not like praying at a mother’s knee.  The Bellites overlook the difference:  they talk about moral discipline; but wherein does it encourage the imaginative feelings, without which the practical understanding is of little avail, and too apt to become the cunning slave of the bad passions.  I dislike display in everything; above all in education....  The old dame did not affect to make theologians or logicians; but she taught to read; and she practised the memory, often, no doubt, by rote; but still the faculty was improved:  something, perhaps, she explained, and trusted the rest to parents, to masters, and to the pastor of the parish.  I am sure as good daughters, as good servants, as good mothers and wives, were brought up at that time as now, when the world is so much less humble-minded.  A hand full of employment, and a head not above it, with such principles and habits as may be acquired without the Madras machinery, are the best security for the chastity of wives of the lower rank.

Farewell.  I have exhausted my paper.

Your affectionate

W. WORDSWORTH.[34]

[34] Memoirs, vol. ii. pp. 180-3.  G.

* * * * *

Of the Same to the Same,

MY DEAR SIR,

I have taken a folio sheet to make certain minutes upon the subject of
EDUCATION.

As a Christian preacher your business is with man as an immortal being.  Let us imagine you to be addressing those, and those only, who would gladly co-operate with you in any course of education which is most likely to ensure to men a happy immortality.  Are you satisfied with that course which the most active of this class are bent upon?  Clearly not, as I remember from your conversation, which is confirmed by your last letter.  Great principles, you hold, are sacrificed to shifts and expedients.  I agree with you.  What more sacred law of nature, for instance, than that the mother should educate her child? yet we felicitate ourselves upon the establishment of infant-schools, which is in direct opposition to it.  Nay, we interfere with the maternal instinct before the child is born, by furnishing, in cases where there is no necessity, the mother with baby-linen for her unborn child.  Now, that in too many instances a lamentable necessity may exist for this, I allow; but why should such charity be obtruded?  Why should so many excellent ladies form themselves into committees, and rush into an almost indiscriminate benevolence, which precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial?  When the stream has thus been poisoned at its fountain-head, we proceed, by separating, through infant-schools, the mother from the child, and from the rest of the family, disburthening them of all care of the little-one for perhaps eight hours of the day.  To those who think this an evil, but a necessary one, much might be said, in