Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having
outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn
gives place to brandy pure and simple--a beverage itself frost-proof
and only suited to frost-proof men.

The long nights and indoor days of the North are favorable to another
and more desirable trait of modern social progress--education. The
potency of such a meteorological cause in making popular a taste for
knowledge the instances of Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and North
Germany, to say nothing of New England, leave us no room to doubt.
It is, of course, not the only cause. Ability to read and write is as
universal in China and Japan, as in the countries we have named. In
the case of the Orientals it cannot be ascribed, either, wholly to
that conviction of the importance, as a conservative guarantee,
of elevating the popular mind and taste, which belongs to the
enlightenment of the day. Instinctive recognition of this need
manifests itself in a simultaneous move in the direction of universal
education at government expense throughout the two continents. All
the populations snatch up their satchels and hurry to school. Athens
revives the Academe and reinstates the Olympic games under a literary
avatar. Italy follows suit. Hornbooks open and shut with a suggestive
snap under the pope's nose, and Young Rome calculates its future with
slate and pencil. Gaul, fresh from one year's term in the severest of
all schools, adversity, joins the procession, close by John Bull, who,
_more suo_, pauses first to decide whether the youthful mind shall
take its pap with the spoon of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, or neither.
With him the question between Church schools and national schools
is complicated by one which is common to other nations--whether
attendance shall be compulsory or voluntary only. The tendency is
toward the former, which has long been in practice in some of the