“When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of its parents,” then, and then only, their rigid judge considers that some little inadvertences and follies may be safely passed over. Nor would she permit one of them to “be chid or beaten twice for the same fault,”--a stately assumption of justice that speaks volumes for the iron-bound code by which they were brought into subjection. Most children nowadays are sufficiently amazed if a tardy vengeance overtake them once, and a second penalty for the same offense is something we should hardly deem it necessary to proscribe. Yet nothing is more evident than that Mrs. Wesley was neither a cruel nor an unloving mother. It is plain that she labored hard for her little flock, and had their welfare and happiness greatly at heart. In after years they with one accord honored and revered her memory. Only it is not altogether surprising that her husband, whose ministerial functions she occasionally usurped, should have thought his wife at times almost too able a ruler, or that her more famous son should stand forth as the great champion of human depravity. He too, some forty years later, promulgated a system of education as unrelaxing in its methods as that of his own childhood. In his model school he forbade all association with outside boys, and would receive no child unless its parents promised not to take it away for even a single day, until removed for good. Yet after shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of propriety, and carefully guarding them from every breath of evil, he ended by expelling part as incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that the remainder were very “uncommonly wicked.” The principle of solitary training for a child, in order to shield it effectually from all outside influences, found other and vastly different advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and Miss Edgeworth’s Practical Education, a book which must have driven over-careful and scrupulous mothers to the verge of desperation. In it they are solemnly counseled never to permit their children to walk or talk with servants, never to let them have a nursery or a school-room, never to leave them alone either with each other or with strangers, and never to allow them to read any book of which every sentence has not been previously examined. In the matter of books, it is indeed almost impossible to satisfy such searching critics. Even Mrs. Barbauld’s highly correct and righteous little volumes, which Lamb has anathematized as the “blights and blasts of all that is human,” are not quite harmless in their eyes. Evil lurks behind the phrase “Charles wants his dinner,” which would seem to imply that Charles must have whatever he desires; while to say flippantly, “The sun has gone to bed,” is to incur the awful odium of telling a child a deliberate untruth.