The Two Sides of the Shield. Yonge Charlotte Mary

that is crammed down girl’s throats, whether they have a turn for languages or not? Do they ever read a German book? Now you learnt it for love of Fouque and Max Piccolomini, and you have kept it up ever since.’

      ‘Yes, by cramming it down my children’s throats. But what I complain of, Jane, in the young folk that come across me is not over-knowledge, but want of knowledge—want of general culture. This Dolores, for instance, can do what she has been taught better than Mysie, some tings better than Gillian, but she has absolutely no interest in general knowledge, not even in the glaciers which she has seen; she does not know whether Homer wrote in Greek or Latin, considers “Marmion” a lesson, cannot tell a planet from a star, and neither knows nor cares anything about the two Napoleons. Now we seem to have breathed in such things. Why! I remember being made into Astyanax for a very unwilling Andromache (poor Eleanor) for caress, and being told to shudder at the bright copper coal-scuttle, before Harry went to school.’

      ‘Of course poor Maurice could not cultivate his child. Yet, after all, we grew up without a mother; but then the dear old Baron lived among us, and knew what we were doing, instead of shutting us up in a schoolroom with some one, with only knowledge, not culture. Those very late dinners have quite upset all the intelligent intercourse between fathers and children not come out.’

      ‘Yes, Jasper and I have felt that difficulty. But after all, Jenny, when I look back, I cannot say I think ours was a model bringing up. What a strange year that was after Eleanor’s marriage!’

      ‘Ah! you felt responsible and were too young for it, but to me it was a very jolly time, though I suppose I was an ingredient in your troubles. Yes, we brought ourselves up; but I maintain that it was better alternative than being drilled so hard as never to think of anything but arrant idling out of lesson-time.’

      ‘Lessons should be lessons, and play, play, is one of the professor’s maxims to which that poor child has treated us.’

      ‘Ah! on that system, where would have been all your grand heraldic pedigrees? I’ve got them still.’

      ‘Oh! Jenny, you good old Brownie, have you? How I should like to look at them again and show them the Gillian and Mysie. Do you remember the little scalloped line we drew round all the true knights?’

      ‘Ay! and where would have been all your romancing about Sir Maurice de Mohun, the pride of his name? For my part, I much prefer a cavalier dead two hundred years ago as the object of a girl’s enthusiasm—if enthusiasm she must have—to the existing lieutenant, or even curate.’

      ‘Certainly; I should be sorry to have been bred up to history with individual interest and romance squeezed out of it. You see when Jasper came home from the Crimea he exactly continued mine.’

      ‘You have fulfilled your ideal better than falls to the lot of most people, even to the item of knighthood.’