order, make a clear statement of the
case for themselves, and try if they can point out the facts on which
the decision principally rests. This is not merely education for a
lawyer; the powers of reasoning and judgment, when we have been
exercised in this manner, may be turned to any art or profession. We
should, if we were to try the judgment of children, observe, whether
in unusual circumstances they can apply their former principles, and
compare the new objects that are placed before them without
perplexity. We have sometimes found, that on subjects entirely new to
them, children, who have been used to reason, can lay aside the
circumstances that are not essential, and form a distinct judgment for
themselves, independently of the opinion of others.

Last winter the entertaining life of the celebrated miser Mr. Elwes
was read aloud in a family, in which there were a number of children.
Mr. Elwes, once, as he was _walking_ home on a dark night, in London,
ran against a chair pole and bruised both his shins. His friends sent
for a surgeon. Elwes was alarmed at the idea of expense, and he laid
the surgeon the amount of his bill, that the leg which he took under
his own protection would get well sooner than that which was put under
the surgeon's care; at the same time Mr. Elwes promised to put nothing
to the leg of which he took charge. Mr. Elwes favourite leg got well
sooner than that which the surgeon had undertaken to cure, and Mr.
Elwes won his wager. In a note upon this transaction his biographer
says, "This wager would have been a bubble bet if it had been brought
before the Jockey-club, because Mr. Elwes, though he promised to put
nothing to the leg under his own protection, took Velnos' vegetable
sirup during the time of its cure."

C---- (a girl of twelve years old) observed when this anecdote was
read, that "still the wager was a fair wager, because _the medicine_
which Mr. Elwes took, if it was of any use, must have been of use to
both legs; therefore the surgeon and Mr. Elwes had equal advantage
from it." C---- had never heard of the Jockey-club, or of bubble bets
before, and she used the word _medicine_, because she forgot the name
of Velnos' vegetable sirup.

We have observed,[92] that works of criticism are unfit for children,
and teach them rather to remember what others say of authors, than to
judge of the books themselves impartially: but, when we object to
works of criticism, we do not mean to object