with Roger Ascham to joining the youths and maidens in the exhilarating diversion of the chase. Yet she was a model of loving obedience to her parents, and of devotion to her husband. And this was the case although her parents educated her with the astonishing and atrocious cruelty which was in those days deemed necessary to success in education. Fuller may well say

that her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, treated "with more severity than needed to so sweet a temper" their lovely child, who at thirteen was writing Greek, and at fifteen was also learning Hebrew, Latin, Italian, and French, and corresponding with the learned Bullinger, while she could also embroider beautifully, and had many feminine accomplishments. Yet here, taken from Roger Ascham's "Scholemaster," is the account she gave him of the way in which she was trained: "When I am in presence either of father or mother; whether I speake, or keepe silence, sit, stand, or go, eate, drinke, be merrie or sad, be sowying, playing, dauncing, or doing anie thing else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfitelie as God made the world, or else I am so sharplie taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presentlie sometimes with pinches, nippes, and bobbes, and other waies which I will not name, for the honour I bear them, without measure misordered, that I thinke myselfe in hell."

But to return to Margaret Roper, the passages which describe her relation to her father are very beautiful:

"When he had remained with great cheerfulness about a month's space in the Tower, his daughter Margaret, longing sore to see her father, made earnest suit, and at last got leave to go to him; at whose coming, after they had said together the seven psalms and litanies, among other speeches he said thus unto her: 'I believe, Megg, that they who have put me here think they have done me a high displeasure, but I assure thee, mine own good daughter, that if it had not been for my wife, and you my children, whom I account the chief part of my charge, I would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room as this, and straiter too.'»

Here is the famous description of the last parting of father and daughter by his great-grandson, Cresacre More:

"When Sir Thomas was come now to the Tower-wharf, his bestbeloved child, my Aunt Roper, desirous to see her father

. . to have his last blessing, gave her attendance to meet him; whom, as

soon as she espied, after she had received upon her knees his fatherly blessing, she ran hastily unto him, and without consideration of care of herself, passing through the midst of the throng and guard of men, who, with bills and halberds compassed him round, there openly in the sight of them all embraced him, took him about the neck and kissed him, not able to say any word but 'Oh, my father! Oh, my father!' He liking well her most natural and dear affection to him, gave her his fatherly blessing, telling her that, whatsoever he should suffer, though he were innocent, yet it was not without the will of God, counseling her to accommodate her will to God's blessed pleasure, and to be patient for her loss. She was no sooner parted from him, and had gone scarce ten steps, when she, not satisfied with her former farewell, like one who had forgot herself, ravished with the entire love of so worthy a father, having neither respect to herself nor to the press of people about him, suddenly turned back and ran hastily to him, took him about the neck, and divers times together kissed him; whereat he spoke not a word, but carrying still his gravity, tears fell also from his eyes; yea, there were very few in all the troop who could refrain hereat from weeping;

with a full, heavy heart, she was severed from him."

yet, at last,

The day before his execution he wrote a letter to her with a coal, the use of pen and ink being still denied him, in which he expressed a great affection for all his children, and a grateful sense of her filial piety and tenderness when she took leave of him in the street. He sent her also his whip and shirt of hair. To any who know how deep and rich may be the blessings and life compensations of a happy Christian home-to any who have breathed the air of that paradise-it must be saddening to read that the emancipation of womanhood from many trammels which this age has witnessed is said to have culminated in a "revolt of the daughters." I can imagine many fatal errors in the training of daughters and of sons. I can imagine that the daughters of women of fashion, who are that and nothing more, may think their own aims at least as noble and as little reprehensible as that of any mother who would sell their happiness into the gilded servitude of a "great" or a "wealthy" marriage with some decrepit millionaire or titled debauchee. I can imagine, too, that many mothers may make the mistake about their daughters which so many fathers make about their sons, in expecting that their children ought to be like themselves, and have similar views and similar aspirations. Every human soul is an island, and it is surrounded by an unvoyageable sea. It does

not, by any means, follow that the child will reflect either the character or the ideal of its parents. It may even revert by atavism to some far distant type wholly alien from that of its immediate progenitors; and, in any case, our children, like all other human beings, are -as someone has said-simply the summed-up totals of innumerable double lines of ancestors which go back to our first parents, Adam and Eve. A Commodus, who is a monster of brutalism and vulgarity, is the son of a Marcus Aurelius, who is the "bright consummate flower" of all pagan morality. An Agrippina the younger, whose name was stained with so many infamies, was the daughter of the virtuous wife of Germanicus, who set an example of stainless purity in an evil and adulterous age. If there be any general "revolt of the daughters," which I do not believe, there must be some deep underlying germ of disease in our modern civilization. It can hardly occur when parents are wise and loving, and when, for the fussiness of wearisome restraints and incessant interferences, they substitute the firm control of gentleness and love.

From "Woman's Work in the Home.»

OWEN FELLTHAM

(c. 1602-1668)

WEN FELLTHAM had Bacon for a master, and in brevity and wit he is a worthy pupil of that greatest of English moralists. He owes to Bacon as much as Earle and Fuller do to Theophrastus, but no more, however, for his is one of those rare intellects whose thronging imaginations impel expression without any other effort than that of limitation and direction. Hallam, who has attacked Felltham, illustrates in his own style and literary methods a wholly different school of essay writers, - a school whose excellencies, high and frequent as they are, do not detract from, but rather enhance, grateful appreciation of the concise sentences, the clearly defined metaphors, the frequent illustrations, and the never-to-be-toomuch-admired brevity of the school of which Felltham is an ornament. Hallam, Gibbon, and Dr. Samuel Johnson are very largely responsible by their combined examples for the interminable length of the critical reviews and political disquisitions of the nineteenth century.

If, as has been said, the whole art of eloquence consists of saying enough and stopping, no one who concludes that Felltham's methods are the best possible for his purposes, need be ashamed of admiring him now, as warmly as he was admired by his contemporaries. His admirable essay on "Loquacity and Tediousness in Discourse," says all that needs to be said to avenge, if not to vindicate him, when the faults of his style are measured against those of the writers who pile up clause on clause, until the average mind can no longer endure the burden of the accumulated load. Felltham is pedantic, but he is simple. He is given to preaching, but the longest of his sermons will give no man a chance to nod for weariness. He is "full of affectation," but it is the affectation of a mind like that of Shakespeare a mind into which the whole visible world crowds itself until he cannot but know the subtle relations and resemblances which to others seem strange and unreal. He has the unmistakable marks of genius. Talent we have always with us, but it is not often in the course of the centuries that young writers, or old ones either, can get rid of the perpetual self-consciousness which shuts out the influx of such varied knowledge of the realities of things as Felltham shows in his "Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political,”- a work written, it is said, in his eighteenth year. Little is known of his history. He was

born at Mutford, in Suffolk, probably in 1602, and his middle life was involved in the quarrel between King and Parliament, in which he sided warmly with the King. He died in Northamptonshire in 1668. Aside from its own interest, his prose is so obviously a result of the same forces which evolved the Shakespearean cycle of poets, that on this account, if no other, he would deserve the most careful study. But for those who have listened long to the "tumult of discourse » from great nineteenth-century apostles of higher criticism, Felltham's highly moral method of getting at, around, and to the end of his subject when he moralizes cannot fail to be a relief and a refreshment. W. V. B.

A

OF LOQUACITY AND TEDIOUSNESS IN DISCOURSE

PRATING barber came to trim King Archelaus, and said to him, How will you please to have me cut your hair ?». Said the king, "Silently." And, certainly, though a man has nothing to do, but to hear and answer, yet a boundless tongue is a strange unbridled beast to be worried with. And the misery is, that those who speak much seldom speak well: it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer. Horace, I think, was to be pitied when he was put into a sweat, and almost slain in the Via Sacra, by the accidental detention of a prating tongue. There is nothing tires one more than words, when they clatter, like a loose window shaken by the wind. A talkative fellow may be compared to an unbraced drum, which beats a wise man out of his wits. Surely, nature did not guard the tongue with the double fence of teeth and lips, without meaning that it should not move too nimbly. When a scholar full of words applied to Isocrates for instruction, the latter demanded of him a double fee: one, to teach him to speak well; another, to teach him to hold his peace. Those who talk too much to others, I fear, seldom speak enough with themselves; and then, for want of acquaintance with their own bosoms, they may well be mistaken and exhibit foolishness when they think they are displaying wisdom. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,—ever running and almost incurable. Some are blabbers of secrets, and these are traitors to society; they are vessels unfit for use, for they are bored in their bottoms.