Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/55

44 cultivation of so useful a faculty? Why, for instance, should we not have premiums on a small scale, or other encouragements, in our public seminaries, for the most ingenious and useful inventions? Why should there not be a little museum attached to every school, in which such specimens of ingenuity could be kept? We all know there are few simple pleasures which surpass those derived from the exercise of the faculty of invention; might it not, therefore, be rendered as profitable, as it is amusing, by filling up some of the idle hours of a school-girl's life, and occupying the time too frequently appropriated to mere gossip on subjects by no means calculated to improve the morals, or enlarge the understanding?

The little girl of four years old, seated on a footstool beside her mother, is less happy in the rosy cheeks and shining curls of her new doll, than in the shawl she has herself invented for it, or the bonnet her sister is making. It is the same throughout the whole season of early youth. What is drawing, that most delightful of all amusements to a child, but the exercise of the faculty of invention? So soon as this exercise is reduced to a science, so soon as "perspective dawns," and the juvenile performer is compelled to copy, the charm of the performance in a great measure ceases. It is true, it will be restored a hundredfold when acquaintance with the rules of art shall enable the young student again to design, and with better effect; but during her infancy, she has far more enjoyment in her own red-brick house, with a volume of green smoke issuing from every chimney; and in her own round-bodied man, whose nose is emulous of a beak, and his eye in the centre of his head, than in the most elaborate and finished drawings which a master could lay before her; not, certainly, because she sees more symmetry or likelihood in