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in a community, crimes multiply when or that conduct. Aim, therefore, to dithere is no certain administration of just-minish the amount of parental governice; so in a family, an immense increase ment as fast as you can substitute for it in of transgressions results from a hesitating your child's mind that self-government or irregular infliction of penalties. A arising from a foresight of results. In weak mother, who perpetually threatens infancy a considerable amount of absoluand rarely performs who makes rules in tism is necessary. A three-year-old urchin haste and repents of them at leisure-who playing with an open razor, can not be treats the same offense now with severity allowed to learn by the discipline of conand now with leniency, according as the sequences; for the consequences may, in passing humor dictates, is laying up such a case, be too serious. But as intelmiseries both for herself and her children. ligence increases, the number of instances She is making herself contemptible in calling for peremptory interference may their eyes; she is setting them an example be, and should be, diminished; with the of uncontrolled feelings; she is encourag- view of gradually ending them as maing them to transgress by the prospect of turity is approached. All periods of probable impunity; she is entailing end- transition are dangerous; and the most less squabbles and accompanying damage dangerous is the transition from the to her own temper and the tempers of her restraint of the family circle to the nonlittle ones; she is reducing their minds to restraint of the world. Hence the ima moral chaos, which after-years of bitter portance of pursuing the policy we advoexperience will with difficulty bring into cate; which, alike by cultivating a child's order. Better even a barbarous form of faculty of self-restraint, by continually indomestic government carried out consist- creasing the degree in which it is left to ently, than a humane one inconsistently its self-restraint, and by so bringing it, carried out. Again we say, avoid coërcive step by step, to a state of unaided selfmeasures whenever it is possible to do so; restraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden but when you find despotism really neces- and hazardous change from externallygoverned youth to internally-governed sary, be despotic in good earnest. maturity.

Bear constantly in mind the truth that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you can not too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. This it is which makes the system of discipline by natural consequences, so especially appropriate to the social state which we in England have now reached. Under early, tyrannical forms of society, when one of the chief anger evils the citizen had to fear was the of his superiors, it was well that during childhood parental vengeance should be a predominant means of government. But now that the citizen has little to fear from any one-now that the good or evil which he experiences throughout life is mainly that which in the nature of things results from his own conduct, it is desirable that from his first years he should begin to learn, experimentally, the good or evil consequences which naturally follow this

Let the history of your domestic rule typify, in little, the history of our political rule: at the outset, autocratic control, where control is really needful; by and by an incipient constitutionalism, in which the liberty of the subject gains some express recognition; successive extensions of this liberty of the subject; gradually ending in parental abdication.

Do not regret the exhibition of considerable self-will on the part of your children. It is the correlative of that diminished coërciveness so conspicuous in modern education. The greater tendency to assert freedom of action on the one side, corresponds to the smaller tendency They both to tyrannize on the other. indicate an approach to the system of discipline we contend for, under which children will be more and more led to rule themselves by the experience of natural consequences; and they are both the accompaniments of our more advanced social state. The independent English boy is the father of the independent English man; and you can not have the last without the first. German teachers say that they had rather manage a dozen

German boys than one English one. Shall we, therefore, wish that our boys had the manageableness of the German ones, and with it the submissiveness and political serfdom of adult Germans? Or shall we not rather tolerate in our boys those feelings which make them free men, and modify our methods accordingly?

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has been established from the beginning, becomes doubly difficult when a wrong state of feeling has to be set right. Not only will you have constantly to analyze the motives of Or the motives of your children, but you will have to analyze your own motives-to discriminate between those internal suggestions springing from a true parental solicitude, and those which spring from your own selfishness, from your love of ease, from your lust of dominion. And then, more trying still, you will have not only to detect, but to curb these baser impulses. In brief, you will have to carry on your own higher education at the same time that you are educating your children. Intellectually you must cultivate to good purpose that most complex of subjects-human nature and its laws, as exhibited in your children, in yourself, and in the world. Morally, you must keep in constant exercise your higher feelings, and restrain your lower. It is a truth yet remaining to be recognized, that the last stage in the mental development of each man and woman is to be reached only through the proper discharge of the parental duties. And when this truth is recognized, it will be seen how admirable is the ordination in virtue of which human beings are led by their strongest affections to subject themselves to a discipline which they would else elude.

