YO জীবন -bब्रिड । competition amongst the natives of Bengal, and is no longer an untrod path. The masterly pen of the Rev'd. gentleman (Babu K. M. Banerjee) who carried off the palm has amply treated it in all its ramifications, in his excellent and very beautiful "Essay.” Though it is almost hopeless for a school-boy to follow so great a master with any thing like distinction (the very attempt to do so being a kind of literary sacrilege), yet as I am called upon to offer my unpremeditated thoughts on the subject, I cannot but hope that the indulgent reader will ( to request him in the language of the poet)- "Be to their faults a little blind And to their virtues very kind.” It is a fact almost as undisputed as any axiom of Euclid that nothing can be more difficult for a man than to emancipate his mind from impressions, left upon it in youth,-the season of his life wherein the mind, like wax, receives and retains any thing inculcatcd upon it, -and that the notions and prejudices which he imbibes in his younger days exert a very great influence over him in his aster-life In nothing, therefore, we ought to be more careful than in selecting nurses for our children ; for there is scarcely any thing that exerts a more pernicious influence over the early education of a child than the ignorance of its nurse. Many people have been unable to give up their belief in the exsistence of Ghosts, notwithstanding the strong remonstrances of Reason, and the evidence of Science, because the impressions left on the mind by the idle tales heard or recited in the nur
