The section, "Of Behaviour at School," made Kenneth and Christopher, the two Westminsters, very merry:-- "Behave to your teachers with humility and to your schoolfellows with respect." "Make your bow or courtesy when you enter, and walk straight to your seat." "Never quarrel at school, for it shows idleness and bad temper." "When the master speaks to you, rise up to hear him, and look him in the face as he speaks, with modesty and attention. Begin not to answer him before he has done speaking, then bow to him with respect and answer him with humility." "If you have occasion to complain of a school-fellow, first speak to him softly and desire him to desist. If he will not, then rise up and wait an opportunity; and when the master's or usher's eye is upon you bow and say softly, and in a few words, what your complaint is." This was too much. "Did they really ever behave like that?" Kenneth asked. "I suppose so," I said. "This is a book that seems to have been popular, for it has gone into many editions." Kenneth stated himself to be jiggered. I went on:-- "If you see your play-fellows do anything wrong, tell them of it." "Return a jest with another, but always with good manners." "Never call anyone by a reproachful name." It is odd to think that anybody at any period could seriously have set down such mandates; but there they are in black and white--a kind of Sermon on the Mount by a dancing-master. It is when one reads counsels of something more than perfection--counsels of pedantic priggishness, shall we say--to natural, healthy children, that one realises how necessary compromise is to daily life and how far removed perfection is from the natural human being. This little book may of course have been, even in its own day, excessively proper and inhuman: but I have seen others hardly less so. We have to remember that children, as creatures of delight, are of comparatively recent discovery. They were for many years merely the young of man, to be broken in like dogs. Not even the men of imagination knew any better. No child was, as far as I have read, thought a fit subject for introduction into a novel until Henry Brooke's _Fool of Quality_, and even there, although there are the high spirits of the two schoolboys, there are no infant-like tendernesses and natural gaiety. A few poets had praised the young very gaily--Prior and Ambrose Phillips, for example--but rather as courtiers than human beings: it was left for Blake first to see that the child was not merely the young of man but a separate creature, filled with fugitive and exquisite charm. To-day, of course, we are overdoing the discovery. The child is set in the midst, and we sit around worshipping and applauding and vying with each other in detecting and celebrating darlingnesses. I went on to the section on "Behaviour to Parents and the Family ":--