Lastly, always remember that to educate rightly is not a simple and easy thing, but a complex and extremely difficult thing: the hardest task which devolves upon adult life. The rough and ready style of domestic government is indeed practicable by the meanest and most uncultivated intellects. Slaps and sharp words are penalties that suggest themselves alike to the least reclaimed barbarian and the most stolid peasant. Even brutes can use this method of discipline; as you may see in the growl and half-bite with which a bitch will check a too-exigeant puppy. But if you would carry out with success a rational and civilized system, you must be prepared for considerable mental exertion - for some study, some ingenuity, some patience, some self-control. You will have habitually to trace the consequences of conduct to consider what are the results which in adult life follow certain kinds of acts; and then you will have to devise methods by which parallel results shall be entailed on the parallel acts of your children. You will daily be called upon to analyze the motives of juvenile conduct: you must distinguish between acts that are really good, and those which, though externally simulating them, proceed from inferior impulses; while you must be ever on your guard against the cruel mistake not unfrequently made, of translating neutral acts into transgressions, or as cribing worse feelings than were entertained. You must more or less modify your method to suit the disposition of each child; and must be prepared to make further modifications as each child's disposition enters on a new phase. Your faith will often be taxed to maintain the requisite perseverance in a course which seems to produce little or no effect. Especially if you are dealing with children who have been wrongly treated, you must be prepared for a lengthened trial of patience before succeeding with better methods; seeing that that which is not easy even where a right state of feeling

While some will probably regard this conception of education as it should be, with doubt and discouragement, others will, we think, perceive in the exalted ideal which it involves, evidence of its truth. That it can not be realized by the impulsive, the unsympathetic, and the short-sighted, but demands the higher attributes of human nature, they will see to be evidence of its fitness for the more advanced states of humanity. Though it calls for much labor and self-sacrifice,, they will see that it promises an abund ant return of happiness, immediate and remote. They will see that while in its injurious effects on both parent and child a bad system is twice cursed, a good system is twice blessed-it blesses him that trains and him that's trained.

It will be seen that we have said nothing in this paper about the transcendental distinction between right and wrong, of which wise men know so little, and children nothing. All thinkers are agreed that we may find the criterion of

right in the effect of actions, if we do not find the rule there; and that is sufficient for the purpose we have had in view. Nor have we introduced the religious element. We have confined our inquirers to a nearer, and a much more neglected

Our

field, though a very important one. readers may supplement our thoughts in any way they please; we are only concerned that they should be accepted as far as they go.

From the Westminster Review.

RECOLLECTIONS OF SHELLEY AND BYRON.*

MR. TRELAWNY has done well in giving this manly and carelessly written little volume to the world: it will at least revive the personal memory of two Englishmen who, though long dead, can never be altogether of the past. Without telling much of either with which we were not previously acquainted, the information communicated is the result of intimate personal knowledge, and, gathered during the intervals of a familiar acquaintance, comes out with such freshness and vigor, that it possesses nearly all the merit of novelty; and the striking features of character are brought forward in much stronger relief, than in the tame and wearisome biography of which one at least was the victim. It is the least enviable appanage of genius that it perpetuates by its own lustre those faults and weaknesses which repose in the graves of meaner men; the biographer, even though a friend, can not ignore these; and while he avoids giving them undue prominence, can not forget that truth has its claims, as well as genius.

We recognize Shelley in these sketches as he appeared in his works-the gentle, guileless, noble soul who persisted in putting himself wrong with the world, and who rashly and fearlessly launched his indignant sarcasm at the cant and bigotry and selfishness of society, without indicating any rational plan for its regeneration. Had he possessed a friend suffi

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ciently influential and judicious to have delayed the publication of "Queen Mab" for ten years, Shelley's lot might have been far different. How could he reasonably expect forbearance from a society whose creed, by a portion of it sincerely venerated, he so recklessly outraged? The wisest man feels himself to be an infant if he attempts to understand the doctrine of Original Sin; and yet it was this problem that the youthful and inexperienced Shelley dared to grapple in his poem, in a spirit of unparalleled rashness and presumption.

Mr. Trelawny was for some time, as is well known, the companion of Byron and Shelley during their voluntary exile in Italy. Too manly and too honest to believe in the justice of the tremendous calumnies which drove Shelley from England, and deprived him of his children, he was yet, like all who ever came to personal knowledge of Shelley, astonished to find what manner of man was this of whom all who did not know him spoke so ill. We see him as Mr. Trelawny saw him, more than thirty years since, in the following scene:

"Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a although I could hardly believe, as I looked at tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and his flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies, he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment; was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world? excommunicated by the fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by a grim Lord Chancellor, discarded by

every member of his family, and denounced by the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I could not believe it; it must be a hoax. He was habited like a boy, in black jacket and trowsers, which he seemed to have outgrown, or his tailor, as is the custom, had shamefully stinted him in his 'sizings.."

His wife's personal appearance, née Godwin, the authoress of "Frankenstein,"

is sketched on the same occasion:

"The most striking feature in her face was her calm, gray eyes. She was rather under the English standard of woman's height, very fair

and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude; like Shelley, though in a minor degree, she had the power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old writers. Neither of them used obsolete or foreign words."

The artless and natural character of Shelley endeared him to the few who had the privilege of personal knowledge; and, as appears from these sketches, contrasted very favorably with the artificial manner and undisguised egotism of Byron-but in truth the latter was only himself when in the stillness of night he was engaged in composition, and absorbed into forgetfulness of his physical deficiencies and his chronic starvation.

Mr. Trelawny gives a more minute and circumstantial detail than has previously appeared, of the miserable circumstances attending the death of Shelley and of his companion Mr. Williams. The letter which the latter had dispatched to his wife on the previous day, informing her and Mrs. Shelley of their proposed return to the home in the Gulf of Spezzia, where both ladies were anxiously expecting their husbands, who had been unexpectedly detained in Leghorn, is surely, breathing as it does the warmest affection, destined to be so sadly quenched, the most touching document ever preserved from oblivion. The condition of the two bodies, when thrown ashore after many days, was such as to make incremation the most eligible means of disposing of the remains; and this proceeding was conducted in both cases-for they were not burned together -with great care by Mr. Trelawny, in an iron furnace constructed on purpose. Lord Byron may have given way to some apparent levity on the occasion; but it was but to conceal an emotion he deeply felt, but which he lacked the moral cour

age to evince publicly. Shelley's toy skiff, the Don Juan, in which they embaaked with inauspicious omens on that melancholy evening, does not appear to have been capsized during the gale, notwithstanding the ominous remark of the Genoese mate of the Bolivar about the superfluous gaff-topsail; but from her damaged condition, when afterwards weighed by the exertions of Captain Roberts, was probably run down by some Italian speronare scudding before the gale.

Shelley stands far higher in the opinions of his countrymen now than when his gentle spirit and ardent love of truth were quenched forever in the waves of the Mediterranean. It is not necessary to vindicate his character from calumnies which are long forgotten; but if there are any who, not knowing, yet care to know, how gentle, how generous, how accomplished, and how unselfish he was, it is written in this late testimony of one who knew him well, and knowing him well in life, had the hard task assigned him of communicating his premature death to the despairing widow.

Shelley formed a correct and candid estimate of his own writings when he said: "They are little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and just-they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be." He read too much, was altogether too much imbued with the ideas of others. His were the azure and vermilion clouds that float in insubstantial beauty through the atmosphere of an Alpine sunrise, rather than the enduring creation of grandeur, strength, and beauty which we recognize in a great poem.

