of two little peasant girls, Lizzie and Jenny, the one five, and the other seven. They are lost in the storm; and day blackens into night before traces of them are discoverable. At last, "one little voice" answers the father's agonised cry: 'tis Lizzie's, as she crouches, white as death, beside a swollen stream within which her sister lies dead: the eyes of the poor survivor fixed like stone on that "dark object underneath, washed by the turbid water"—" one arm and hand stretched out, and rigid grown, grasping as in the death-gripe, Jenny's frock." Conveyed home, and put to bed, the child deliriously dwells on the horrors of the bygone day:

All night long from side to side she turned,
Piteously plaining like a wounded dove,

With now and then the murmur, "She won't move."
And lo! when morning, as in mockery, bright
Shone on that pillow-passing strange the sight—
The
young head's raven hair was streaked with white!

VOL. I.

པ་

5

ABOUT DUNCES AT SCHOOL, WHO BECOME

PRIZEMEN IN AFTER LIFE.

A Chapter of Enstances.

It is an old remark, as Hazlitt says, that boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world.

Lord Chesterfield received with considerable gratification from his "Dear Boy" a theme in three languages-which performance his lordship, with paternal complacency, showed to some men of letters at the Bath, at the same time telling them the composer's age and standing: of course they expressed a high degree of pleasurable surprise; and said that if the lad went on at this rate for but four or five years longer, he would distinguish himself extremely. "But then they added (for I must tell you all)," the earl writes to his son, "that they observed many forward boys stop short on a sudden, and turn out great blockheads at last." Poor young Stanhope, in after life, is commonly believed to have been one of these.

Hazlitt accounts for the decline and fall, in many such cases, by contending that, in point of fact, the things which a boy is set to learn at school, and on

which his success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind), he argues, is the chief faculty called into play, in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, &c., so that he who has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish attention, will make the most forward schoolboy. A lad with a sickly constitution, and no very active mind, Hazlitt goes on to say,—one who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy it for himself, will generally be at the head of his form. "An idler at school, on the other hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a breath, and who had rather chase a ball or a butterfly, feel the open air in his face, look at the fields or the sky, follow a winding path, or enter with eagerness into all the little conflicts and interests of his acquaintances and friends, than doze over a musty spelling-book, repeat barbarous distichs after his master, sit so many hours pinioned to a writing-desk, and receive his reward for the loss of time and pleasure in paltry prize-medals at Christmas and Midsummer." There is, indeed, Hazlitt allows, a degree of stupidity which prevents children from

learning the usual lessons, or ever arriving at these puny academic honours; but what passes for stupidity he asserts to be much oftener a want of interest, of a sufficient motive to fix the attention, and force a reluctant application to the dry and unmeaning pursuits of school-learning. The best capacities are as much above this drudgery, as the dullest are beneath it. Our men of the greatest genius have not been most distinguished for their acquirements at school or at the university."

re

Dunce Walter Scott was, and Dunce he would ever remain, was Professor Dalzell's estimate and prediction of young Walter's powers and promise. The Greek Professor took the deepest interest in the progress of his class, one of whom came to call on Scott in St. George's-square, to remonstrate with him on the "silliness of his conduct" in professing contempt for Greek, and resolving not to learn it; and told him he was distinguished by the name of the Greek Blockhead. Scott once handed to the Professor a composition, in which, weighing Homer against Ariosto, he pronounced him wanting in the balance; which heresy he supported by what he calls a profusion of bad reading and flimsy argument. "The wrath of the professor was extreme, while at the same time he could not suppress his surprise at the quantity of out-of-the-way knowledge which I displayed. He pronounced upon me the severe sentence that dunce I was, and dunce was to remain -which, however, my excellent and learned friend lived to revoke over a bottle of Burgundy, at our

literary Club at Fortune's, of which he was a distinguished member."

A writer in "that authentic record" called the 'Percy Anecdotes," having ventured on the statement that Scott had been distinguished at Musselburgh school as an absolute dunce, and that only Dr. Blair, seeing further into the millstone, had pronounced there was fire in it,-Sir Walter, in 1826, denied that he was ever at Musselburgh school in his life, or that he had ever, to his knowledge, attracted the attention of Dr. Blair; and adds: "Lastly, I was never a dunce, nor thought to be so, but an incorrigibly idle imp, who was always longing to do something else than what was enjoined him.” Though, on the whole, he made a brighter figure in the yards than in the class, at the Edinburgh High School, and commonly disgusted his kind master, Luke Frazer, by his negligence and frivolity, he seems to have as often pleased him by flashes of intellect and talent.

Tom Moore's first schoolmaster, the well-known Samuel Whyte of Dublin, had had a boy entrusted to his care in 1758, whom, after a few years' trial of his powers, he pronounced to be "a most incorrigible dunce." This boy, says Moore, was no other than the afterwards celebrated Richard Brinsley Sheridan; and the worthy schoolmaster, so far from being ashamed of his mistake, had the good sense often to mention the circumstance, as an instance of the difficulty and rashness of forming any judgment of the future capacity of children.