Southey was really stating this idea when he wrote in “The Doctor” that “A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years or a kitten rising six weeks,” though to our mind the presence of both would be the ideal arrangement, since the kitten would take the place of the puppy previously mentioned, for the child to play with. If we wish to support age kindly, it is only to be done by surrounding ourselves with youth. And the laughter of children, surely the purest and sweetest of all music, will strike a responsive chord in our breasts, and will enable us to live through the years that wither, in all harmony and contentment. THE FOLLY OF EDUCATION OF all the intellectual exercises with which we solace the idle hours that we devote to thought, none is more engaging and at the same time perplexing than that of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the age in which we live. Naturally the difficulty lies, not in lack of materials on which to base an impression—indeed, we are embarrassed by the quantity of evidence that accumulates to our hand—but in the fact that it is hard to see things in true perspective when they are very near to the observer. The yet unborn historians of the present era will doubtless lack much of our knowledge, but they will be able to unravel in the quietude of their studies the tangled threads and stubborn knots that writhe beneath our fingers with the perpetual changeableness and uneasy animation of life itself. But if it is impossible to write dispassionately of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades and musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of the wallpaper of the room in which we write, it is always open to the student of life to fall back on impressionism, the form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a loaded phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen and honeyed words. And the brutal method is apt to prove the more efficacious, as with that frail sex that kisses, so I am told, the masculine hand that grants the accolade of femininity in that blessed state of bruiser and bruised that is Nature’s highest conception of the relationship of the two sexes. While science greets the corpse with incomprehensible formulæ and the conscientious artist gropes for his note-book of epithets to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty nose with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the dog is dead indeed.