After Shelley's death, Byron moved from Pisa to Albaro, near Genoa, where he occupied the Casa Saluzzi; but the loss of one whom he must have looked on as a friend, and respected for the nobleness of his nature, together with the failure of the Liberal, which could hardly succeed under the auspices of two such editors as Hunt and himself, made him dissatisfied with an inactive existence, and he looked round for some field, not of enterprise, but excitement. quite unfit constitutionally to encounter real fatigue or privation; he had courage, no doubt; contempt of life, and tameless pride; but possessed neither the physical nor mental robustness to see in well-plan

He was

"It is as though the fiends prevailed
Against the seraphs they assailed,
And fixed on heavenly thrones should dwell
The freed inheritors of hell-

So fair the scene, so formed for joy,
So cursed the tyrants that destroy."

ned, and long-sustained action a career of | then, as before ours now, when we look distinction or usefulness. After much on Naples: wavering, he determined to revisit Greece, and bought a vessel to convey himself and his lares to the land which was to witness his own dissolution, and thus to derive from him another of its many claims to classic interest. The choice of his vessel seems to have been decided more by motives of economy than from any regard to its nautical capabilities, and when its defects were indicated by a more critical judgment than his own, he was consoled by the reflection that he had got it a bargain.

It was on the 13th of July, 1823, that he sailed in the Hercules from Genoa with Mr. Trelawny, Count Gamba, and an Italian crew; slowly they stood eastward up the Mediterranean, and so wretched were the sailing qualities of the vessel, that even with a fair wind the average progress was but twenty miles a day. They put into Leghorn, which they quitted for Cephalonia, on the 23d of July.

"On coming near Lonza, a small islet con

verted into one of its many prisons by the Neapolitan government, I said to Byron: There is a sight that would curdle the blood of a poet laureate.' 'If Southey were here,' he answered, he would sing hosannahs to the Bourbons. Here kings and governors are only the jailers and hangmen of the detestable Aus

trian barbarians. What dolts and drivelers

the people are, to submit to such universal despotism! I should like to see from this our ark, the world submerged, and all the rascals drowning on it like rats.' I put a pencil and paper into his hand, saying: 'Perpetuate your curses on tyranny,' etc. He readily took the paper and set to work. I walked the deck, and prevented his being disturbed. . . . After a long spell he said: 'You think it is as easy to write poetry as to smoke a cigar look, it's only doggerel. Extemporizing verse is nonsense; Poetry is a distinct faculty-it won't come when called. You may as well whistle for a wind; a Pythoness was primed when put into the tripod. I must chew the cud before I write. I have thought over most of my subjects for years before writing a line.' time I can't forget the theme; but for this Greek business I should have been at Naples writing a fifth canto of Childe Harold, expressly to give vent to my detestation of the Austrian tyranny in Italy.""

Give me

But his own earlier lines might well have recurred both to the poet and to his biographer, for surely none could be more applicable to the scene before their eyes

"The poet had an antipathy to every thing scientific; maps and charts offended him. . Buildings the most ancient or modern he was as indifferent to as he was to painting, sculpture, or music. But all natural objects, or changes in the elements, he was generally the first to point out, and the last to lose sight of." -P. 187. [The italics are our own.]

Mr. Trelawny echoes an old remark of Baron Macaulay's, (Warren Hastings,) which every one's experience will confirm, as to the effect of a sea voyage in testing temper and character, and says: "I never was on shipboard with a better companion than Byron: he was generally cheerful, gave no trouble, assumed no authority, uttered no complaints, and did not interfere with the working of the ship; when appealed to, he always answered: Do as you like." There was much enjoyment of life on board this dull sailer, the Hercules; and the voyage, if protracted, was under clear, warm skies, and in smooth water. One scene narrated has a grimly comic element: apropos to some remark, Byron exclaimed: "Women, you should say: if we had a woman-kind on board, she would set us all at loggerheads, and make a mutiny; would she not, captain ?" "I wish my old woman were here," replied the skipper; "she would make you as comfortable in my cabin at sea as your own wife would in her parlor on shore." Byron started, and looked savage. The skipper went on unconscious, etc., etc.

"I

Byron had written an autobiography, it seems, conceived in manly, straightforward fashion-in a vigorous, fearless style, and was apparently truthful as regarded himself. It was subsequently intrusted to Mr. Moore, as literary exethe advice of others, it would seem. cutor, and by him suppressed, following told Murray Lady Byron was to read the manuscript if she wished it, and requested she would add, omit, or make any comments she pleased, now, or when it was going through the press." (P. 197.) They reached Zante and Cephalonia at last; and after an absence of eleven

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