impressions and ideas; and under wise guidance the progress which
he makes is really wonderful. Lord Brougham has observed that
between the ages of eighteen and thirty months, a child learns
more of the material world, of his own powers, of the nature of
other bodies, and even of his own mind and other minds, than he
acquires in all the rest of his life. The knowledge which a child
accumulates, and the ideas generated in his mind, during this
period, are so important, that if we could imagine them to be
afterwards obliterated, all the learning of a senior wrangler at
Cambridge, or a first-classman at Oxford, would be as nothing to
it, and would literally not enable its object to prolong his
existence for a week.

It is in childhood that the mind is most open to impressions, and
ready to be kindled by the first spark that falls into it. Ideas
are then caught quickly and live lastingly. Thus Scott is said to
have received, his first bent towards ballad literature from his
mother's and grandmother's recitations in his hearing long before
he himself had learned to read. Childhood is like a mirror, which
reflects in after-life the images first presented to it. The first
thing continues for ever with the child. The first joy, the first
sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first
achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of
his life.

All this while, too, the training of the character is in progress
--of the temper, the will, and the habits--on which so much of
the happiness of human beings in after-life depends. Although man
is endowed with a certain self-acting, self-helping power of
contributing to his own development, independent of surrounding