use as to be able, unaided, to compose and print
a weekly sheet containing news and articles of
their own writing! I thought of my play-room
and what it contained. I had a  vision of a penny
top, a popgun roughly made from a branch, of
alder-tree, a kite composed of a halfpenny cane
and a sheet of brown paper, a worsted ball
wound upon an old barrel bung, and a teetotum.

Again; the other evening I went to a party
and I had scarcely entered the house when my
host's two boys carried me off into the garden
to take my photograph. One, quite a little
fellow, posed me in the chair, instructed me to
look at a certain spot, and warned me of that
principle of the convex lens which has a
tendency to enlarge feet and hands which are
placed too much in advance of the rest of the
body. The other boy, meanwhile, was in a dark
room, playing with subtle chemicals, of whose
nature and properties his grandfather the
eminent chemist had never even dreamed. In less
than five minutes these two youngsters had used
one of the closest secrets of nature to fix my
image on a piece of glass. It was as easy a feat
for them as it was for me to lift up my top, while
spinning, in a spoon or in the hollow of my hand.

I had another vision: Of a party at home,
when I, as a boy, the age of that juvenile
photographer, was considered rather a bore, and
was only permitted to bother the guests for
half an hour or so after dinner. It was not
supposed that I had any entertaining powers
whatever. The guests, in the goodness of their
nature, would kindly endeavour to entertain
me, by giving me an apple, and perhaps telling
me a pretty little story, all in simple words of
one syllable. After which I was carefully sent
to bed before supper. But these modern boys:
they bring you their newspaper to look at;
they photograph you, they play the accompaniments
to your songs, they astonish your weak
mind with the magnesium light, they sit up to
supper, they tell you the latest news by
telegram—in fact, they entertain you. When I was
a boy, my stock of play literature consisted of
some half-dozen sixpenny books, such as Jack
the Giant Killer, Puss in Boots, the History of
Cock Robin, and an abridgment of the Arabian
Nights. I remember that I kept them locked
up in a deal box, and was exceedingly chary of
lending them, or even letting any one look at
them. But boys now-a-days take in their
monthly and weekly magazines, correspond with
the editor, answer riddles and rebuses, contribute
puzzles and engage in chess tournaments
by correspondence; nay, they club subscriptions
to Mudie's, and read all the new sensation
novels as they appear. I see some square–
capped boys, of not more than fourteen years,
going to school every morning reading their
penny newspapers. I have no doubt, whatever
that they read the law and police reports under
their desks when they ought to be learning
their lessons. Boys and hobbedehoys used
be a nuisance, because they were lumpy, and
awkward, and uninteresting; and because they
were too young to share in the conversation of
grown-up people. But now-a-days, if boys are
voted a nuisance at all—which they will not
tamely permit—it is because they are too clever
by half, and know a great deal too much.

Inwardly and outwardly the British boy has
undergone a great change. Everything about him
is in an advanced state. His mind is manly and
so are his clothes. Your modern infant grows
so fast that you never can catch him in jackets.
When he emerges from his swaddling-clothes,
he slips through your fingers, and vaults into a
tailed coat. He casts aside his feeding-bottle,
and his pap-spoon, to clap a cigar or a
meerschaum-pipe in his mouth.

The modern youth forces his whiskers, as the
modern market-gardener forces his asparagus.
He has no pause for lay-down collars of the old
patterns, nor for a round cap with a tassel, such
as the boys of the Own Book used to wear. He
is a new pattern of boy altogether. Look at
the frontispiece of an old Treasury of Knowledge,
and see what the British boy was. There is his
papa—also of a pattern peculiar to the period—
seated at a table with a terrestrial globe, a
retort, a pair of compasses, and a heap of books
at his elbow, allegorical of the entire tree of
knowledge and the whole circle of the sciences.
You will observe that his papa wears a
high-collared coat, a very short waistcoat, and tightly-fitting
trousers, which, when your paint-box is
at hand, you are irresistibly tempted to colour
yellow. Your idea of that papa is, that he has
always been a papa, and that his whole mission,
on earth is to teach the use of the globes to
his son with rigid paternal severity; just as
your idea of the boy is that he was born a boy
like that, and for no other purpose on earth but
to be taught the use of the globes and overawed
by his papa. Look at that boy. His outline
is composed of a series of curves—curves for
his cheeks, curves for his arms, curves for his
legs, as if his papa had constructed him with
the pair of compasses. He is the good
old-fashioned sort of boy, who was fond of pudding,
who over-ate himself when he went out visiting,
who robbed orchards, who had all the
complaints of infancy in rapid succession, and never
missed one on any account; who carried
gunpowder in his pocket, who was always in
mischief, and who, as regarded his most honourable
curve, seemed to be specially adapted and cut
out for chastisement. When I look at the
portraits of that boy of a past age, I can quite
understand how the schoolmasters of the period
could not keep their hands off him. The whole
physical development of him was a standing
invitation to the cane.

If schoolmasters don't flog now, it is not
because they have lost faith in the virtues of
birch, but because the modern boy is morally
and physically repulsive to the cane. Those
inviting curves of his have been smoothed
down; his jackets have assumed tails. He
wears gloves also, and is thus armed against
correction at all points. Intellectually, too,
how could you think of administering flagellation
to a boy who writes, edits, prints, and
publishes a newspaper, or be guilty of the
outrage of boxing the ears of a boy who is versed