been present with him, that made his influence so comprehensive—a power rarer and more marvelous than the greatest of intellectual gifts. The work on the education of girls, which grew out of the duchess’s request, swelled into a considerable compass, and was first published in 1687. It greatly increased his reputation, revealing a knowledge of child-nature which was most remarkable, and taking advanced ground in many particulars. He showed himself a thoroughgoing reformer, breaking away from the trammels of mediæval education that so long and so disastrously had ruled. There is hardly a page of it which might not afford profitable study for parents at the present day. It still holds a high position among works on this subject. His deep love for children sharpened his keen observation of all that concerned them. He severely reprobated the fashion of leaving them with uneducated persons; for he regarded the earliest years as of unspeakable importance in the formation of character. “Never let them show themselves off,” he says, “but do not be worried by their questions; rather encourage them; they are the most natural opportunities of teaching.” He discovered that children are always watching others, endowed with a great faculty of imitation, so that it is impossible to over-estimate the responsibility of their first guardians. He recognized the necessity of discipline; but if the child has merited disgrace, he pleads that there should be some one to whom she can turn for sympathy, thus showing that he had fathomed that overwhelming sense of loneliness which is one of childhood’s chief terrors. He says: “Make study pleasant, hide it under a show of liberty and amusement. Let the children interrupt their lessons sometimes with little jokes; they need such distraction to rest their brain. Never fear to give them reasons for everything. Never give extra lessons as a punishment.” His method was to treat children as reasonable beings instead of unruly animals whom it was necessary to coerce against their will; and his object was to make them regard learning as a privilege and delight, not as a penance forced upon them by the tyranny of their elders. He made religion the groundwork of all education, but he would have it guarded against superstition. He stood strongly for the true, best rights of women, counting their occupations no less important to the public than those of men. He would give the young girl useful solid tastes that would fill her mind with real interests and prevent idle curiosity and the dissipations of romance-reading. “Give them something to manage, on condition that they give you an account of it,” he pleads; “they will be delighted with the confidence, for it gives an incredible pleasure to the young when one begins to rely upon them and admit them to serious concerns.”