Education.—The striving of modern fashionable education is to make the character impressive; while the result of good education, though not the aim, would be to make it expressive.
There is a tendency in modern education to cover the fingers with rings, and at the same time to cut the sinews at the wrist.
The worst education, which teaches self denial, is better than the best which teaches every thing else, and not that.—Tales and Essays by John Sterling.
[From Household Words.]
GHOST STORIES—AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF MADLLE CLAIRON.
The occurrence related in the letter which we are about to quote, is a remarkable instance of those apparently supernatural visitations which it has been found so difficult (if not impossible) to explain and account for. It does not appear to have been known to Scott, Brewster, or any other English writer who has collected and endeavored to expound those ghostly phenomena.
Clairon was the greatest tragedian that ever appeared on the French stage; holding on it a supremacy similar to that of Siddons on our own. She was a woman of powerful intellect, and had the merit of affecting a complete revolution in the French school of tragic acting; substituted an easy, varied and natural delivery for the stilted and monotonous declamation which had till then prevailed, and being the first to consult classic taste and propriety of costume. Her mind was cultivated by habits of intimacy with the most distinguished men of her day; and she was one of the most brilliant ornaments of those literary circles which the contemporary memoir writers describe in such glowing colors. In an age of corruption, unparalleled in modern times, Mademoiselle Clairon was not proof against the temptations to which her position exposed her. But a lofty spirit, and some religious principles, which she retained amidst a generation of infidels and scoffers, saved her from degrading vices, and enabled her to spend an old age protracted beyond the usual period of human life, in respectability and honor.
She died in 1803, at the age of eighty. She was nearly seventy when the following letter was written. It was addressed to M. Henri Meister, a man of some eminence among the literati of that period; the associate of Diderot, Grimm, D'Holbach, M. and Madame Necker, &c., and the collaborateur of Grimm in his famous "Correspondence." This gentleman was Clairon's "literary executor;" having been intrusted with her memoirs, written by herself, and published after her death.
With this preface we give Mademoiselle Clairon's narrative, written in her old age, of an occurrence which had taken place half a century before.