a school? It is a place for moral discipline and for intellectual instruction. Now, most true it is, that no child ever lived who did not, as he grew up, manifest tendencies and feelings which required rebuke, opposition, and constraint; and the school is the place for this; but it is not the only nor the chief place for it. If all constraint is at once relaxed when the child leaves the school; if he breaks from its thraldom into full license the moment he goes to his play; if, amid his fellows, or under the paternal roof, he is unwatched, unrestrained, unrebuked for evil deeds, little can his school do for him, and weighty and fearful is the responsibility of his parents. In point of moral discipline, therefore, the school should be no bugbear. And as to intellectual instruction, who has lived within the sight and hearing of a child, and does not know that he hungers and thirsts for knowledge? The babe of a week old seeks not its mother's breast with sharper appetite, than will urge him, when infancy expands into childhood, to question, and question closely, father and mother and brother and sister, and everybody near him, about every thing in his sight or in his thought. This is the first and natural manifestation of the desire to know; and it is wise, though not very common, to follow this desire somewhat as a guide. It is often easy to silence it by a little impatience or contempt; but the desire is still there, always there, deeply implanted in our nature. Education is founded upon this desire; acts through it; and most grossly errs when it afflicts or disappoints it, and by so doing makes the school distasteful to the child, and compels him to regard it as a place of imprisonment and punishment. And hereafter, when, in the progress of mankind, schools become more what schools should be, the child will seek the school as the home of his mind; and there will his mind expand and grow, as flowers and fruits open and ripen in the sunshine, without pain and almost without effort. At present there are few such homes, and few such schools; and the hope, that such things may become realities, must abide the common fate of all aspirations which look far forward. But the sneer which may rebuke cannot extinguish this hope; for thitherward tends all improvement in education, and the progress of this improvement will measure the advancement of man. ART. IV.-1. Rhymed Plea for Tolerance. In Two Dialogues. With a Prefatory Dialogue. London. 1833. 16mo. 2. Poems; for the most part Occasional. By JOHN KENYON, formerly of St. Peter's College, Cambridge. London. 1838. 8vo. It is a familiar remark of Hume, that, "when the arts and sciences come to perfection in a state, they necessarily decline; and seldom or never revive there." If "perfection" means here a high degree of excellence, which is the only fair interpretation, since there can be nothing really perfect in this world, the remark appears to us, like many others of its acute author, rather specious than sound. At all events, it does not apply to literature, which Hume evidently means to comprehend under the word "arts"; at least, not in those nations endowed with poetic imagination and sensibility, whose literature, the breathing of nature, as it were, will be found to reflect most faithfully the many-colored hues of the times through which it passes. It may be true, however, of a people like the ancient Romans, or like the French among the moderns; for both these nations have been remarkably deficient in the poetic temperament. It is singular, that the French, the most prosaic of modern nations, should, in their primitive period, in the infancy of civilization, have furnished the seeds, which, under more refined culture, have produced the most beautiful and exuberant flowers of fancy on a foreign soil; while their own land, so far from ripening them, has been cursed, in later times, with comparative poetic sterility. Thus the fabliaux and Norman tales of chivalry were the coarse web, from which the romantic Muse of Italy wove her cloth of gold and rich embroidery. The defect of such nations as the Roman and the French seems to be, that, wanting genuine poetic feeling, their literature does not easily respond to the peculiarities of their own condition. It does not reflect the age. They do not derive their ideas of beauty from the objects around them, but from an antique, or at all events a foreign model. Their worship of the Muse is without enthusiasm. They have never been filled with the god. They feel no "Divinity within them, breeding wings What did freedom, "the spur that the clear spirit doth raise," do for Rome, in the earlier ages of her history, in the higher arts of civilization? Where were the poets, like Chaucer, struggling for expression amidst the barbarous discordances of a rude and unformed dialect? Or like Petrarch, building up the elegant fabric of his native language, by the sounds of music? Or like Dante, calling up spirits of power and beauty from the darkness of chaos? Neither Rome nor France had those master-spirits who could throw the light of their own genius in advance, to direct the march of civilization. Literature was not, with them, the spontaneous, irrepressible growth of an untamed soil. It was not the hardy mountain plant, sending forth its branches and its mild native fragrance to heaven; but a hot-house flower, beautiful to the eye, but delicate and feeble, such as could expand only in the sheltered, sunny atmosphere of a court. delicate exotic resist the shock of tempests, or even the fitful How could such a changes of the seasons? The Roman literature, to abandon our metaphor, which will be likely to halt if we ride it too long, the political troubles of the country; and Hume's remark - did not survive may find a pertinent illustration in its subsequent decline. The truth is, the principle of vitality was wanting. It was grafted on a foreign stock. Its best productions were closely modelled on the Greek. Its forms, its rules, were all accommodated to this model, not to the existing relations of the nation itself. The same, to some extent, may be said of the French, who professed to form their higher poetry, at least, on the same models of the antique, and under even greater disadvantages; for there was obviously much less violence done to nature by a nation moulding itself on a contemporary, than by a modern nation forming itself on an ancient. The effects on the Roman and the French have been somewhat analogous. Abandoning natural impulse, they have conformed to rules. Instead of nature they have fashioned themselves on a model, and therefore, instead of originals, have produced copies. In such a system, the merit of the work consisted not so much in free, natural movement, as in artificial refinement of taste; not so much in spontaneous and vigorous impulses, as in outward and superficial beauty of form; in exemption from faults, in fact, rather than positive beauty. One beauty it could not well have, that of vari - |