minds, passionate and truly sensitive dispositions, which are easily stirred by the other senses, are usually indifferent to this.  From this very fact, which apparently places taste below our other senses and makes our inclination towards it the more despicable, I draw just the opposite conclusion—­that the best way to lead children is by the mouth.  Greediness is a better motive than vanity; for the former is a natural appetite directly dependent on the senses, while the latter is the outcome of convention, it is the slave of human caprice and liable to every kind of abuse.  Believe me the child will cease to care about his food only too soon, and when his heart is too busy, his palate will be idle.  When he is grown up greediness will be expelled by a host of stronger passions, while vanity will only be stimulated by them; for this latter passion feeds upon the rest till at length they are all swallowed up in it.  I have sometimes studied those men who pay great attention to good eating, men whose first waking thought is—­What shall we have to eat to-day? men who describe their dinner with as much detail as Polybius describes a combat.  I have found these so-called men were only children of forty, without strength or vigour—­fruges consumere nati.  Gluttony is the vice of feeble minds.  The gourmand has his brains in his palate, he can do nothing but eat; he is so stupid and incapable that the table is the only place for him, and dishes are the only things he knows anything about.  Let us leave him to this business without regret; it is better for him and for us.

It is a small mind that fears lest greediness should take root in the child who is fit for something better.  The child thinks of nothing but his food, the youth pays no heed to it at all; every kind of food is good, and we have other things to attend to.  Yet I would not have you use the low motive unwisely.  I would not have you trust to dainties rather than to the honour which is the reward of a good deed.  But childhood is, or ought to be, a time of play and merry sports, and I do not see why the rewards of purely bodily exercises should not be material and sensible rewards.  If a little lad in Majorca sees a basket on the tree-top and brings it down with his sling, is it not fair that he should get something by this, and a good breakfast should repair the strength spent in getting it.  If a young Spartan, facing the risk of a hundred stripes, slips skilfully into the kitchen, and steals a live fox cub, carries it off in his garment, and is scratched, bitten till the blood comes, and for shame lest he should be caught the child allows his bowels to be torn out without a movement or a cry, is it not fair that he should keep his spoils, that he should eat his prey after it has eaten him?  A good meal should never be a reward; but why should it not be sometimes the result of efforts made to get it.  Emile does not consider the cake I put on the stone as a reward for good running; he knows that the only way to get the cake is to get there first.