neatness, dash; that honest fellow believes in solidity, serviceability, perseverance. How does it look? is the first consideration of the one; How does it work? of the other. The one thinks too much of the shadow, the other is rather greedy of the substance. If the one has often gone eagerly astray after airy abstractions, deceitful will-o'-the-wisps that have led him floundering into terrible quagmires, the other has had his sense of the ideal somewhat "fattened out of him,” and forgets that it is not the sum of wisdom to see clearly one inch before his nose, but no further. Haste is not always speed, nor does slow always prove sure. The effervescence of the Frenchman has sometimes left a sad sediment; yet the temperament of his neighbour is apt to be somewhat muddy in its steadiness. One of these rivals in freedom and enlightenment has been in too great a hurry to make the beautiful his own without being sure that he had got firm hold of the true; the other, sniffing suspiciously at fine words which butter no parsnips, has been sometimes too slow to recognise that life is not all matter-of-fact. The one has aimed higher and has oftener missed his mark; the other, as yet, has been more successful, even when he seemed less to deserve it. By all the rules of warfare, we are told, the French ought to have won the battle of Waterloo; but somehow they didn't. They set about colonizing America, but that business got into other hands. They started like the hare in the race for civil liberty; we have got ahead like the tortoise. So, on the whole, it appears as if those different qualities forming the British nature, fitted in more closely to the order of things, to which all men in the long run must adapt themselves.

What a character would that of the French and of the English make if united in one! If we could only blend the fire of one with the strength of the other-French vivacity, sensibility, wit, with English sturdiness, sense, humour-we should have the model man of the world. Some day, we hear, there is to be a tunnel between France and England, which cannot but increase their traffic in the best that one has to exchange with the other. Meanwhile, let us trust that the two nations are coming to understand each other better every day, as it is the true wisdom of all civilized nations to do; and that Waterloo begins to be as dusty a memory as Fontenoy is, as Sedan will be when time has healed those sore wounds,

HERE is no royal road to learning, we are truly told: long at the best, often weary, nor ever wholly free from stones and briers, will be the path by which youth advances to any height of scholarship, to be at last able to enjoy some small outlook upon the wisdom of ages. The most favoured child of fortune must have his wrestlings with the alphabet and the multiplication table; nay, there are grimmer foes, on which few of us, in these days of compulsory education, have leave to turn our backs. So it has been, and so it always will be, as long as human nature takes less readily to its lessons than to its meals. Yet much, we must own, has been done in smoothing the way for tender feet through what once was such an appalling wilderness, and in paring the claws of those ruthless monsters that of old so commonly infested it. The schoolboy of to-day little thinks what his lot might have been, had it been cast a few generations earlier. These smart and not too modest young gentlemen of ours, who run down to Eton and Harrow by express trains, with as few tears as their grandfathers used to shed at the beginning of the holidays; who have the best of tutors, grammars, graduses and the like, always at hand to help them over every scholastic stile; who grumble when they get roast mutton too often for dinner, and clamour if they don't get hot dishes at breakfast; for whom the time-honoured birch is fast becoming a mere vain symbol, like the sceptre of the monarch or the dress

sword of the court chamberlain; who spend in pocket-money and amusement more than has kept many a famous student in food, clothes, books, and all; who never in their lives have known what it was to want a quire of paper or a warm overcoatthese young Sybarites of learning, as they are by comparison, for all their fagging customs and football scrimmages, should they find themselves not duly thankful for the blessings of fortune, would do well to consider what a thing might be going to school two or three hundred years ago, as exemplified, for instance, in the autobiography of one who went through a painful, yet by no means uncommon, experience of that rough apprenticeship to polite letters.

In the last year of the fifteenth century, when the great revival of learning was thawing men's minds, so long frost-bound in the ignorance of the Middle Ages, and sowing the seed which would soon bear fruit in the Reformation, a boy named Thomas Platter came into this changing world near the village of Grenchen, in the Canton of St. Gall. He was a Swiss boy, then, born heir to that freedom which his bold fathers had wrested from the men-at-arms of Austria and Burgundy, bred among that romantic scenery which has now become "the playground of Europe," though, in his days, the inhabitants thought more of the dangers and poverty than of the grandeur and beauty of their wild mountains. His family seems not to have been rich, and was soon to be poorer; better off once, hints Master Thomas, but ruined by usurers, who, with the bad security of a troubled time, would naturally exact ruinous interest. The women of that frugal folk spent their long winter evenings in spinning and weaving wool, to be made up into stout doublets and hose for the peasants; and in autumn the men used to visit the richer district of Berne to buy these fleeces, which their own rough-haired goats did not afford them. On such a journey our boy's father took the plague, and died away from home, when Thomas was still too young to remember him. But he remembers his maternal grandfather, Hans Summermatter, whom he rather incredibly assures us to have reached the venerable age of a hundred and twenty-six, yet not by ten to have been the oldest man in the parish! This patriarch, we are also told, married a second wife when he was just a century old, and had another baby, with a progeny of grey-haired children already grown up about him!

