300 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn. 



the very same faculty wliicli the poet or the painter 

 employs, only on a different class of objects ; remember 

 that this faculty is present in some strength in every 

 mind of any power, in every mind which can do more 

 than follow helplessly in the beaten track, and do 

 nothing but what it has seen others do already : and 

 then see whether it be not worth while to give the 

 young a study which above all others is fitted to keep 

 this important and universal faculty in health. Now, 

 from fifty to five-and-twenty years ago, under the 

 influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school of 

 education, imagination was at a discount. That school 

 was a good school enough : but here was one of its 

 faults. It taught people to look on imagination as 

 quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad thing, a 

 sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an 

 unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolu- 

 tion ; and an equally unfair glorifying of the imagina- 

 tion ; the present generation have found out suddenly 

 that the despised faculty is worth something, and 

 therefore are ready to believe it worth everything ; so 

 that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on 

 some poets, the mere possession of imagination, how- 

 ever ill regulated, will atone for every error of false 

 taste, bad English, carelessness for truth; and even 

 for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common 

 morality ; and it is no longer charity, but fancy, which 

 is to cover the multitude of sins. 



The fact is, that youth will always be the period of 

 imagination ; and the business of a good education will 

 always be to prevent that imagination from being 

 thrown inward, and producing a mental fever, diseasing 

 itself and the whole character by feeding on its own 



