ever," as Mr. Lang has said of Pecksniff. But Dickens was a Londoner,
and incapable of looking at this or any other question from any other
than the Londoner's standpoint. Can you have a better system for the
children of all England than this one which will turn out the most
perfect draper's assistant in Oxford Street, or, to go higher, the most
efficient Mr. Guppy in a solicitor's office? It is true that we have
Nature's unconscious intelligence against us; that by and by, when at
the age of fourteen the boy is finally released, she will set to work to
undo the wrong by discharging from his mind its accumulations of useless
knowledge as soon as he begins the work of life. But what a waste of
time and energy and money! One can only hope that the slow intellect of
the country will wake to this question some day, that the countryman
will say to the townsman, Go on making your laws and systems of
education for your own children, who will live as you do indoors; while
I shall devise a different one for mine, one which will give them hard
muscles and teach them to raise the mutton and pork and cultivate the
potatoes and cabbages on which we all feed.

To return to the downs. Their very emptiness and desolation, which
frightens the stranger from them, only serves to make them more
fascinating to those who are intimate with and have learned to love
them. That dreary aspect brings to mind the other one, when, on waking
with the early sunlight in the room, you look out on a blue sky,
cloudless or with white clouds. It may be fancy, or the effect of
contrast, but it has always seemed to me that just as the air is purer
and fresher on these chalk heights than on the earth below, and as the
water is of a more crystal purity, and the sky perhaps bluer, so do all
colours and all sounds have a purity and vividness and intensity beyond
that of other places. I see it in the yellows of hawkweed, rock-rose,
and birds'-foot-trefoil, in the innumerable specks of brilliant