Moreover, these English children, although incredibly good, have the grace to be unconscious of their goodness. Even Selina, who, like young Wackford Squeers, is "next door but one to a cherubim," is apparently unaware of the fact. Leila does not instruct her father. She receives counsel quite humbly from his lips, though she is full eight years old when the first volume opens. Matilda has never any occasion to remonstrate gently with her mother; and little Alfred fails, in the whole course of his infant life, to once awaken in his parents' friends an acute sense of their own unworthiness.
This conservative attitude is due, perhaps, to the rigid prejudices of the Old World. In our freer air, children, released from thraldom, develop swiftly into guides and teachers. We first introduced into the literature of the Sunday-school the offensively pious little Christian who makes her father and mother, her uncles and aunts, even her venerable grandparents, the subjects of her spiritual ministrations. We first taught her to confront, Bible in hand, the harmless adults who had given her birth, and to annihilate their feeble arguments with
