Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/137

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AN HUNDRED YEARS AGO
135

and relating to children and grandchildren the history of his earlier career, it is as remarkable for minuteness of detail, as are its companion volumes for large generalizations. After the fashion of "Gil Bias," it is interspersed with accounts of the adventures of this or that comrade whom chance has brought into contact with the hero. With much less elegance of style than the celebrated story of Le Sage, it more than repairs this shortcoming by the purity of incident and superior moral tone which pervades its many chapters. With utmost exactness it relates the trivial incidents of infancy, childhood, and youth; each passing event is made the subject of a new disquisition. Mistakes of the time regarding the rearing of children, the sending out of the infant to nurse, the relegating of early training to servants and irresponsible persons, the absurd ignorance of the village schoolmaster, all receive their share of castigation. Laxness of discipline in seminary and college, the strange mingling of trivialities and superstitions which finally assumed the place of education, the misusages of society which condemned the offspring of well-to-do parents to the temptations of idleness, each has