succeed by appearing' to possess dangerous qualities which they have not, or more dangerous qualities than any they really have? To some extent, we think that even these little hypocrisies of nature have their analogies in the mental world. Lord Thurlow, of whom it was said that no one could really be as wise as Lord Thurlow always seemed, unquestionably succeeded to some extent through the majestic air which gave a rather commonplace shrewdness such enormous advantages of mien and bearing, — and there are plenty of such successes; and, again, the caterpillar holding a dozen little birds at bay by the contortions of its body and the uncanny glare of its mock-eyes is not at all a bad apologue for Turkey persuading all the powers of Europe that she is so dangerous that none of them dare approach her, though she is a creature without vision and without political vitality. But just as it is in the main the lower forms of animal life that nature protects by these little hypocrises, so it is in the main in the lowest aspects of mental life that this imitative skill in assuming the air of something better or more powerful than we can really boast of, gains for us social or political advantages. The more there is of us, the less need we have of these humble devices of nature for imposing upon others a false appearance of capacities which we do not possess. It is the insects and the reptiles, not the nobler creatures, which astound us most by their feats of histrionic skill. And it is the poorest elements in man, not his highest qualities, which gain for him the false repute of a wisdom or a courage which he does not possess.
MY SECOND SCHOOL.
One of the brothers Smith, in a lively essay, exhorted his reader to catch opportunity by the forelock, if ever he found himself in the company of a set of "wretches" who had never heard of Joe Miller, but yet were perfectly capable of appreciating him. Such an opportunity might never occur again, and the most, consequently, ought to be made of it. Without the remotest chance of balk or hindrance, the man well posted up in his "Joe" is bound, if for the first and only time in his life, to find himself generally amusing.
It is not with the slightest suspicion that the rare combination of ignorance with appreciativeness to which Mr. Smith refers is to be found among the readers of All the Year Round, that I now venture to repeat a very ancient jest. I ward off the sneers with which it will be received, because it singularly symbolizes the somewhat dismal narrative which will presently follow.
Well, then: An amateur painter, who was repairing his house, told a friend that he had been struck by a bright notion. The ceiling of his library was very dirty, so he purposed to whitewash it, and then paint upon it a picture, representing Apollo and the nine Muses. The friend, who had his own views as to the proficiency of the amateur, suggested, as an improvement, that the ceding should be painted first, and whitewashed afterwards.
Of my second school, which was simply a day-school, and which I entered at the age of ten, I can safely say that it was apparently designed to answer the purpose of the whitewash in the above story, supposing the advice of the friend to have been accurately followed. Whatever we had been taught at my preparatory school, the second school appeared to have been framed with the express purpose of washing out; and in this case, the picture to be obliterated was not only not bad, but very good. I am bound, however, in justice to say, that I and my fellow-pupils had tolerable memories. Our previous knowledge was not obliterated. Simply, we made no progress. Learning was made easy, because it was made small.
Stop! don't let me be incorrect. Objects become somewhat indistinct, when one looks at them through a vista of more than fifty years, unless one, takes great pains to secure accuracy. Though we made no progress, we made a great show of making progress; and that was something to the credit of Dr. Saunders, our reverent preceptor. A Dissenting minister of considerable repute in a suburb of London, in the immediate vicinity of that inhabited by Mr. Jackson, he had none of that hatred of "Mars, Bacchus, Apollo," to which Lord Macaulay refers as prevalent among the early Puritans. If he called upon paterfamilias, with the intention of securing some young hopeful as a pupil, he would roll jauntily in an armchair, and talk merrily of the achievement of learning sixty lines of 'Horace with a minimum of labor, if only his method of instruction was conscientiously followed. What that method was, I never found out; and although, with two or
