WONDERFUL CHILDREN, AND GOOD MOTHERS.

It is a curious fact, that in the present times we have none of those precose prodigies, so numerous in the olden time. It seems to have been one of the peculiar privileges of the wisdom of our ancestors, to produce those infant miracles of learning and science, the “admirable Crichtons” of the nursery, who studied in cradles, and lectured from go-carts. “I was not” (says the quaint, but most amusing Mr. Evelyn,) “initiated into any rudiments, till I was four years old; and then, one Friar taught us, at the church door of Wotton!” This “’till I was four years old,” marks his conviction of his own backwardness, in comparing himself with other children of his age, and times; but it was more particularly in reference to the superior wit, talent, and learning of his own son, at that early period of his brief existence, who was, to use his afflicted father’s words, a “prodigy for wit and understanding.” A prodigy, indeed! for, “at two years and a half old, he could perfectly read any of the English, French, Latin, and gothic characters, pronouncing the three first languages exactly,” &c. &c.

The termination of this most short, splendid, and unnatural career is worth marking:—“He died,” (says Evelyn) “at five years, after six fits of quartan ague, with which it pleased God to visit him; though, in my opinion, he was suffocated by the women and maids who tended him, and covered him too hot with blankets, as he lay in a cradle, near an excessive hot fire, (in a quartan fever!)—I suffered him to be opened, when they found he was what is vulgarly called, livergrown!” What a picture!—what a history of the times, the state of science, and the wisdom of our ancestors! In the first instance, the attributing an infliction to the divine visitation, which was at the same time assignable to vulgar nursery maids, and hot blankets. In the next, the vain father not perceiving that the genius of his child was but disease, and his supernatural intelligence only the unnatural development of faculties, most probably produced by mal-organization, which the style of his rearing and education was so calculated to confirm. “Before his fifth year, he had not only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all nouns, conjugate the verbs, regular and irregular, learned out ‘Puerilis,’ got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, construe and prove what he had read, knew the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comonius’s ‘Janua,’ and had a strong passion for Greek.”

This is too frightful—it makes one shudder to transcribe it. Such, however, was the education, by which an accomplished and really knowing parent, (knowing for the age in which he lived,) hesitated not to hurry his wonderful child to an untimely grave.

Such, however, were the times, when learning was dearly prized, and knowledge little diffused; when monastic universities, founded by the church, through the influence of its royal and noble dependants, were the sole depositaries of the little that was known, worth the labour of acquiring; and when the most learned of the community had less solid practical information, than the operative mechanics of the present day. Such were the times when plague, pestilence, and famine, were events of ordinary occurrence; when corruption in morals, and baseness in politics flourished, even to the extent of surrounding a king at the altar of his God, with the ministers of his vices; and converting the “brightest,” and the “wisest,” into the worst and meanest of mankind. These were the times of the most brutal ignorance in the people, and the greatest profligacy in the nobility; and, these were the times that produced such learned little prodigies as young Evelyn, under a system of education calculated to make such prodigies; but not to form citizens for a free state, nor legislators for a great nation.

Whatever may have been the natural abilities of this poor child, to have made such a progress in the learned languages, at five years old, he must have been the object and victim of a very laborious system of study, all applied to the exercise of his memory. He must therefore have submitted to close confinement in warm rooms, to the privation of air and exercise, and to a sedentary and cramped position; and he was probably much injured by the gross habit of eating, and the want of personal purity, so remarkable in an age, when meat was devoured three or four times a day, even by the most dainty, and when general ablutions were resorted to, more as a remedy than a daily habit.

The overworking of the brain at the expense of all the other functions, must also have had a fatal effect even on children of robust temperaments; and the Indian practice of flinging their offspring into the sea, to sink or swim, as strength or feebleness decided, was humanity and civilization, to the system pursued in times quoted with such approbation—a system by which infant intelligence was tortured into intellectual precocity, and hurried to an early tomb, under the precipitating concurrences of “maids, women, hot blankets, and excessive hot fires.”

What is most notable in all this is, that Mr. Evelyn, the father of the unfortunate infant, was one of the cleverest and most advanced men of his time, and much celebrated for his translation of, and his essay prefixed to, the “Golden Book” of St. Chrysostom, “concerning the Education of Children.”

