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From the day when James Edward Smith was presented with his first botanical lesson-book, and Sir Joseph Banks fell in with Gerard's 'Herbal' from the time when Alfieri first read Plutarch, and Schiller made his first acquaintance with Shakspeare, and Gibbon devoured the first volume of 'The Universal History' each dated an inspiration so exalted, that they felt as if their real lives had only then begun.
At one of those moments when, lesson-book in hand, I would pace the room, and try to keep strictly to one particular crack in the floor as I hummed a fragment of some tune or repeated some vague formula in short, at one of those moments when the mind leaves off thinking and the imagination gains the upper hand and yearns for new impressions I left the schoolroom, and turned, with no definite purpose in view, towards the head of the staircase.
Epic poetry no longer merely furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself independently to the hearing and reading public.
This announcement was preceded, as I remarked, by that conversation which led to the crystallising of the half-formed convictions of the apostles in a definite creed, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. But that was not all that they needed to know and believe and trust to. That was the first volume of their lesson-book.
We are quick to blame and slow to praise chary of kind words, but voluble in reproof holding ourselves superior in station, but not always showing ourselves superior in thoughtfulness, self-control, and kind forbearance. Ah me! Life is a lesson-book, and we turn a new page every day."
My mother has told me that she attributed her incapacity for relishing Milton to the fact of "Paradise Lost" having been used as a lesson-book out of which she was made to learn English a circumstance which had made it for ever "Paradise Lost" to her.
It served as a capital lesson-book. As Murray already knew French, he did not require Miss Cecile's lessons, and so he was able to look philosophically on, and, like a wise monitor, he told Jack to take care what he was about, neither to take possession of the young lady's heart nor to lose his own.
"Never mind, it will teach 'em self-reliance," Mr. Littell insisted, when his wife protested that the girls would have to be more closely chaperoned on subsequent trips. "Falling into scrapes is the finest lesson-book ever opened to the heedless." Sunday morning the girls and Mrs. Littell motored to Washington and attended services in one of the fine old churches.
Six miles away or nearer, by a charming shaded walk along a canal was an ancient town with a legend a legend which, as a child, I read in my lesson-book at school, marvelling at the wood-cut above it, in which a ferocious dog was tearing a strange man to pieces, while the king and his courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus.
In the same sentence Bunyan has a word for the man of sense, and another for the man of fancy, and a third for the man of feeling; and by thus blending the intellectual, the imaginative, and the affectionate, he speaks home to the whole of man, and has made his works a lesson-book for all mankind. Another secret of Bunyan's popularity is the felicity of his style.