The larger and simpler objections to book-lore lie on the surface of the case. First. Health, bodily activity, and muscular strength are almost inevitably exchanged in a certain measure for learning. Ardent students are rarely vigorous or agile; and, in the humbler ranks, the loss of ruddy cheeks and stalwart limbs among the children of the peasantry, after schools have been established in a village, has been constantly observed. The close and heated class-rooms in which the poor urchins sit (often in winter with clothes and shoes drenched through with rain or snow) form a bad exchange, in a physical point of view, for the scamper across the common, and the herding of sheep on the mountain. Let us put the case at its lowest. Suppose that, out of three persons who receive an ordinary book-education, one always loses a certain share of health; that he is never so vigorous as he would have been, and is more liable to consumption, dyspepsia, and other woes incident to sedentary humanity, of which again he bequeaths a tendency to his offspring. Here is surely some deduction from the supposed sum of happiness derivable from knowledge. Can all the flowers of rhetoric of all the poets make atonement for the loss of the bounding pulse, the light, free step, the cool brain of perfect health? Secondly. It is not only the health of life’s noon and evening which is more or less compromised by study, but the morning hours of life’s glorious prime, hours such as never can come again on this side heaven, which are given to dull, dog’s-eared books and dreary “copies,” and sordid slates, instead of to cowslips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field, and the flying of the white kite, which soars up into the deep dark blue and carries the young eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing and the child-angels are playing among the rolling clouds of summer. There was once a child called from such dreams to her lesson,—the dreary lesson of learning to spell possibly those very words which her pen is now tracing on this page. The little girl looked at her peacock, sitting in his glory on the balustrade of the old granite steps, with nothing earthly ever to do but to sun himself and eat nice brown bread and call “Pea-ho!” every morning, and the poor child burst into a storm of weeping, and sobbed, “I wish I were a peacock! I wish I were a peacock!” Truly Learning ought to have something to show to compensate for the thousand tears shed in similar anguish! School-rooms are usually the ugliest, dullest, most airless and sunless rooms in the houses where they exist; and yet in these dens we ruthlessly imprison children day after day, year after year, till childhood itself is over, never, never to return. And _then_ the young man or woman may go forth freely among the fields and woods, and find them fair and sweet, but never so fair or so sweet as they were in the wasted years of infancy. Who can lay his hand on his heart, and say that a cowslip or a daffodil