A SCATTERED FAMILY.

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Thomas himself had plenty of brothers and sisters-how many, he cannot exactly tell. After his father's death, the widow marrying again, her first family became broken up. The sons had to take service as soon as they could shift for themselves, and two of them at least were killed in battle: thus early was hardy Switzerland breeding soldiers for all the wars of Europe. Little Thomas himself, the Benjamin of the family, came to be more or less taken charge of by his father's sisters, and his first childish recollections belong to the home of one of these aunts, at a place called "In the wild," near his native village. His mother could not or would not even nurse him; he grew up to tumble about for himself upon milk given him through a small horn, which was his diet for four or five years.

It was a rough up-bringing, at the best, in which weaklings were likely to be killed-off without much help from doctors or nurses. Such incidents as he recalls from these early years show how children are the same in all times and places. Once his aunt had laid him on a table warmly wrapped in a truss of straw while she went to mass; then what must the lively little imp do but get up and run through the snow naked, so that he was found in another house well-nigh frozen to death, if it had not been for the friendly care of the neighbours! Again, his eldest brother came home from the Savoy Wars, all scars and steel, bringing with him, the kind warrior, a little wooden horse for Tommy, who drew it along by a thread before the door, and remembers well how he thought it could really walk. The big fierce brother was playful also; he passed one leg over the little fellow's head, and said, "Oho, Tomilin, now you will never grow any more!" Centuries of high deeds, all these crowded historical pictures of men - at - arms in battle, and princes in counsel, seem for the moment to grow dim beside such touches of childish reminiscence, as fresh as if they came from yesterday. Another time the urchin, now able to run about and make his way wherever he was not wanted, appears in the character of a true boy, heedless of forms and proprieties. A great dignitary of the Church, no less than a cardinal, had come to Grenchen to confirm the young people, for which rite our Thomas was in due time to be presented by a relative of his, a priest, who had undertaken to act as his godfather. But as soon as the cardinal had dined and gone into the church, this small catechumen presented himself all alone,

impatient to have the matter over at once, that he might make sure of the customary present from his godfather. He found the cardinal sitting in solitary state, who was naturally surprised to see him present himself so unceremoniously, and asked him what he wanted. "I should like to be confirmed," said the unabashed child. This good-natured Churchman was not offended, but inquired his name, and gave him a gentle slap on the cheek; then, when the godfather appeared, full of apologies and indignation at such forwardness, the cardinal said a word for his little friend, remarking, "That child will surely become something wonderful, perhaps a priest."

He was by no means the first to predict this honour for our hero. As Thomas had been born on Shrove Tuesday while the bells were ringing for mass, many of the superstitious gossips declared him destined to the priesthood. But there were difficulties in the way. The needful schooling, little as that was, did not lie at every Swiss peasant's door. The country was demoralized by its long struggle for independence, and the petty civil wars which had from time to time sprung up among this restless armed population, who found so much to do in wringing a bare livelihood from their native rocks, as well as in defending them now against foreign tyrants, now against quarrelsome neighbours, that they were little able to cultivate learning. Then the poverty of the family urged that Thomas should be doing something betimes for his own support. So at the age of six he began life as a goatherd in the service of his mother's brother-in-law.

A hard life this was for such a young one. Often nearly lost in the snow, he was just able to struggle out, leaving his shoes behind him, and run home barefoot. He had charge of about eighty goats when he opened their stable-door of a morning, and was not quick enough in springing aside, the impetuous herd, rushing forth, would knock him down and scamper over his little body. As soon as he had let them loose, the foremost of the provoking creatures would be into the corn-field; and while Thomas with legs, arms and voice was driving them out, others would come running in, till the poor boy fell a-crying in despair, knowing well that he must expect a beating from the farmer for these faults of his unruly charge. Sometimes the older goatherds goodnaturedly helped him, especially one friend and namesake, a certain Thomas of Leidenbach, who