As may be imagined, Algernon experienced the very worst effects of the spoiling system. Every possible error in education seemed likely to lend its aid in making the child selfish, and the man, if he lived to become one, insignificant and disagreeable. Mrs. Hartland read every treatise which had ever been published on her favourite theme, and endeavoured to put every theory in practice. Like all late converts to any thing from its opposite, she was mad upon the subject of reading. Literature, next to the love of young Algernon, became her ruling passion, and the most tiresome pedantry of language succeeded her natural manner of expressing herself. Exercising a limited capacity on topics new to her understanding, and often above its calibre, our good dame's mind became the strangest mass that could be conceived of ill-digested systems, the principles of which she could not comprehend, but the practical results of which, however contradictory, she attempted to realize. Algernon was to be a miracle of early knowledge; yet his mind was not to be over-wrought. He was to be a prodigy of courage, while every living animal was banished from his presence, lest any injury should reach the child. Of self-denial he was to be a shining example, because Mrs. Hartland found that quality much insisted upon in the works which were now her chief delight; but at the same time her son's spirit was not to be broken by opposition, nor his temper soured by contradiction. From this specimen it is easy to judge of the whole, and the reader has no need of further insight into the chaos which we have sufficiently described. Mr. Hartland, though Greek and Latin had been driven into his cranium, and he was rather proud of his skill in prosody, was a person of still flatter intellect than his wife. Constitutional indolence also added lead to the dullness of his faculties. It is therefore not to be wondered at, that, mistaking his fair partner's activity for genius, and her dictatorial harangues, delivered in words, each of which was as long as a tape-worm, for the profoundest wisdom; he honestly believed that Minerva herself had stepped down from her niche in the celestial Pantheon, to assume the outward similitude of his better half. Now it so happened that, about the period of which we are speaking, a monstrous quarto, with prodigious margins, which professed to impart the newest and most approved method of teaching the young idea how to shoot like a vine along the march of modern intellect, arrived at Henbury-lodge. Mrs. Hartland flew at the prize, and disinterring the volume from the superincumbent mass of brown paper and twine by which it was environed, hastened to her sanctum, and opening at random, after the manner of the Virgilian lots, she chanced to light upon the following paragraph, which struck upon her eye and understanding as especially directed to her peculiar case: