beds, evergreens, and a smooth sunny lawn, having the view bounded by the trees which screen the garden, is a favourite resort of our little people; while the tall youngsters rather disdain it, as though it were a patent tin arbour, pretending, forsooth, that it savours too much of a city taste for them, as if that in itself were something very contemptible. It is to be wished, once for all, that the grounds of such judgments were sifted before they were allowed to pass. So late even as in the time of Sir Thomas More, it was deemed an honour to be a cockney, the being born or educated in London counting for a kind of nobility. But all tastes for social life in common were despised by those who felt attracted towards the wildness and pride of a savage state, which needed no altars. That, however, does not concern us at present. In this summer-house, then, very pretty and delightful, however resembling the seats that receive the youth of Cockayne upon a holiday, sheltered from the sharp winds of March, as in an Arcadian bower, and warm, even at that early season, as if exposed to the sun of Provence, little John has been known to entertain the brokendown soldier, wending his way home from the Crimea; and here he has himself been often caught, when left at home alone, saying his beads very devoutly; but just as ready as ever to laugh, or to bundle them into his pocket, and to run after you for any other project if you should think fit to interrupt him; for on these occasions he was not exactly like Gloucester, who, divinely bent to meditation, could be moved in no worldly suit to draw him from his pious exercise, or if obliged to yield, who would after some canting words return to his "holy work" again. I trow there was some difference between them. And besides, this fine, I was within an ace of saying old Christian, loved very heartily your secular employment, though it were only splitting pea pods with some one he liked, or making a grass whistle. Ulysses wished himself once more young in order that he might find favour, and that some one might be induced to give him a new cloak. There are other gifts better than a cloak, the desire of which might prompt a man of mature age to repeat the words, and say from the depths of his own heart Ὡς νῦν ἡβώοιμι. Let us proceed to observe wistfully, and as silently as is compatible with our purpose, what lessons of piety to serve, not as a cloak for hypocrites, but as the ornament of man's nature, may be obtained in the Children's Bower. We mean no offence, no deception; any one can observe these things, however ill qualified he may be to talk about them. In the world, among persons long grown up, as few need be reminded, piety is often a thing either alternately ignored and despised, or, for there's no use in mincing matters, a quality miserably abused and counterfeited. For those who despise it, seeking by sceptical arguments to disprove its value, Plato has left one of the most sublime passages that occurs in the whole of his writings; and it is for us to observe that what he seems to detest most in them, is the renouncement of the thoughts and manners of the Children's Bower, and the non-appreciation of both, which is involved in the very position they assume. "Come," he says, "tell us, how can any one speak without a feeling of anger respecting those who make these denials, from not being impressed by what they have heard, even from young children, and when they were fed with milk from their nurses and mothers, and by what was spoken, as it were, in epodes, both in sport and in earnest; and together with sacrifices, hearing it in prayers, and seeing the sights that follow it, which a young person sees and hears with the greatest delight, while their parents are making a sacrifice with the greatest earnestness, and taking for granted all that the infidel denies by their acts of adoration, and giving not even a handle for suspicion that what he says is true;-they who despise all this-how can any one in mild language admonish them *?" However, without alluding longer to these formal antagonists, we find traces in another form of the same opposition to the piety of the bower. "The action of the university," says Emerson, "is directed more on producing an English gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist." In this little Arcadian school of children, one might have thought the two things very compatible; and, indeed, one would have to look no farther for proof than the example of this eldest * Leges X. brother, who, while every inch the gay young English gentleman, had in him the making of something higher, having even already the fervent, lively faith, and unobtrusive piety of the continental Christian, if purblind travellers will allow the expression to pass. But in the world, wherever there is pride, and the mere moral qualities that constitute respectability, maturity and age are apt to reverse the sacred maxim, and think, at least, if not pronounce piety to be good for nothing. They are, at the best, apt to regard it as an equivocal excess; which judgment arises, as a philologist remarks, from the scepticism of the world, that questions the eventual retribution of the industry spent in devotion, or of the privations, if they can be called such, incurred from sanctity. What are the consequences? Why, in spite of all their seeming virtues, "Men awless, lawless live, most hideous case! Men, no more men, a God-contemning race *.” Long grown-up persons are