the sea, to sink or swim, as strength or feebleness decided, was humanity and civilization, to the system pursued in times quoted with such approbation-a system by which infant intelligence was tortured into intellectual precocity, and hurried to an early tomb, under the precipitating concurrences of maids, women, hot blankets, and excessive hot fires."

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What is most notable in all this is, that Mr. Evelyn, the father of the unfortunate infant, was one of the cleverest and most advanced men of his time, and much celebrated for his translation of, and his essay prefixed to, the "Golden Book" of St. Chrysostom, "concerning the Education of Children."

But if Mr. Evelyn was misled by "all the vulgar errors of the wise," where was the mother's instinct? Alas, where a mother's instincts often are, in her vanity and her weakness. Mrs. Evelyn was one of the most accomplished women of the Court of Charles the Second; and one of the few virtuous women who frequented it. She was a celebrated linguist and artist, and her works in oil and miniature are frequently quoted with pride by her husband. Yet she permitted disease to creep insidiously on the infancy of her child, while he was learning the Latin and Gothic characters, and giving to studies beyond his strength those hours which should have gone to air, exercise, and timely repose. Finally, she consigned him to the superintendence of her maids and women; and, worse than all, hurried on his death by surrounding him with circumstances calculated to produce it, because that rational information necessary to all mothers, was not on the category of her acquirements. How many mothers, even in these march of intellect times, have stopped

short with Mrs. Evelyn; whose judgment should take the lead of the gratification of feeling and vanity?-and be it observed, that mothers in general mistake their own indulgence for their children's; and have quite as much pleasure in stuffing pounds of plum cake down the throats of their over-fed masters Gobbleton Mowbray, as the masters Gobbleton enjoy in its deglutition.

"The Temple of Nature is the heart of a mother," says Kotzebue, in his sentimental jargon; but there are various temples; and Nature is a very capricious deity. What was she in the heart of Lady Macclesfield, and in a thousand other mothers, who have abandoned their children to want or infamy, or to neglect, and the influence of their own bad examples, whose results pursue their offspring through life?

The more or less powerful instinct of maternity is an affair of temperament, nurtured or modified by other instincts or passions, and by circumstances favourable or unfavourable to its existence. The bird that flies at the invader of its nest-the tigress that gathers its young under it, and darts its murderous glance at all who attempt to interfere with the objects of its affections, is more respectable than any one of these mothers "upon instinct," who are only that. It is not the instinct, or feeling, but the judgment that directs it, which is laudable. Maternity is no abstraction; and when people say, "such a one is injudicious, or ignorant, or feeble, or shallow, but she is a good mother," they talk nonsense. That which the woman is, the mother will be; and her personal qualities will direct and govern her maternal instinct, as her taste will influence her appetite. If she be prejudiced and ignorant, the good mother will mismanage her children; and if she be

violent in temper and vehement in opinion, the good mother will be petulant and unjust towards them: if she be inconsistent and capricious, she will alternate between fits of severity and bursts of indulgence, equally fatal: if she be vain, and coquettish, and selfish, she may be fond of her children through her pride, but she will always be ready to sacrifice their enjoyments, and even their interests, to the triumphs of her own vanity, or the gratification of her egotism.

The perfection of motherhood lies, therefore, in the harmonious blending of a happy instinct, with those qualities which make the good member of general society-with good sense and information

with subdued or regulated passions, and that abnegation, which lays every selfish consideration at the feet of duty. To make a good mother, it is not sufficient to seek the happiness of the child, but to seek it with foresight and effect. Her actions must be regulated by long-sighted views, and steadily and perseveringly directed to that health of the body and of the mind, which can alone enable the objects of her solicitude to meet the shocks and rubs of life with firmness, and to maintain that independence, in practice and principle, which sets the vicissitudes of fortune at defiance, fitting its possessor to fill the various stations, whether of wealth or poverty, of honour or obscurity, to which chance may conduct him.

This is my idea of the duties of maternity, and of the perfection of that most perfect creature, a good mother. I know it is not everybody's idea, and that there is another beau idéal of maternity, which is much more prevalent.

There is the good mother, that spends half her life in hugging, flattering, and stuffing her child, till

like the little Dalai Lama of Thibet, he thinks he has come into the world for no other purpose than to be adored like a god, and crammed like a capon. This is the good mother, who, in her fondness, is seen watching anxiously, after a long late dinner, for the entrance of the little victim which she has dressed up for sacrifice, and whose vigils are prolonged beyond its natural strength, that it may partake of the poisonous luxuries in the last service of the feast of ceremony, till the fever of over excitement mounts to its cheek, sparkles in the eye, and gives incoherency to its voluble nonsense; an excitement to be followed not by the deep and dreamless sleep of infancy, but by the restless slumbers and fearful visions of indigestion. Alas for the

mother and for the child! and alas for the guests called upon for their quota of admiration upon such melancholy occasions, such terrible exhibitions of human vanity and human weakness, counteracting the finest instincts of human nature!

Clever and truth-telling Miss Edgeworth--you who have written such rational and charming books for children-why have you not written some easy lessons for their mothers? Why have you not com-, posed a manual for their use, to teach them a few elementary facts in physics and in morals; and, above all, to teach them that nature, in all things, is the sole basis of right thinking and right acting, under all circumstances, and in all times? Did mothers know and feel this, what sorrows and disappointments might be spared to their hearts and their hopes, to their affections and their ambition; what time, now given to acquire arts, for which nature has refused the requisite organization, might be dedicated to health, and what lives might be spared, whose loss, (attributed sacri

legiously to "the will of God,") has only been a sacrifice to "maids, women, hot blankets, excessive hot fires," and the ignorance, and prejudices, and selfish fondness of the "best of mothers."

TOYS AND TRINKETS.

"Parfaits dans le petit-sublimes en bijoux

Grands inventeurs de riens, nous faisons des jaloux."

Voyage à Berlin.

I SHOULD like to know if the march of intellect has any thing to do with the indifference which the children of our day show for toys. The Mrs. Chenevixes, and the petits Dunkerques of modern times would be ruined and undone, if it were not for the papas and mammas, whose boudoirs and dressingrooms are the only baby-houses to be found in modern mansions.

The witty, the gallant Marquis de Sévigné was called by his mother "le roi des bagatelles," from his love of bijouterie; and Lord might be called the emperor. His pipes and snuff-boxes alone might entitle him to the imperial grade in the sovereignty of trifles: while Lady is the very Catherine of Russia of trinkets, and autocrat of the toy-shop. There is not a useless utility, a superfluous superfluity, that ingenuity can devise for the amusement of idleness, which may not now be found on the tables of the great, and the imitators of their present rage for toys-gold scissors that do not cut; silver