Cold as Paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee.
For a Benizon to fall,
On our meat, and on us all.
These verses, or such as these, Agnes should be able to say, and sing; and if on any state occasion it were desired of her to say grace, should be so mannered as to say obediently, without either vanity or shame. Also, she should know other rhymes for her own contentment such as she liked best, out of narrow store offered to, [[44]]her, if she chose to learn to read. Reading by no means being enforced upon her—still less, writing; nothing enforced on her but household help to her mother; instant obedience to her father’s or mother’s word; order and cleanliness in her own departments and person; and gentleness to all inoffensive creatures—paddocks as well as lambs and chickens.
Further, instead of eighteen distinct penny Children’s Prizes, containing seventy-two elaborate woodcuts of ‘Ducklings Astray,’ and the like, (which I should especially object to, in the case of Agnes, as too personal, she herself being little more at present than a duckling astray,) the St. George’s Company would invest for her, at once, the ‘ridiculously small sum of eighteenpence,’ in one coloured print—coloured by hand, for the especial decoration of her own chamber. This colouring by hand is one of the occupations which young women of the upper classes, in St. George’s Company, will undertake as a business of pure duty; it was once a very wholesome means of livelihood to poorer art students. The plates of Sibthorpe’s Flora Græca, for instance, cost, I am informed, on their first publication, precisely the sum in question,—eighteen-pence each,—for their colouring by hand:—the enterprising publisher who issued the more recent editions, reducing, in conformity with modern views on the subject of economy, the colourist’s remuneration to thirty shillings per hundred. But in the St. George’s Company, young ladies who have the gift of [[45]]colouring will be taught to colour engravings simply as well as they can do it, without any reference whatever to pecuniary compensation; and such practice I consider to be the very best possible elementary instruction for themselves, in the art of watercolour painting.
And the print which should be provided and thus coloured for little Agnes’s room should be no less than the best engraving I could get made of Simon Memmi’s St. Agnes in Paradise; of which—(according to the probable notions of many of my readers, absurd and idolatrous)—image, little Agnes should know the legend as soon as she was able to understand it; though, if the St. George’s Company, could manage it for her, she should be protected from too early instruction in the meaning of that legend, by such threats from her English playfellows as are noticed in my correspondent’s letter.
Such should be some small part of her religious education. For beginning of secular education, the St. George’s Company would provide for her, above and before all things, a yard or two square of St. George’s ground, which should be wholly her own; together with instruments suited to her strength, for the culture, and seeds for the sowing, thereof. On which plot of ground, or near it, in a convenient place, there should be a bee-hive, out of which it should be considered a crowning achievement of Agnes’s secular virtues if she could produce, in its season, a piece of snowy and well-filled comb. And, (always if she chose to learn to read), [[46]]books should be given her containing such information respecting bees, and other living creatures as it appeared to the St. George’s Company desirable she should possess. But touching the character of this desirable information, what I have to say being somewhat lengthy, must be deferred to my March letter.
Castleton, Peak of Derbyshire,
27th January.
Since finishing this letter, I have driven leisurely through the midland manufacturing districts, which I have not traversed, except by rail, for the last ten years. The two most frightful things I have ever yet seen in my life are the south-eastern suburb of Bradford, (six miles long,) and the scene from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel; yet I cannot but more and more reverence the fierce courage and industry, the gloomy endurance, and the infinite mechanical ingenuity of the great centres, as one reverences the fervid labours of a wasp’s nest, though the end of all is only a noxious lump of clay. [[47]]