lad was merely forced by training into a precocity foreign to his nature, and which, according to Mr. Bain, failed to produce any great show of juvenile scholarship, the Italian boy fed on books with a resistless and craving appetite, his mind growing warped and morbid as his enfeebled body sank more and more under the unwholesome strain. In the long lists of despotically reared children there is no sadder sight than this undisciplined, eager, impetuous soul, burdened alike with physical and moral weakness, meeting tyrannical authority with a show of insincere submission, and laying up in his lonely infancy the seeds of a sorrow which was to find expression in the key-note of his work, Life is Only Fit to be Despised.
Between the severe mental training of boys and the education thought fit and proper for girls, there was throughout the eighteenth century a broad and purposeless chasm. Before that time, and after it, too, the majority of women were happily ignorant of many subjects which every school-girl of to-day aspires to handle; but during the reigns of Queen Anne and the first three Georges, this igno-
