'I don't see how all these painted windows, and crosses, and chanting, and the deuce and the Pope only know what else, are to make boys any better.' 'We have it on the highest authority,' said Vieuxbois, 'that pictures and music are the books of the unlearned.

I do not think that we have any right in the nineteenth century to contest an opinion which the fathers of the Church gave in the fourth.' 'At all events,' said Lancelot, 'it is by pictures and music, by art and song, and symbolic representations, that all nations have been educated in their adolescence! and as the youth of the individual is exactly analogous to the youth of the collective race, we should employ the same means of instruction with our children which succeeded in the early ages with the whole world.' Lancelot might as well have held his tongue--nobody understood him but Vieuxbois, and he had been taught to scent German neology in everything, as some folks are taught to scent Jesuitry, especially when it involved an inductive law, and not a mere red-tape precedent, and, therefore, could not see that Lancelot was arguing for him.

'All very fine, Smith,' said the squire; 'it's a pity you won't leave off puzzling your head with books, and stick to fox- hunting.

All you young gentlemen will do is to turn the heads of the poor with your cursed education.' The national oath followed, of course.

'Pictures and chanting! Why, when I was a boy, a good honest labouring man wanted to see nothing better than a halfpenny ballad, with a wood-cut at the top, and they worked very well then, and wanted for nothing.' 'Oh, we shall give them the halfpenny ballads in time!' said Vieuxbois, smiling.
'You will do a very good deed, then,' said mine host.