which he wove the most advanced educational ideals of his time and of our time relating to the blighting influence of coercion, the divinity in the child, the recognition of freedom as the truest process and highest aim of education, the value of real sympathy, the importance of self-activity, the true reverence for the child leading to faith in it, the need of child study, the effect of joyousness on the child's development, the benefits of play, the influence of nutrition, the ideal of community, the importance of the imagination as a basis for the best intellectual growth, the narrowness of utilitarianism, the absolute need of apperceptive centres to which shall be related the progressive enlargement and enrichment of feeling and thought throughout the life of the individual, the arrest of development and the sacrifice of power and life due to cramming, and the weakness of all educational systems and methods that regard fact-storing as the highest work of the teacher.

It has been said by critics of Dickens that he exaggerated the defects and errors in the characters of those whom he described. Two things should be kept in mind, however. Dickens usually described the worst, not the best types, and he was justified in revealing a wrong principle or practice in the strongest possible light, in order to make it more easily recognisable and more completely repugnant to the aroused feeling and startled thought of humanity. He was writing with the definite purpose of making the world so thoroughly hate the wrong in education and child training as to lead to definite practical reforms.

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Dickens himself did not admit the justness of the charge of exaggeration. His coarsest, most ignorant, and most brutal teacher is Squeers, yet he says Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible. There are upon record trials at law in which damages have been sought as a poor recompense for lasting agonies and disfigurements inflicted upon children by the treatment of the master in these places, involving such offensive and foul details of

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neglect, cruelty, and disease as no writer of fiction would have the boldness to imagine. Since the author has been engaged upon these Adventures he has received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon neglected or repudiated children these schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages."

Dickens discusses the charge of exaggeration in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit. He says:

What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another. That which is commonly called a long-sight, perceives in a prospect innumerable features and bearings nonexistent to a shortsighted person. I sometimes ask myself whether there may occasionally be a difference of this kind between some writers and some readers; whether it is always the writer who colours highly, or whether it is now and then the reader whose eye for colour is a little dull?

On this head of exaggeration I have a positive experience more curious than the speculation I have just set down. It is this: I have never touched a character precisely from the life, but some counterpart of that character has incredulously asked me: "Now really, did I ever really see one like it?"

All the Pecksniff family upon earth are quite agreed, I believe, that Mr. Pecksniff is an exaggeration, and that no such character ever existed.

It is worth remembering, too, that it is impossible to exaggerate the description of the effects of the evils Dickens attacked. Coercion in any form blights and dwarfs the true selfhood of the child. The coercion of Mrs. Crisparkle's placid but unbending will, which she kept rigid from a deep conviction of Christian duty, is as clearly at variance with the elemental laws of individual freedom and growth by self-activity as the more dreadful forms of coercion practised by Squeers, Creakle, Bumble, or Murdstone.

Doctor Blimber's cramming is not exaggerated. It would be quite possible to find in England or the United

States or Canada not only private but public institutions in which similar processes of illogical cramming are still practised. Words are still given before the thought, and as a substitute for thought. "Mathematical gooseberries " are yet produced "from mere sprouts of bushes," the "words and grammar” of literature are still given instead of the life and glory of the author's revelations, children yet are "made to bear to pattern somehow or other."

Whether Dickens exaggerated or not in regard to other spheres of work or of existence without work, he certainly did not exaggerate in regard to school conditions. He studied them faithfully, and described them truly. He saw wrongs more clearly than other men, and he made them stand out in their natural hideousness.

It is frequently asserted that Dickens portrayed wrong training more than right, that he was destructive rather than constructive. In a sense, this is correct. His mission was to startle men, so that they would be made conscious of the awful crimes that were being committed by teachers and parents in the name of duty, as conceived by the highest Christian civilization of his time. He knew that a basis of strong feeling must be aroused against a wrong before it can be overthrown and right practices substituted for it. The only sure foundation for any reform is an energetic feeling of dislike for present conditions. The chief work of Dickens was to lay bare the injustice, the meanness, and the blighting coercion practised on helpless children not only by “ignorant, sordid, brutal men called schoolmasters," but in a less degree by the best teachers and parents of his time. His was a noble work, and it was well done.

The grandest movement of the nineteenth century was the development of a profound reverence for the child, so deep and wide that his rights are beginning to be clearly recognised by individuals and by national laws, and that intelligent adulthood is studying him as the central element of power in the representation of God in the accomplishment of the progressive evolution of the race. Christ put "the child in the midst of his disciples "; men

are learning to follow his example, and study the child as the surest way to secure industrial, social, and moral reforms. Froebel and Dickens were the men who revealed the child. They were the true apostles of childhood. It must not be supposed that Dickens was not conscious of the positive good while describing the evils. The expressions "child queller," "gospel of monotony, "bear to pattern," ," "taught as parrots are," etc., and the name McChoakumchild," reveal the possession of the highest consciousness of child freedom, of individuality, and of child reverence yet given to humanity. So in all his wonderful pictures it would have been impossible for him to have so vividly described the wrong if he had not clearly understood the right. He had perfect sympathy with childhood, he was a great student of the child and of the existing methods of training and educating him, and his insights and judgment were so clear and true that, as Ruskin says, in the last analysis he was always right."

If he had never written anything but his article on the kindergarten, published July, 1855, he would have proved himself to be an educational philosopher.

CHAPTER II.

INFANT GARDENS.

DICKENS wrote the following article for Household Words in 1855. It reveals a surprising mastery of the vital principles of "the new education." He wrote the article to direct attention to the work of the Baroness Von Bülow, who had come to England to introduce the kindergarten system. Dickens's works show that he had long been a close student of Froebel's philosophy. The article must always take a front rank as a strikingly clear, comprehensive, and sympathetic exposition of the principles and processes of the kindergarten. Kindergartens were called "infant gardens" when first introduced into England.

Seventy or eighty years ago there was a son born to the Pastor Froebel, who exercised his calling in the village of Oberweissbach, in the principality of Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt. The son, who was called Frederick, proved to be a child of unusually quick sensibilities, keenly alive to all impressions, hurt by discords of all kinds; by quarrelling of men, women, and children, by ill-assorted colours, inharmonious sounds. He was, to a morbid extent, capable of receiving delight from the beauties of Nature, and, as a very little boy, would spend much of his time in studying and enjoying, for their own sake, the lines and angles in the Gothic architecture of his father's church. Who does not know what must be the central point of all the happiness of such a child? The voice of its mother is the sweetest of sweet sounds, the face of its mother is the fairest of fair sights, the loving touch of her lip is the symbol to it of all pleasures of the sense and of the soul. Against the thousand shocks and terrors that are ready to afflict a child too exquisitely sensitive, the mother is the sole pro