“Levana” is peculiarly adapted to cause those who have to do with children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their trust.  It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent.  There are, indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life.  But often it is far otherwise.  Too often, owing to the indolence or immaturity of those who assume the responsibility of parents, the child is cast into a terrible moral perplexity, which is at last moral corruption.  Our duties toward different children are as eclectic and irregular as Nature herself.  There is a need to study and respect the individual character, which claims from parents the daily use of their mental powers,—­and this without a compelling external stimulus.  Now it is easy and not unpleasant to work in a routine.  Schiller used to say that he found the great happiness of life to consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty.  He was in the right.  Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not mechanical.  Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the multiplication of photographs from the teacher’s negative, or, in the words of Richter, “to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble copies of the same pedagogue type.”  But the parent’s office demands courage,—­courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago.  The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery.  Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that “scholastic grossness of barbarous ages” from which we nineteenth-century citizens have by no means escaped.  “We do amiss,” exclaims the eloquent scholar, “to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in one year.”  He denounces this “misspending our prime youth at schools and universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearned.”  We quote the words of Milton rather than those of other eminent men to the same effect, because the poet cannot be accused of objecting to Latin and Greek taught at the right time and in the right way.  A man whose mighty English was always fast anchored to classic bottoms had surely no sentimental preference for modern sciences.  Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge.  But Milton realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the