to support. These are the brothers who spend
their sisters' money, the husbands who live on
their wives' earnings, the fathers who have run
through their own, and now fall open-mouthed
upon their children's property; these are the
pea-sticks with fine green top-knots basking in
the sun, while the withered halm and dying
flowers at their feet speak of nourishment
diverted, and force abstracted, and power, which
should have been creative, gone all to pushing
out green top-knots on dry sticks. Better if
they had remained dry sticks to the end, sapless
and leafless, rather than budding evils of an
active kind; better that force should be wasted
in trying to give nonentity a being, than that it
should go to the creation of mischief.

We all know cases where the power of a
family is wasted on watering dry sticks—where
the eldest son, for instance—for whom are destined
all those broad acres, and who is to undertake
all that social influence—is bad, or a fool,
while the younger branches, who are carted out
of the paternal nursery-ground almost as soon
as budded, would have done honour to the
position their senior will disgrace. Not all the
watering in the world will make that dry stick
a flowering tree; not, though every drop was
drawn out of the family well in buckets of gold
made out of the family plate melted down for
the service. Schooling will not inform him if
he is a dunce according to the configuration of
Gall and Spurzheim; not the most eloquent
preachments ever written about the moral
obligations connected with social position will
arouse a spark of social conscience if he is
self-indulgent and a sensualist; nor could Lord
Chesterfield himself make him a gentleman after
the manner of the Bayards or the Cids, if he
is naturally a Fagin or a Sykes. He is a dull,
dead, dry stick in the beginning, and a dull,
dead, dry stick he will continue to the end; and
the only sign of vitality he will ever give will
be by the absorption of the living juices which
else would have gone to make noble growths of
better materials. A notable instance of this
occurred not long ago; a case known to us all;
where money, name, and family all went to
form an unclean animal, who—assuredly more
pitiable even than blameworthy to those who
can accept the necessities of matter—remained
a dry stick, which no amount of watering or
dressing could make a burgeoning rod! It
would have been better for every one if the
hopelessness of that stick had been recognised
in time, whereby palisading might have been
provided, to the saving of force and rampant
scandal.

Schoolmasters and schoolmistresses see a
great deal of the culture of dry sticks. They
help in it at times themselves, when they grind
at chaff which can never become flour, and
plough at sea-sand which can never bear grain.
The boobies they work at, striving to give
brains where there are none, and to inculcate
accomplishments for which there is no kind of
aptitude! Sheep that we are, we must all
follow the bell-wether—we must all be shorn,
and ruddled, and branded according to one pattern,
like so many casts turned out of the same
mould, no matter what the differences of material
among us. Because it is the fashion for those
who can, to learn music, French, or algebra, we
put to the same things those who cannot, and
then feel ourselves aggrieved and angry according
to righteousness—so we say—when our
notable scheme of education by machinery falls
to the ground in collapse, and our dry sticks
bear no blossoms. Anna Maria can play efficiently,
and can sing like a lark—she has that
mysterious gift called ear, and knows both time
and tune by instinct; but Mary Jane can hardly
recognise God save the Queen when she hears
it on the brass band, and for the life of her,
poor soul! can never make her counting and
her crotchets agree. In default of music,
though, she has a veritable genius for cookery;
or she has the prettiest taste imaginable for
that wonderful combination of ends and snippets
which goes by the name of millinery: but
cui bono? Cookery is low, and millinery is
vulgar. Cannot puffs and bonnets be bought
for ready cash? But music is a divine accomplishment
fresh from the hands of Apollo and
the Muses, and created expressly for ladies.
Wherefore, Mary Jane must study clefs as the
accompaniment of her condition, and eschew
domestic economy as discords; she must labour
at that which she cannot attain, and forego that
which is success made to her hand, because
the Anna Marias of life have time and tune in
pronounced development, and depressions are
not recognised in good society. The dry stick
which she, like all the rest of us, has in the
midst of her living growth must be carefully
tended and watered, while the saplings, which
only ask leave to grow according to the laws of
their nature, are crowded out and destroyed.
And so poor Mary Jane bears no fruit of the
mental kind at all, being forbidden apples and
not able to compass peaches.

What a lamentable instance of this determination
that thistles shall bring forth figs and
dry sticks bud out into flowering roses, was
that of Maulstick's son! Maulstick was an
artist with aspirations in excess of power—by
no means a rare thing in the artistic world, or
elsewhere—going up to heaven on Icarian
wings badly secured with common wax, without
even an inch of packthread to help; and floundering
in the mire in consequence. He had
just common sense enough to know the
difference between the mire and the ether, and to
feel that his wings were, after all, a little insecure,
and not quite adapted for long journeys
into the empyrean; and he decided that his
son's career should be the complement of his—
the fulfilment of all in which he had failed.
Maulstick's son was a dry stick. Planted in a
city office, and perched upon a clerk's stool,
with its work ruled out before it, it might have
struck down a handful of roots, and have
subsequently borne fruit of a kind—poor and
shabby in quality, and of scanty quantity at all
times, the central sap being of but a watery nature