Page:Books and men.djvu/19

 Rh But for real and uncompromising severity towards children we must turn to France, where for years the traditions of decorum and discipline were handed down in noble families, and generations of boys and girls suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults were magnified into grave delinquencies, and relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du Gueselin were really the wicked little savage that the old chroniclers delight in painting, or whether his rude truculence was not very much like that of naughty and neglected boys the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic significance in those lines of Cuvelier's which describe in barbarous French the lad's remarkable and unprepossessing ugliness:—

Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and swarthy, his better qualities might have shone forth more clearly in early life, and it would not have needed the predictions of a magician