often apt to fancy, secretly at least, that the moral man needs not piety; and there is a tendency in many of the wise and practical, who have forgotten altogether the faith and language of the Children's Bower, to adopt the old opinion expressed by Cicero in these curious words, "Men have external goods, vines, corn, olives, all the prosperity of life from the gods; virtutem autem nemo umquam Deo acceptam retulit; and rightly," adds the philosopher, "for on account of virtue we glory; who ever returned thanks to the gods for being a good man? but for being rich, honoured, and safe; for Jove does not make men just, temperate, or wise, but secure, opulent, and successful. This is the judgment of all mortals, that fortune is to be sought from God, wisdom from ourselves +." This was pretty well, no doubt, for the age when it was written; but men grow wiser every day; and every one can see what a prodigious progress, in regard to such ideas, has been effected in recent times, when no one will understand the spirit of the Countess Matilda, as evinced in the manner in which she used to sign her name, the letters being grouped round a cross, with "Dei gratia si * Drummond. † De Nat. Deorum. quid est" added; for assuredly the most accredited opinion now, where the voices of children and youths, and of the women who love them, are not heard, is, that men are what they are by means of themselves-that they must owe even their opulence and success, their security and fortune, as well as their virtue and their wisdom, to themselves and to nothing else. Piety can hardly rank very high in the estimation of persons who, like many that are advanced in years, have ceased to consider for what reason it should exist at all in the world. "Comment peut-on aimer Dieu," asks Madame de Sevigné, 66 quand on n'en entend jamais parler comme il convient?" "No carnal lover, though in this respect almost insane, can so burn with affection for his beloved one," says St. Chrysostom, 66 as God burns with love for our souls." This would be thought shocking language now. But, for all that, as a great modern writer says, "If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts; if for every assertion of God's demands from them, we could substitute a display of his kindness to them; if side by side with every warning of death, we could exhibit proofs and promises of immortality; if, in fine, we were to show men a near, visible, inevitable, but all-beneficent Deity, whose presence makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer deaf children sitting in the market-place *." "The young," says Baldesanus, with great simplicity, omitting mention of fanatics and libellers of God with a good conscience, who are just as dangerous company, "should never associate with the kind of men who are called politicians, temporizers, who measure all religion and conscience by utility; and who, in regard to the worship of God, seem never to have heard of Him t." Men of mature age and imagined wisdom, are apt also to consider that they have done all that can be required of them, when they have indulged in high intellectual speculations about the nature of God, forgetting, as Picus of Mirandula says, "that it is a great folly not to love God in this life, since we attain to far greater things by loving than by knowing Him, or speaking about *Modern Painters. Stimul. Virtut. Adolescent. Him." Nevertheless, those who adopt the spirit incident, at all events, to the schools and to the world, rather than that of the Children's Bower, appear resolved rather on seeking by knowledge never to find what they seek, than on possessing by loving what, without love, we should even find in vain; "et tamen volumus, quærendo per cognitionem nunquam invenire quod quærimus, quam amando possidere, quod sine amore frustra etiam inveniremus." Children trained in the old Christian way, can teach us by their artless example to love God-the one thing necessary; as even the experience of poor sinners might tell them, when they feel what it is not to have a supreme object of love; and, at all events, as Bernard Marcas the troubadour sings, in his quaint impressive language, (Ou l'Escritura ment), lon firmament que branda, Fors que l'Amour de Dieu, que toujours durara." But how does piety show itself in the Bower? What sort of thing, after all, is it? Here, too, there is much to learn. Julius Cæsar, in the procession of his four triumphs, his chariot breaking down, was so affected by the mischance that he never afterwards, it is said, ascended a vehicle without repeating a charm. The mind of Julius Cæsar, the greatest intelligence, the most practical genius perhaps that ever was given to the world, could not get over the need of fearing and worshipping the invisible, the supernatural. Is it not better to take a lesson from one of these simple boys or girls, trained to the common religious exercises of Christians, so referable to a spiritual and intellectual principle, rather than to be left like Cæsar, and like so many other great men in modern times, to make out for oneself substitutes, which will prove superstitious in spite of all their vaunted philosophy, and not merely harmlessly so, but noxious and debasing in their nature? Children, in regard to piety, "remembering their Creator in the days of their youth," have the devotion which Goldsmith, judging from what he thought he could detect as the spirit of the poor, or perhaps from what he remembered having seen in lands of faith, |