ERRATA. Page 56 11th line from bottom-for "am content," read is content. 65 6th line from bottom-for "has all hilarity," read have, &c. 167 2d line 2d verse-for "might draw," read might'st draw. 237 7th line from top-for "indifferent," read being indifferent. TRAVELING. MENTALLY AND BODILY. IT is a wholesome thing to be what is commonly termed "kicked about the world." Not literally "kicked"-not forcibly propelled by innumerable feet from village to village, from town to town, or from country to country, which can be neither wholesome nor agreeable; but knocked about, tossed about, irregularly jostled over the principal portions of the two hemispheres; sleeping hard and soft, living well when you can, and learning to take what is barely edible and potable ungrumblingly when there is no help for it. Certes, the departure from home and old usages is any thing but pleasant, especially at the outset. It is a sort of secondary "weaning" which the juvenile has to undergo; but like the first process, he is all the healthier and hardier when it is over. In this way, it is a wholesome thing to be tossed about the world. To form odd acquaintance in ships, on the decks of steam boats and tops of coaches; to pick up tem porary companions on turnpikes or by hedge-sides; to see humanity in the rough, and learn what stuff life is made of in different places; to mark the shades and points of distinction in men, manners, customs, cookery, and other important matters as you stroll along. What an universal toleration it begets! How it improves and enlarges a man's physical and intellectual tastes and capacities! How diminutively local and ridiculously lilliputian seem his former experiences! He is now no longer bigotted to a doctrine or a dish, but can fall in with one, or eat of the other, however strange and foreign, with a facility that is truly comfortable and commendable: always, indeed, excepting, such doctrines as affect the feelings and sentiments, which he should ever keep "garner'd up" in his "heart of hearts;" and also, always excepting the swallowing of certain substances, so very peculiar in themselves, and so strictly national, that the undisciplined palate of the foreigner instinctively and utterly rejects them, such as the frog of your Frenchmanthe garlic of your Spaniard the compounds termed sausages of your Cockney-the haggis of your Scotchman-the train-oil of your Russian. He has but little of the ardent spirit of boyhood, or the mounting spirit of manhood in him, who can quietly seat himself by his father's hearth, dear though it be, until that hearth, by virtue of inher itance becomes his own, without a wish to see how the world wags beyond the walls of his native town. How mulish and uncompromising he groweth up! How very indocile and incredulous he becometh! To him localities are truths right is wrong and wrong is right, just as they fall in with or differ from the customs of his district; and all that is rare or curious or strange or wonderful or different from what he has been accustomed to, is measured by the petty standard of his own experience, and dogmatically censured or praised accordingly. Such men are incurable, and what is worse, legal nuisances they can neither be abated by law nor logic. I like human nature of quite a different pattern. A boy, especially, is all the better for a strong infusion of credulity in his composition. He should swallow an hyperbole unhesitatingly, and digest it without difficulty. It is better for a juvenile to be ingenuous than ingenious. It is better for him to study Baron Munchausen than Poor Richard's Maxims. The Baron's inventions fertilize his imagination without injuring his love of truth; Poor Richard's truisms teach him nothing but that cold worldly wisdom he is almost sure to learn, and learn too soon. Strong drink is not for babes and sucklings; neither is miserly, hard-hearted proverbs 66 a penny saved is a penny earned"-"a groat a day is a pound a year," and such like arithmetical wisdom. Keep it from them: it takes the edge off their young sensibilities, and sets them calculating their charities. They will learn selfishness soon enough without taking regular lessons. The good Samaritan, honest man, cared not a fig-leaf for such axioms, or he too would have "passed by on the other side." Not that I mean to question the utility of arithmetical studies for children, or inculcate the neglect of worthy proficients or professors therein. Hutton, Tinwell, Bonnycastle, or more ancient Cocker ;far from it, I have too severely ere now experienced the ill-effects of slighting the multiplication table and other loftier branches of arithmetic; but I could not then help it. I was a great traveler when a boy, though not in the body; in imagination I had circumnavigated the globe. A book of voyages and travels was to me better than a holiday, and I devoured the pages of Wallis, Cartwright, Byron, and other navigators with an appetite that now seems to me to have been really preternatural. How I used to trudge away, not unwillingly to school, if I had only Robinson Crusoe (which was then a most veritable and authentic document) smuggled |