Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/163

Rh my knee while I was teaching her to draw a bird, put an end to the difficulty, by looking up in my face and crying out, 'Why, Sir, Lucilla reads Latin with papa every morning.' I cast a timid eye on Miss Stanley, who, after putting the sugar into the cream-pot, and the tea into the sugar-basin, slid out of the room, beckoning Phœbe to follow her."

So dreadful was it to learn Latin in those days! Yet Phœbe, because she had a superabundance of vivacity and a tincture of romance, was thoroughly taught arithmetic and some amount of mathematics.

On the eighth birthday of one of the younger little girls, which is very prettily celebrated by a tea-drinking in a bower, she gives up all her "little story-books," as the year before she had given up all her gilt books with pictures, "and I am now," she says, "going to read such books as men and women read."

Mr. Stanley allows that a slower child might be kept on these stories a year longer, but he says, "These books are novels in miniature and will lead to the want of novels at full length. The too great profusion of them (what would he say now?) protracts the imbecility of childhood. They arrest the understanding instead of advancing it. They give forwardness without strength."

In all this he was perfectly right, though perhaps too rigid in excluding all youthful literature, but he was