No suasion will make you “sit up” if you are an oyster; no, nor even if you are a cod. You must have a backbone, and your backbone must have learned its work before sitting up is possible to you. No doubt the human oyster may grow a backbone, and the human cod may get into the way of sitting up, and some day, perhaps, we shall know of the heroic endeavours made by schoolmaster and mistress to prop up, and haul up, and draw up, and anyhow keep alert and sitting up, creatures whose way it is to sprawl. Sometimes the result is surprising; they sit up in a row with the rest and look all right; even when the props are removed they keep to the trick of sitting up for awhile. The schoolmaster begins to rub his hands, and the parents say, “I told you so. Didn’t I always say Jack would come right in the end?” Wait a bit. The end is not yet. The habits of school, as of military life, are more or less mechanical. The early habits are vital; reversion to these takes place, and Jack sprawls as a man just as he sprawled as a child, only more so. Various social props keep him up; he has the wit to seem to “sit up”; he is lovable and his life is respectable; and no one suspects that this easy-going Mr. John Brown is a failure; a man who had the elements of greatness in him, and might have been of use in the world had he been put under discipline from his infancy. Sprawling is an ugly word, but the attitude we are thinking of is by no means always inelegant. Scott gives a delightful illustration of one kind of mental sprawling in “Waverley”:--