integral cultivation throughout the world? A
volcano keeps open a never-frozen gulf in the
midst of the antarctic ice; multiply, in thought,
these outlets of fire at either pole, and the
development of either glacier would cease.

WHICH IS THE PLAGUE?

DID it ever occur to a child's mind that grown
people are plagues? Probably. Plagued with
children, indeed! Look at any poor little
Dulcissimus, and see how he is plagued with
adults. Heavy fathers, light mothers,
blundering teachers, patronising ignorance in
attendant servants, contemptuous patronage of
all the big Dulcissimuses between eighteen
and twenty-two, lie in a lump over the child
world. A little schoolboy on the public road,
sucking the nectaries of the white nettle blossoms,
is a fair type of the child: a brisk little being,
that knows how to get the sugar out of nettles.

If children had but a tenth part of our
own skill in finding fault, they might get up
a great many judicious talks among themselves
about us all. But they accept us for their guides.
The brutal drunken mother who will beat her
starved child with a poker, is looked up to by her
victim with a shrinking love. The thoughtless
woman who sends out into the frost, poor little
Dulcissimus, half-clad in costly raiment that
the world may see his legs, is never asked by
him for skirt or stocking.

At school, master and ushers are acknowledged
plagues, and many flowers of satiric
fancy bud about the rod. There is little
malice in the mockery, and such as it is
in childhood, it afterwards remains. Tusser
wrote, as a man, just as he might have written
as a boy, about the floggings he got from that
great flogger of boys, Nicholas Udall, who
produced the first of our English comedies, but was
not appreciated as a popular comedian among
his boys.

     From Paul's I went, to Eton sent,
     To learn straightways the Latin phrase,
     Where fifty-three stripes given to me
          At once I had;
     For faults but small, or not at all,
     It came to pass, that beat I was;
     See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee
          To me, poor lad.

Coleridge, who had many a thrashing—and, as
he thought, only one that was just—from the
belaborous Doctor Asterisks at the Bluecoat
School, always talked pleasantly about that
scholar's unsparing use of the rod. "I'll flog
you," became so habitual an exclamation with
him, that one day, when a lady committed the
high misdemeanour of looking in at his class-
room door, to ask a holiday for her Master
Dulcissimus, whose cousin had come to town, and
when, failing of her errand, she lingered in
the doorway, the doctor shouted, " Bring that
woman to me! I'll flog her!" Boys laugh at all
this, and, by tumbling about among each other
get, early in life, at a rough critical sense of
the absurdities of adults. They acquire a keen
scent for a prig; but their rough justice does not
include judgment on the faults of home. They
boast of their fathers among one another, and
nurse images of their mothers in their hearts.
So they would still do, if the fathers were all
prigs, and the mothers all simpletons.

Let us endeavour to look at the two sides of a
domestic question, Which is the Plague? Is it
the young to the old, or the old to the young?
The young are a plague to the old by sounding
recklessly the note of mirth in the midst of adult
dulness. They take the sportive view of life.
Let Dulcissimus but lay his fingers on a copy of
a writ or a distress-warrant, and he will probably
regard it as a jolly thing to make a boat of, or
will get an hour's rejoicing out of it by snipping
it into a fly-cage, or cutting it with scissors into
the remote suggestion of a pig. He and his
little comrades obtrude musical laughter on
the dull family conclave, and, at their worst,
call off attention from the greater troubles
of the world, by their own famous domestic
achievements in the getting up of small
calamities, present, obtrusive, clamorous, insignificant,
and comic. The plague of children forces the
attention of adults from their own worldly pains
and toils, and, however the big race may pish
and psha, it is obliged to dance round imaginary
maypoles with the little people, accept frank
love, take home-thrusts from it, run on all-fours,
and have its starch utterly crumpled.

To be sure it is a worry to hear children
cry; but their crying is generally a sign of
their being afflicted by the plague of adults.
They may well cry. The child wishes to decorate
with sport every labour of its life. Ignorant
adult servants, stimulating the quick fancy with
tales of superstitious terror, are as fanciful as
the child may desire, but hardly joyous. Think
of their stupid adult tempers, giving tongue
to the popular cry about the fretfulness of
children. No child is fretful except when it
is sickly or ill managed.

Bottle and spoon are the first plagues that
the child suffers, from adult stupidity or selfishness.
Nursing mothers commonly yield their
places, once a day, to spoon and bottle, because
society says to them, every evening, Won't you
come out to-night? and because they have not
courage to answer always, No. Society can do
without them very well, but they are not aware
of that. Society, in as far as it means friends,
can find them out in their own homes; why
should they become plagues to their children,
for society, in as far as it means fashion?

And then bottle and spoon are made into
double plagues by the ignorance of nurses who,
looking upon milk as a thin fluid, although even
cow's milk is really so heavy as to need dilution,
do terrific things with gruel. The plague of an
adult nurse will even pour into the mouth of a
week-old infant, gruel, which is to the child's
stomach what gravel might be to her own.
Then rhubarb follows to correct the gruel, as
one might correct a meal of gravel with a dose
of pepper; and the dill-water stands upon the