pay the surliest housekeepers into patience until he had seen it to heart's content; if none of these, I was allowed to look at Guido, Carlo Dolce-or the more skilful masters of the Dutch school-Cuyp, Teniers, Hobbima, Wouvermans; but never any second-rate or doubtful examples. I wonder how many of the lower middle class are now capable of going through a nobleman's house, with judgment of this kind; and yet with entirely unenvious and reverent delight in the splendour of the abode of the supreme and beneficent being who allows them thus to enter his paradise? If there were no nobleman's house to be seen, there was certainly, in the course of the day's journey, some ruined castle or abbey; some celebrated village church, or stately cathedral. We had always unstinted time for these; and if I was at disadvantage because neither my father nor mother could tell me enough history to make the buildings authoritatively interesting, I had at least leisure and liberty to animate them with romance in my own fashion. I am speaking, however, now, of matters relating to a more advanced age than that to which I have yet brought myself -age in which all these sights were only a pleasant amazement to me, and panoramic apocalypse of a lovely world. Up to that age, at least, I cannot but hope that my readers will agree with me in thinking the tenour of my life happy, and the modes of my education, on the whole, salutary. Admitting them to have been so, I would now question farther; and, I imagine, such question cannot but occur to my readers' minds, also,—how far education, and felicities, of the same kind, may be attainable for young people in general. Let us consider, then, how many conditions must meet; and how much labour must have been gone through, both by servile and noble persons, before this little jaunty figure, seated on its box of clothes, can trot through its peaceful day of mental development. I. A certain number of labourers in Spain, living on dry bread and onions, must have pruned and trodden grapes;— cask-makers, cellarmen, and other functionaries attending on them. II. Rough sailors must have brought the wine into the London Docks. III. My father and his clerks must have done a great deal of arithmetical and epistolary work, before my father could have profit enough from the wine to pay for our horses, and our dinner. IV. The tailor must have given his life to the dull business of making clothes-the wheelwright and carriage-maker to their woodwork-the smith to his buckles and springs-the postilion to his riding-the horse-breeder and breaker to the cattle in his field and stable,-before I could make progress in this pleasant manner, even for a single stage. V. Sundry English Kings and Barons must have passed. their lives in military exercises, and gone to their deaths in military practices, to provide me with my forenoons' entertainments in ruined castles; or founded the great families whose servants were to be my hosts. VI. Vandyck and Velasquez, and many a painter before them, must have spent their lives in learning and practising their laborious businesses. VII. Various monks and abbots must have passed their lives in pain, with fasting and prayer; and a large company of stonemasons occupied themselves in their continual service, in order to provide me, in defect of castles and noblemen's seats, with amusement in the way of abbeys and cathedrals. How far, then, it remains to be asked, supposing my education in any wise exemplary, can all these advantages be supplied by the modern school board, to every little boy born in the prosperous England of this day? And much more in that glorious England of the future; in which there will be no abbeys, (all having been shaken down, as my own sweet Furness is fast being, by the luggage trains); no castles, except such as may have been spared to be turned into gaols, like that of" time-honoured Lancaster," also in my own neighbourhood; no parks, because Lord Derby's patent steam agriculture will have cut down all the trees; no lords, nor dukes, because modern civilization won't be Lorded over, nor Led |