Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/156

 should not, at any rate, be less wonderful than other people's bantlings. When his eldest son had reached the mature age of six, we find him writing to Miss Hannah More and Mrs. Chapone, asking what books he shall give the poor infant to read, and explaining to these august ladies his own theories of education. Mrs. Chapone, with an enthusiasm worthy of Mrs. Blimber, replies that she sympathizes with the rare delight it must be to him to teach little William Latin; and that she feels jealous for the younger children, who, being yet in the nursery, are denied their brother's privileges. When the boy is ten, Sir William reads to him "The Faerie Queene," and finds that he grasps "the beauty of the description and the force of the allegory." At eleven he has "an animated relish for Ovid and Virgil." And the more the happy father has to tell about the precocity of his child, the more Mrs. Chapone stimulates and confounds him with tales of other children's prowess. When she hears that the "sweet Boy" is to be introduced, at five, to the English classics, she writes at once about a little girl, who, when "rather younger than