74 EARLY PREJUDICE. 



ment. He loves, while yet in freedom, to ride upon a sun- 

 beam ; but would be content, when once enthralled, to bask 

 only in the sunshine and his mistress's smile, to revel and 

 to sleep upon a bed of roses. What think you, ladies, of 

 this our candidate for your especial notice ? In proper and 

 euphonious parlance, * Cetonia aurata ' is the fitting appellation 

 which he bears ; but to you, probably, if already known at 

 all, he is more familiar ate ' a nasty beetle !' 



Yes, it is thus, doubtless, that, blinded (as some are for 

 their live-long day) by the morning mist of early prejudice, 

 you have been led to miscall even that beautiful creature, the 

 Rose or Golden Chafer ; with a multitude of others scarcely 

 less worthy of admiring notice. 



The first unlucky Scarab&KS, which may have crossed the 

 toddling footsteps of our childhood, was made, perhaps in our 

 childish fearlessness, an object of manual examination, and that 

 with impunity, for the insect is almost always as innocent as we 

 were once. But only let nurse, or some other person grown up 

 in error, have been at hand, and our earliest experiment in en- 

 tomology would have been abruptly ended by a warning lecture, 

 rendered intelligible to our dawning apprehension in the sense, 

 at least, of fear and repugnance. With this false impression, 

 struck anew on every occasion, and deepening with our strength, 

 we grow up ; if to manhood, with dislike ; if to womanhood, with 

 terror of every thing that wears a beetle's shape, although it is 

 one considered by entomologists as the most perfect (or per- 



