With the human race, although I am far from affirming that, even in this age of bronze, filial piety has fled with other virtues from the earth, something of the same unequal barter holds good in the relationship of parent and child. The former gives gold, the latter does not always return silver. Do not deceive yourself. You love your children more than your children love you. I can prove it in three words. They are dearer to you than your own parents. And this inequality of affection is but one more of the beautiful arrangements made by that Providence which bestows good so liberally in proportion to evil. Under the common law of Nature, you are likely to die first, and the aggregate amount of suffering is, therefore, much less than it would be did the course of domestic affection flow the other way. So you toil, and slave, and scheme for the child’s benefit, forgiving its errors, repairing its follies, re-establishing its fortunes, just as, long ago, you used to rebuild with loving patience those houses of cards the urchin blew down with such delight. But, as of all human affections, this, if not the strongest, is certainly the deepest and most abiding, so when wounded does it inflict on our moral being the sharpest and most enduring pain. “Is there any cause in Nature that makes these hard hearts?” says poor King Lear, forced, against his own instincts, to acknowledge the venomed bite of that “serpent’s tooth” with which elsewhere he compares a “thankless child.” I have known men, and women too, accept with courage every sample of misfortune and disgrace—in the language of the prize-ring, “come up smiling” after every kind of knock-down blow—but I cannot remember an instance in which the ingratitude of children has not produced wrinkles and grey hairs, in the proportion of ten to one, for every other sorrow of any description whatever. There is no prospect of alleviation to amuse his fancy—no leavening of pique to arouse his pride. Hurt to the death, the sufferer has scarce manhood enough left to conceal his wounds. In that conflict between man and woman which is perpetually going on, and without which the world, if more comfortable, would undoubtedly be less populous, gold is invariably given for silver with a lavish extravagance, akin to the absurdity of the whole thing.