Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/126

 that this pungent element passes harmless and unnoticed through your minds. Books of this sort, (if otherwise not objectionable,) may be listened to by children as mere entertainment. Such are Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Gulliver's Travels:the poison is a kernel within a stone.

Some children, apart from task-work, and without cost of infantile hilarity, may, during the period ending at the completion of the seventh or eighth year, have acquired a considerable amount of general information;others may have learned little or nothing. This disparity is, how-ever, not to be cared for by the teacher. Much less should she labour to lessen it by using any stimulating methods with those who lag behind; for this cannot but be injurious. Whether the child of slow apprehension will always remain in the rear of others, or may hereafter over-take and pass his competitors is uncertain:if he does, then our anxiety has been groundlessif not, fruitless; for this backwardness, in such a case, is the indication of an original intellectual deficiency which no efforts of ours can supply.

Infancy, as I have said, is, emphatically, Nature’s sea-son; and parents may be thoroughly contented, so far, who see their children reach the verge that separates infancy from childhood in blooming healthhappy, in habit and in temper; with transparent dispositions, with a curiosity alive, with a moderate command of language; and, if I may be allowed the figure, with a lap full of the blossoms of philosophy, unsorted and plucked as they have come to hand.

One might even say less than this; and yet affirm, that the period of infancy has passed auspiciously, if only the cheek be ruddy, the eye sparkling, the sympathies prompt and kind, and the habit of implicit obedience thoroughly formed. Happy are the parents who are devising the more