Puslapio vaizdai
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(which are the most indiscreet years in the course of human life) have profited as he expected by the long extemporaneous prayers to which they listened night and morning, the sad sabbaths which they were compelled to observe, and the soporific sermons which closed the domestic religiosities of those melancholy days? Ask him if this discipline has prevented them from running headlong into the follies and vices of the age? from being bird-limed by dissipation? or caught in the spider's web of sophistry and unbelief? "It is no doubt a true observation," says Bishop Patrick, " that the ready way to make the minds of youth grow awry, is to lace them too hard, by denying them their just freedom."

Ask the old faithful servant of Mammon, whom Mammon has rewarded to his heart's desire, and in whom the acquisition of riches has only encreased his eagerness for acquiring more-ask him whether he has succeeded in training up his heir to the same service? He will tell you that the young man is to be found upon race-grounds, and in gaming-houses, that

he is taking his swing of extravagance and excess, and is on the high road to ruin.

Ask the wealthy Quaker, the pillar of the meeting—most orthodox in heterodoxy,—who never wore a garment of forbidden cut or colour, never bent his body in salutation, or his knees in prayer, never uttered the heathen name of a day or month, nor ever addrest himself to any person without religiously speaking illegitimate English,—ask him how it has happened that the tailor has converted his sons? He will fold his hands, and twirl his thumbs mournfully in silence. It has not been for want of training them in the way wherein it was his wish that they should go.

You are about, Sir, to send your son to a public school; Eton or Westminster; Winchester or Harrow; Rugby or the Charter House, no matter which. He may come from either an accomplished scholar to the utmost extent that school education can make him so; he may be the better both for its discipline and its want of discipline; it may serve him excellently well as a preparatory school for the world into which

he is about to enter.

But also he may come away an empty coxcomb or a hardened brute -a spendthrift—a profligate—a blackguard

or a sot.

To put a boy in the way he should go, is like sending out a ship well found, well manned and stored, and with a careful captain; but there are rocks and shallows in her course, winds and currents to be encountered, and all the contingencies and perils of the sea.

How often has it been seen that sons, not otherwise deficient in duty toward their parents, have, in the most momentous concerns of life, taken the course most opposite to that in which they were trained to go, going wrong where the father would have directed them aright, or taking the right path in spite of all inducements and endeavours for leading them wrong! The son of Charles Wesley, born and bred in methodism and bound to it by all the strongest ties of pride and prejudice, became a papist. This indeed was but passing from one erroneous persuasion to another, and a more inviting one. But Isaac Casaubon also had the

grief of seeing a son seduced into the Romish superstition, and on the part of that great and excellent man, there had been no want of discretion in training him, nor of sound learning and sound wisdom. Archbishop Leighton, an honor to his church, his country, and his kind, was the child of one of those firebrands who kindled the Great Rebellion. And Franklin had a son, who notwithstanding the example of his father (and such a father!) continued stedfast in his duty as a soldier and a subject; he took the unsuccessful side-but

nunquam successum crescat honestum.*

No such disappointment was destined to befal our Daniel. The way in which he trained up his son was that into which the bent of the boy's own nature would have led him; and all circumstances combined to favour the tendency of his education. The country abounding in natural objects of sublimity and beauty (some of these singular in their kind) might have impressed a duller imagination than had fallen to his lot; and that imagination had time enough

* LUCAN.

for its workings during his solitary walks to and from school morning and evening. His home was in a lonely spot; and having neither brother nor sister, nor neighbours near enough in any degree to supply their place as playmates, he became his father's companion imperceptibly as he ceased to be his fondling. And the effect was hardly less apparent in Daniel than in the boy. He was no longer the same taciturn person as of yore; it seemed as if his tongue had been loosened, and when the reservoirs of his knowledge were opened they flowed freely.

Their chimney corner on a winter's evening presented a group not unworthy of Sir Joshua's pencil. There sate Daniel, richer in marvellous stories than ever traveller who in the days of mendacity returned. from the East; the peat fire shining upon a countenance which weatherhardened as it was, might have given the painter a model for a Patriarch, so rare was the union which it exhibited of intelligence, benevolence and simplicity. There sate the boy with open eyes and ears, raised head, and fallen lip, in all

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