brought us up, as you call it, with all her powers; but public opinion
would never have suffered us to get merely the odd sort of teaching
that she could give us. It was regular, or course; but oh! do you
remember the old atlas, with Germany divided into circles, and
everything as it was before the Congress of Vienna?'

'You liked geography; I hated it.'

'Yes, I was young enough to come in for the elder boys' old school
atlases, which had some sense in them. It seems to me that we had more
the spirit of working for ourselves according to our individual tastes
than people have now. We learnt, they are taught.'

'Well! and what did we learn?'

'As much as we could carry,' said Aunt Jane, laughing. 'Assimilate, if
you like it better; and I doubt if people will turn out to have done
more now. What becomes of all the German that is crammed down girl's
throats, whether they have a turn for languages or not? Do they ever
read a German book? Now you learnt it for love of Fouque and Max
Piccolomini, and you have kept it up ever since.'

'Yes, by cramming it down my children's throats. But what I complain
of, Jane, in the young folk that come across me is not over-knowledge,
but want of knowledge--want of general culture. This Dolores, for
instance, can do what she has been taught better than Mysie, some tings
better than Gillian, but she has absolutely no interest in general
knowledge, not even in the glaciers which she has seen; she does not
know whether Homer wrote in Greek or Latin, considers "Marmion' a
lesson, cannot tell a planet from a star, and neither knows nor cares