Some years ago, I met with a modern Job, who said he had read through the large edition of Johnson's Dictionary; and I do regret, with considerable sincerity, having neglected to ask the gentleman whether, in the course of his highly entertaining reading, he met with any word so murdered, butchered, abused, and misunderstood, as the poor polysyllable--education. Many wise people conceive it to signify many multitudes of words--of dead words and of living words, of words without symbols; or, in plain language, they say (or they act as if they said) that education means to make a man's head a portable lexicon of all languages. This is what they term the education classical. Some very wise men go a step farther with the meaning of the term. They shake their heads in contempt at the mere word-men. They mingle more of utility with their idea of the signification. They maintain that education meaneth also certain figures, whereby something is learned concerning pounds and pence, and square inches and solid inches. Here the general idea of education terminates; and this is the education mercantile and mathematical. There are, however, a third class of philosophically-wise men, who affirm that education means the macadamising, on a small scale, of blue stones and grey ones; in describing comets with tails, and planets without tails; in making the invisible gases give forth light in darkness, as the invisible mind lighteth mortality. This is the education scientific. Thus the artillery of all the three is directed against the head. The head is made a gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, while the poor heart is suffered to remain in a state of untutored, uncared-for barbarity and ignorance. And in all this parade, concerning what education in reality imports, it is overlooked, that the heart from whence all evil proceeds--the heart where all good is received--is the soil where the first seeds of education ought to be sown, watered, watched over, pruned, and reared with tenderness. And it is not until the heart has become a sturdy savage, hardened in ignorance, that any attempts are made to curb it within the limits of moral obligation. A more insane idea cannot be conceived by a rational man, than supposing that education begins by learning to know that one letter is called A, a second B, and a third C. Education begins with the first glance which the mother bestows upon her child in answer to its first smile. Before the infant has lisped its first word, the work of education has made progress. The mother is the first, the fondest, the most important and responsible teacher. It is hers to draw out the young soul, which dreams in the smiles and the laughing eyes of her infant; it is hers to subdue, and in gentleness to root up, the first germ of evil that springs into existence; it is hers to unfold, by a thousand ways and a thousand tendernesses, which a mother's heart can only conceive, and a mother's eye only can express,