"He had learned all his catechism at two years and a half old; he could perfectly read any of the English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the first three languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns, conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out Puerelis, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius' Janua; begun himself to write legibly and had a strong passion for Greek. The number of verses he could recite was prodigious, and what he remembered of the parts of plays which he would also act; and, when seeing a Plautus in one's hand, he asked what book it was, and being told it was comedy and too difficult for him, he wept for sorrow. Strange was his apt and ingenious application of fables and morals, for he had read Æsop; he had a wonderful disposition to mathematics, having by heart divers propositions of Euclid that were read to him in play, and he would make lines and demonstrate them. He had learned by heart divers sentences in Latin and Greek which on occasion he would produce even to wonder. He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or childish in any thing he said or did." Of course this is not given as an ordinary education of an every-day child. It is an extraordinary record of a very unusual child, but it shows what an intelligent child could be permitted to do. Evelyn was a man of great good sense; not the sort of man who would force a child; indeed he averred that he abhorred precocity. But in truth it was a time in England's history when such a child could easily be overstimulated, when public events, the course of history, was so exciting that every child of keen wit must have felt the effects. The crowding of young minds did not end with the seventeenth century. A striking example of the desire to press education is found in the letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, beginning in 1738, when the boy was not six years old. The language and subjects would be deemed to-day suited only to mature minds. In 1741 the father wrote:--