Weekly national intelligencer., 1847-09-11
NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER.
NOTES ON NEW BOOKS.

Fa;rv Tale BY the brothers MAYHEM. New York !:
Harper 4 Brothers" lsmo., 20l PIP. illustrations
This ingenious and pretty morazed fiction seems
,be 6rs of new series which the ever-actlve pub
fishers have begun, under the title of Harpers Fire
side Library If the further volumes prove as
GOOD as this first, the succession will be which
the Young may rejoice over, and the future old re-
member with delight part OF that childish litera
ture which first woke them up to wonder and
sympathy.
AS TO ourselves, we are glad to see any thing that
promises revival of this, which we take 10 be the
proper chd's learning. The present Practical Age
las il is pleased style itself, amidst all its frvol-
ties and fantasies, at which elder times would only
have laughed) is certainly wise enough to reject
for the young that which the young naturally de-
light in, and to prefer the premature cultivation of
the ereason-aempts after positive knowledge, to the
older system of books which sought to engage and
please, rather than directly to inform but we con-
fess ourselves persuaded that Nature herself, the
instructive taste of the young, is much wiser than
all the forcng-beds and hot-houses into which the
Barbaulds and Edgeworhs would force the facul-
ties of little folks to be grown under glass. Toy
histories, and moral and scientific and theological
playthngs, have ever appeared TO exceedingly
sad inventions for little people; and we doubt more
and more every day whether Goody Two-shoes,
Mother Goose, the exploits of the puissant Tom
Thumb, and the deeds of the doughty Jack the Giant
killer, are not capable of insting into childhood
quite much solid information as all that can be
o dstastefully driven into it by Miniature Encyclo-
padias or PHILOSOPHERS in Sport.
We no great believers in the poetic criticism
or the prose taste of DR.. Johnson; but there are
points ON which his powerful sense forms weighty
authority. Among such we remember with plea
sure the opinion which he expressed on some occa-
sion when Boswell asked him what he thought of
Mrs. Barbauld and her acknowledgements, who had
just then found out how folks ought to be taught.
The essence of the system appeared to the Doctor,
we suppose, much as 1t does to us the idea that
as we are taught, while small in order tharwe may
know when big, so the true way is to begin where
you are TO end, and teach, from the jump, exactly
what should be known at the close In other words,
as all instruction is to have for its final aim the per-
fecon of the understanding, the sooner you begin
with that the better. At Mrs. Barbauld the good
Doctor seems only to have laughed as very shall
low person and as to any thing of improvement in
the art OF teaching, he long teacher hmsef) ex-
pressed most decided conviction !" that education
was just as well understood five hundred years ago
as il is now" Was he not substantially right!
new process of thinking must be found out before
there can be any revolution in the manner of learn
ing hoIc to think. To know is but to know and
10 teach is but 10 initiate for others the steps br
Wilich the teacher came 10 haoD, shortening the
track ofcourse, by adopting all esraghtines which
his arrival at the end has shown the wise man, so
men of clear minds must always have employed es-
sentlally the same methods of instructing simply
because they used the faculties for learning.
More or less knowledge may have existed but what
dtd exist must always, as soon as 1t came to have
any completeness any consistency, any progress
from truth to truth, any logic in a word have pur-
sued the same general method in making itself known
to pupils. Nay, what better methods have ever
been devised than the Greek OF Geometry! We
still use Tor all investigation and proof, the logic o
Xeno and Aristotle the rhetoric of the Greek speak
and writers still affords US our noblest and pures
models. Therapeutics and their art military achev
ed every thing which was then possible; we do no
write such poems Homer or Pindar, such hsto
rles as lhucydides; we do not speak such harangue.
as Demosthenes: if, then, cannot beat the An
clients those intellectual things which education
should enable nations TO do more perfectly how il
il that we fatter ourselves that we better under
stand the art which forms the mind for efforts o.
genius
Or, once more: in later times, if the vast and
various wit and accomplishments of Bacon and
Raleigh and Milton the science of a GalIiIeo
kepler, Leibnitz, and Newton; the plastic
and the graphic powers of Michael Angelo and a
Raphael; the poetic invention of Dante, an Ari.
osto, Iasso, Shakespeare, Racine, a Moliere
could reach, without the new education heights 10
which that education has not yet carried any body.
what entities that same education to be considered
miracle-working one
Perhaps, then, the truth lies here that the ra
tlonal education, Jas it aims 10 be- in directing l.
self almost exclusively towards the positive. and
the cultivation Of the powers which take coon;zance
of the positive, serves 10 perfect by RENDERING ex-
acter and more methodcal, the commonplace order
of minds: but that il deadens the imagination II
those who possessed any, and must often break down
all the vigor of the understanding itself by se,tino
il AT tasks for which its muscles are not vet formed
To the rational literature, then, for the tenderes
state Of the mind, we see strong objections. Prac
tlcally, we know the order in which the facultie,
arrive and that the reason does not come until onr
after the imagination the reason, we mean, o
course, in that higher form which can deal with sci
entihc truth in earnest In this sense bows car
scarcely be said to reason until about their six
teenth, nor girls until about their fourteenth wear
Before that they are intellectually beings of Iitl,
but memory, sensation, emotion, and fancy These
then, are the things which must first be cultivated
and their exercise-the only one really possible
until they have amassed store of materials for IN,
Judgment-consuutes the first true education tha
which may be called the sensuous
The first part Of this natural education is tha
which begins with the most infant perceptions o
..z.l.t L.-~