to have regarded his wife more as an advantage to his school than as a
help-meet to himself.

Pestalozzi was diffident, and in dress and manner careless to the point
of slovenliness; Froebel was extravagant in his self-confidence, and at
times almost a dandy in attire. Pestalozzi was always honest and candid,
while Froebel was as a boy untruthful. Pestalozzi was touchingly humble,
and eager to ascribe the practical failure of his theories to his
personal inefficiency; Froebel never acknowledged himself in the wrong,
but always attributed failure to external causes. On the other hand,
while Froebel was equable in temperament, Pestalozzi was moody and
impressionable, flying from extreme gaiety to extreme dejection,
slamming the door if displeased with a lesson a teacher was giving, but
coming back to apologize if he met a child who smiled upon him. Under
Rousseau's influence Pestalozzi was inclined to skepticism, and limited
religious teaching in school to the reading of the gospels, and the
practice of Christianity; Froebel was deeply pious, and made it
fundamental that education should be founded plainly and avowedly upon
religion.

Intellectually the contrast is even stronger. While Froebel had a
university education, Pestalozzi was an eminently ignorant man; his
penmanship was almost illegible, he could not do simple sums in
multiplication, he could not sing, he could not draw, he wore out all
his handkerchiefs gathering pebbles and then never looked at them
afterward. Froebel was not only a reader but a scientific reader, always
seeking first to find out what others had discovered that he might
begin where they left off; Pestalozzi boasted that he had not read a
book in forty years. Naturally, therefore, Pestalozzi was always an
experimenter, profiting by his failures but always failing in his first