ought ridiculous. "Pretty lessons," you will
tell me, "which you yourself criticize for teaching only what there is
no need of learning! Why waste time in instructions which always come
of their own accord, and cost neither care nor trouble? What child of
twelve does not know all you are going to teach yours, and all that his
masters have taught him besides?"

Gentlemen, you are mistaken. I am teaching my pupil a very tedious and
difficult art, which yours certainly have not acquired,--that of being
ignorant. For the knowledge of one who gives himself credit for
knowing only what he really does know reduces itself to a very small
compass. You are teaching science: very good; I am dealing with the
instrument by which science is acquired. All who have reflected upon
the mode of life among the ancients attribute to gymnastic exercises
that vigor of body and mind which so notably distinguishes them from us
moderns. Montaigne's support of this opinion shows that he had fully
adopted it; he returns to it again and again, in a thousand ways.
Speaking of the education of a child, he says, "We must make his mind
robust by hardening his muscles; inure him to pain by accustoming him
to labor; break him by severe exercise to the keen pangs of
dislocation, of colic, of other ailments." The wise Locke,[18] the
excellent Rollin,[19] the learned Fleury,[20] the pedantic de
Crouzas,[21] so different in everything else, agree exactly on this
point of abundant physical exercise for children. It is the wisest
lesson they ever taught, but the one that is and always will be most
neglected.

Clothing.

As to clothing, the limbs of a growing body should be entirely free.
Nothing should cramp their movements or their growth; nothing should
fit too closely or bind the body; there should be no ligatures
whatever. The present French dress cramps and disables even a man, and
is especially injurious to children. It arrests the circulation of the
humors; they stagnate from an inaction made worse by a sedentary life.
This corruption of the humors brings on the scurvy, a disease becoming
every day more common among us, but unknown to the ancients, protected
from it by their dress and their mode of life. The hussar dress does
not remedy this inconvenience, but increases it, since, to save the
child a few ligatures, it compresses the entire body. It would be
better to keep children in frocks as long as possible, and then put
them into