THAT greatest of modern educationists, Miss Charlotte Mason, had a firm belief, built up on many years of close observation and personal contact with all classes of children from infancy upwards, that you could hardly begin too early with putting a child in the way of observing and using its brains.
Wordsworth returns, in his autobiographical poem The Prelude, the most grateful thanks to his mother for letting him, to a considerable extent, go his own way before he was out of the nursery. I can never cease thanking both my parents for treating me in like manner as a person, and one who, unaided, could take an interest in what went on around him. Thus it came to pass quite naturally that when Alfred Tennyson in December 1850 stayed in our house, the vicarage, at Shiplake, half a year after his marriage, I trotted down the kitchen garden walk one morning VOL. XCVII-No. 575