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Little remains to be said of Basedow. He lived chiefly at Dessau, earning his subsistence by private tuition, and giving great offence by his irregularities, especially by drinking. In 1790, when visiting Magdeburg, he died, after a short illness, in his sixtyseventh year. His last words were, 'I wish my body to be dissected for the good of my fellow-creatures.’

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VII.

PESTALOZZI.

JOHN HENRY PESTALOZZI, the most celebrated of educational reformers, was born at Zurich in 1746. At six years old he lost his father, who, leaving his family in needy circumstances, implored their servant, the faithful Bäbeli,' never to desert his wife and children. Bäbeli kept sacredly the promise she gave to the dying man, and she had an equal share with the mother in bringing up the great educator.

With no companions of his own age, Pestalozzi became so completely a mother's child, that, as he himself tells us, he grew up a stranger to the world he lived in. This lonely childhood had its influence in making him, what he remained through life, a man of excitable feelings and lively imagination, which so entirely had the mastery over him as to prevent anything like due circumspection and forethought.*

This will be best understood from the following anecdote. When, in after years, he was in great pecuniary distress, and his family were without the necessaries of life, he went to a friend's house and borrowed a sum of money. On his way home, he fell in with a peasant who was lamenting the loss of a cow. Carried away as usual by his feelings, Pestalozzi gave the man all the money he had borrowed, and ran away to escape his thanks.

From his grandfather, a country clergyman, with whom he often stayed, he received another important influence, strong religious impressions.

When at length he was sent to a day-school, he proved the awkwardest and most helpless of the scholars, and nevertheless showed signs of rare abilities. Among his playmates he was exposed to a good deal of ridicule, and was dubbed by them Harry Oddity of Foolborough, but his good nature and obliging disposition gained him many friends. No doubt his friends profited from his willingness to do anything for them. We find that when, on the shock of an earthquake, teachers and scholars alike rushed out of the school-house, Harry Oddity was the boy sent back to fetch out caps and books. In schoolwork, he says that though one of the best boys in the school, he often made mistakes which even the worst boys were not guilty of. He could understand the sense of what he was taught, and content with this, he neglected the form and the exercises necessary to give him a practical acquaintance with the subject.

As he grew up, the unpractical side of his character was more and more strongly developed. To use his own words, 'Unfortunately, the tone of public instruction in my native town at this period was in a high degree calculated to foster this visionary fancy of taking an active interest in, and believing oneself capable of, the practice of things in which one had by no means sufficient exercise.. While we were yet boys, we fancied that by a superficial school-acquaintance with the great civil life of Greece and Rome, we could eminently prepare

ourselves for the little civil life in one of the Swiss cantons. By the writings of Rousseau this tendency was increased a tendency which was neither calculated to preserve what was good in the old institutions, nor to introduce anything substantially better.'

Lavater, when a young man of twenty, formed a league which was joined by Pestalozzi, a lad of fifteen. This league brought a public charge of injustice against Grebel, the governor of the Canton, and against Brunner, the mayor of Zurich. They also declared themselves against unworthy ministers of religion. The hate of wrong and love of right,' were, with Pestalozzi, not as we so often find them mere juvenile enthusiasms, but they remained with him for life. The oppression of the peasants moved him to a strong antagonism against the aristocracy, and when he was no longer young, he spoke of them as men on stilts, who must descend among the people before they could secure a natural and firm position. He also satirises them in some of his fables, as, e.g. that of the 'Fishes and the Pikes.' 'The fishes in a pond brought an accusation against the pikes who were making great ravages among them. The judge, an old pike, said that their complaint was well founded, and that the defendants, to make amends, should allow two ordinary fish every year to become pikes.'

His desire to be the champion of the ill-used peasantry, determined him in the choice of a profession, and he took to the study of the law. He had been intended for a clergyman, and, according to one account, had actually preached a trial sermon, which

TAKES TO FARMING.

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was a failure: with his usual inaccuracy, he even went wrong in repeating the Lord's Prayer.

Whilst a law student, he lost his most intimate friend, Bluntschli, who died of consumption. Bluntschli showed that he thoroughly understood Pestalozzi's character by his parting advice to him: ‘I die,' said he; and when you are left to yourself, you must not plunge into any career which, from your good-natured and confiding disposition, might become dangerous to you. Seek for a quiet, tranquil career; and unless you have at your side a man who will faithfully assist you with a calm, dispassionate knowledge of men and things, by no means embark in any extensive undertaking the failure of which would in any way be perilous to you.'

Soon after this, Pestalozzi, from over-study, or rather perhaps from over-speculation-for he employed himself rather in forming theories of what should be than in acquiring a practical acquaintance with the law as it was--became dangerously ill. The doctor advised him to go into the country, and influenced not more by this advice than by Rousseau's doctrine of the natural state, Pestalozzi renounced the study of books, burnt his MSS., and went to learn farming.

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In his new employment he found himself with a friend of progress. I had come to him,' says Pestalozzi, a political visionary, though with many profound and correct attainments, views, and anticipations in political matters. I went away from him just as great an agricultural visionary, though with many enlarged and correct ideas and intentions with regard to agriculture.'

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