In the great houses, or those of middle station, a nurse was employed, after satisfying moral and medical tests—a stout respectable person from twenty to thirty years of age. She entered the family, and there represented the life of nature, occupying, to the end of her days if she pleased, a privileged situation about her foster-child. Not infrequently, we must admit, the husband was heartily at one with the ancient principles, and would very readily have authorised his wife to dispense with a nurse. But then some fair friend would take him aside and put him to shame: “What, he actually means to impose that bondage upon his wife! Does he not see already how worn out she is! Ah, he means to compel her to it, and we very well know why, the miser! Really, who would have thought a husband had a soul black enough to inflict such thraldom on a woman, who, thank God, still possesses some attractions!” And in that last word there is a world of meaning. A wife of fifteen or sixteen years, after a year or two of marriage, had every reason to think that life was not over for her, and that she still had need of her beauty. Further, etiquette, and in princely houses even politics, intervened: the convenances were opposed to a mother taking too personal a part in her children’s upbringing, for in that case it would not have been worth while to own a whole regiment of servants. There they were, however, and their allotted functions must be respected; and so the mother had to limit her solicitude to a careful superintendence. Nevertheless, many women ventured to set etiquette at defiance. The Princess of Orange appears just like any other woman when she writes so joyfully to her sister-in-law, Anne of France, that she has just seen her “fair niece,” who called her “mummy and daddy,” and “gave her as sweet a welcome in her little baby-talk as such a baby could.” So, too, Louise of Savoy, when, in 1520, in the midst of preoccupations of every kind, she recalls that, thirty-five years before, Francis I. had cut his first teeth quite unnoticed, “and was not the least little bit ill.” Up to the age of seven, the children remained under their mother’s fostering wing, in a pure state of vegetation. Moralists and physicians taught that they must be allowed to develop freely, without having to learn anything, and without bothering about anything but good air and a regular life. The grand principle of education is to let children grow up of themselves, alone, unaided, without grand theories, without dogmatism; and to habituate them to rely on nothing—neither neither fear nor love; to be themselves; and this from the very earliest infancy. Every being entering life brings to it his own individuality for development; he has the free use of his faculties; he observes much, instinctively using eyes and ears, and his soul reflects his environment like a celestial mirror. So the mother has only to help him, direct him, set him good examples.