‘Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, We love the play-place of our early days; The scene is touching, and the heart is stone That feels not at that sight, and feels at none. The wall on which we tried our graving skill, The very name we carved subsisting still, The bench on which we sat while deep employed, Though mangled, hacked, and hewed, not yet destroyed; The little ones unbuttoned, glowing hot, Playing our games, and on the very spot, As happy as we once, to kneel and draw The chalky ring, and knuckle down at taw; To pitch the ball into the grounded hat, Or drive it devious with a dextrous pat; The pleasing spectacle at once excites Such recollections of our own delights, That viewing it, we seem almost t’ obtain Our innocent sweet simple years again. This fond attachment to the well-known place, Whence first we started into life’s long race, Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway, We feel it e’en in age, and at our latest day.’ Probably we pursue an insoluble problem in seeking a suitable education for a morbidly melancholy mind. At first it seems a dreadful thing to place a gentle and sensitive nature in contact, in familiarity, and even under the rule of coarse and strong buoyant natures. Nor should this be in general attempted. The certain result is present suffering, and the expected good is remote and disputable. Nevertheless, it is no artificial difficulty which we here encounter—none which we can hope by educational contrivances to meet or vanquish. The difficulty is in truth the existence of the world. It is the fact, that by the constitution of society the bold, the vigorous, and the buoyant, rise and rule; and that the weak, the shrinking, and the timid, fall and serve. In after-life, in the actual commerce of men, even too in those quiet and tranquil pursuits in which a still and gentle mind should seem to be under the least disadvantage, in philosophy and speculation, the strong and active, who have confidence in themselves and their ideas, acquire and keep dominion. It is idle to expect that this will not give great pain—that the shrinking and timid, who are often just as ambitious as others, will not repine—that the rough and strong will not often consciously inflict grievous oppression—will not still more often, without knowing it, cause to more tremulous minds a refined suffering which their coarser texture could never experience, which it does not sympathise with, nor comprehend. Some time in life—it is but a question of a very few years at most—this trial must be undergone. There may be a short time, more or less, of gentle protection and affectionate care, but the leveret grows old—the world waits at the gate—the hounds are ready, and the huntsman too, and there is need of strength, and pluck, and speed. Cowper indeed, himself, as we have remarked, does not, on an attentive examination, seem