But if Mr. Evelyn was misled by “all the vulgar errors of the wise,” where was the mother’s instinct? Alas, where a mother’s instincts often are, in her vanity and her weakness. Mrs. Evelyn was one of the most accomplished women of the Court of Charles the Second; and one of the few virtuous women who frequented it. She was a celebrated linguist and artist, and her works in oil and miniature are frequently quoted with pride by her husband. Yet she permitted disease to creep insidiously on the infancy of her child, while he was learning the Latin and Gothic characters, and giving to studies beyond his strength those hours which should have gone to air, exercise, and timely repose. Finally, she consigned him to the superintendence of her maids and women; and, worse than all, hurried on his death by surrounding him with circumstances calculated to produce it,—because that rational information necessary to all mothers, was not on the category of her acquirements. How many mothers, even in these march of intellect times, have stopped short with Mrs. Evelyn; whose judgment should take the lead of the gratification of feeling and vanity?—and be it observed, that mothers in general mistake their own indulgence for their children’s; and have quite as much pleasure in stuffing pounds of plum cake down the throats of their over-fed masters Gobbleton Mowbray, as the masters Gobbleton enjoy in its deglutition.

“The Temple of Nature is the heart of a mother,” says Kotzebue, in his sentimental jargon; but there are various temples; and Nature is a very capricious deity. What was she in the heart of Lady Macclesfield, and in a thousand other mothers, who have abandoned their children to want or infamy, or to neglect, and the influence of their own bad examples, whose results pursue their offspring through life?

The more or less powerful instinct of maternity is an affair of temperament, nurtured or modified by other instincts or passions, and by circumstances favourable or unfavourable to its existence. The bird that flies at the invader of its nest—the tigress that gathers its young under it, and darts its murderous glance at all who attempt to interfere with the objects of its affections, is more respectable than any one of these mothers “upon instinct,” who are only that. It is not the instinct, or feeling, but the judgment that directs it, which is laudable. Maternity is no abstraction; and when people say, “such a one is injudicious, or ignorant, or feeble, or shallow, but she is a good mother,” they talk nonsense. That which the woman is, the mother will be; and her personal qualities will direct and govern her maternal instinct, as her taste will influence her appetite. If she be prejudiced and ignorant, the good mother will mismanage her children; and if she be violent in temper and vehement in opinion, the good mother will be petulant and unjust towards them: if she be inconsistent and capricious, she will alternate between fits of severity and bursts of indulgence, equally fatal: if she be vain, and coquettish, and selfish, she may be fond of her children through her pride, but she will always be ready to sacrifice their enjoyments, and even their interests, to the triumphs of her own vanity, or the gratification of her egotism.

The perfection of motherhood lies, therefore, in the harmonious blending of a happy instinct, with those qualities which make the good member of general society—with good sense and information—with subdued or regulated passions, and that abnegation, which lays every selfish consideration at the feet of duty. To make a good mother, it is not sufficient to seek the happiness of the child, but to seek it with foresight and effect. Her actions must be regulated by long-sighted views, and steadily and perseveringly directed to that health of the body and of the mind, which can alone enable the objects of her solicitude to meet the shocks and rubs of life with firmness, and to maintain that independence, in practice and principle, which sets the vicissitudes of fortune at defiance, fitting its possessor to fill the various stations, whether of wealth or poverty, of honour or obscurity, to which chance may conduct him.

This is my idea of the duties of maternity, and of the perfection of that most perfect creature, a good mother. I know it is not everybody’s idea, and that there is another beau idéal of maternity, which is much more prevalent.

There is the good mother, that spends half her life in hugging, flattering, and stuffing her child, till, like the little Dalai Lama of Thibet, he thinks he has come into the world for no other purpose than to be adored like a god, and crammed like a capon. This is the good mother, who, in her fondness, is seen watching anxiously, after a long late dinner, for the entrance of the little victim which she has dressed up for sacrifice, and whose vigils are prolonged beyond its natural strength, that it may partake of the poisonous luxuries in the last service of the feast of ceremony, till the fever of over excitement mounts to its cheek, sparkles in the eye, and gives incoherency to its voluble nonsense; an excitement to be followed not by the deep and dreamless sleep of infancy, but by the restless slumbers and fearful visions of indigestion. Alas for the mother and for the child! and alas for the guests called upon for their quota of admiration upon such melancholy occasions, such terrible exhibitions of human vanity and human weakness, counteracting the finest instincts of human nature!

Clever and truth-telling Miss Edgeworth—you who have written such rational and charming books for children—why have you not written some easy lessons for their mothers? Why have you not composed a manual for their use, to teach them a few elementary facts in physics and in morals; and, above all, to teach them that nature, in all things, is the sole basis of right thinking and right acting, under all circumstances, and in all times? Did mothers know and feel this, what sorrows and disappointments might be spared to their hearts and their hopes, to their affections and their ambition; what time, now given to acquire arts, for which nature has refused the requisite organization, might be dedicated to health, and what lives might be spared, whose loss, (attributed sacrilegiously to “the will of God,”) has only been a sacrifice to “maids, women, hot blankets, excessive hot fires,” and the ignorance, and prejudices, and selfish fondness of the “best of mothers.”