ESSAY XIII.

OF MANLY TREATMENT AND BEHAVIOUR.

IT has fometimes been a queftion among thofe who are accustomed to fpeculate upon the fubject of education, whether we fhould endeavour to diminish or increase the diftinction between youth and manhood, whether children fhould be trained to behave like men, or ihould be encouraged to the exercife of manners peculiar to themselves.

Pertnefs and primnefs are always in fome degree ridiculous or difgufting in perfons of infant years. There is a kind of premature manhood which we have fometimes occafion to obferve in young perfons, that is deftructive of all honest and spontaneous emotion in its fubjects. They feem as if they were robbed of the chief bleffing of youth, the foremost confolation of its croffes and mortifications a thoughtless, bounding gaiety. Their behaviour is forced and artificial. Their temper is unanimating and frigid. They discuss and affert, but it is with a borrowed judgment. They pride themselves in what is emi

nently

nently their shame; that they are mere parrots or echoes to repeat the founds formed by another. They are impertinent, pofitive and felffufficient. Without any pretenfions to an extraordinary maturity of intellect, they are deftitute of the modefty and defire of information that would become their age. They have neither the graces of youth nor age; and are like forced plants, languid, feeble, and, to any just taste, unworthy of the flightest approbation.

On the other hand there is a character oppofite to this, with which it is impoffible to be greatly delighted. The child is timorous, and bashful, and terrified at the idea of encountering a stranger; or he will accoft the ftranger with an infantine jargon, deftitute alike of discrimination and meaning. There are parents, who receive a kind of fenfual pleasure from the lifping and half-formed accents of their children; and who will treasure and re-echo them, for the purpose of adding duration to these imaginary or fubordinate charms. Nothing is more common, than to employ a particular dialect to young perfons, which has been handed down from generation to generation, and is scarcely inferior in antiquity to the dialect of Milton or Shakespear. The children thus educated, underftand dolls, and cockhorfes, and beating tables, and riding upon

fticks,

and growth to seriousness. All that is fublime in character, all that is generously virtuous, all that extorts our admiration and makes conqueft of our most ardent affections, must have been accompanied both in its rife and progrefs by feriousness. A character may be valuable, a man may be contented and happy, without gaiety; but no being can be worthy the name of a man, if seriousness be not an ingredient in his difpofition.

A young perfon should be educated, as if he were one day to become a man. He should not arrive at a certain age, and then all at once be launched upon the world. He should not be either wholly ignorant of, or unexercised in, the concerns of men. The world is a momentous and a perilous scene. What wife parent would with his child to enter it, without preparation, or without being initiated in the fpectacle of its practices?

The man fhould, by inceffant degrees, be grafted upon the youth; the process should perhaps commence from the period of birth. There is no age at which fomething manly, confiderate and firm, will not be found graceful. The true point of skill is, not to precipitate this important lesson, but to carry it on with a suitable progrefs; to fhow, to the judicious and well informed

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veil of gravity over the innocent, as well as the immoderate, luxuriance and wantonnefs of our thoughts.

But, if hilarity be a valuable thing, good fenfe is perhaps still better. A comparison has fometimes been inftituted between seriousnefs and gaiety, and an enquiry ftarted as to which of the two is most excellent. Gaiety has undoubtedly a thousand recommendations; it is not fo properly the means of happiness, as one of the different fpecies of which happiness confifts. No one would gain attention from a reasonable man, who fhould offer to advance a word against it. But gaiety muft probably in the comparison yield to ferioufnefs. The world in which we are engaged, is after all a ferious fcene. No man can expect long to retain the means of happiness, if he be not fometimes ferioufly employed in contemplating and combining them. The man of mere gaiety, paffes away life like a dream, has nothing to recollect, and leaves behind no traces that he was. His ftate is rather a ftate of vegetation, each day like the day before, than a ftate worthy of a rational being. All that is grand and fublime, in conception or compofition, in eloquence or in poetry, is ferious. Nay, gaiety itself, if it be fuch as a delicate tafte would approve, must have been indebted for its rearing

gay; we may be affectionate; our countenance may be dreffed in fmiles; we may stoop to their capacities; we may adapt ourselves to the quickness and mutability of their tempers. We may do all this; we may win the kindness of their hearts; at the fame time that we are lifting them up to our level, not finking ourselves to theirs.

The whole of this branch of education undoubtedly requires the delicate preferving of a certain medium. We fhould reason with children, but not to fuch a degree as to render them parrots or fophifts. We fhould treat them as poffeffing a certain importance, but not fo as to render them fops and coxcombs. We should repofe in them a certain confidence, and to a certain extent demand their affiftance and advice, but not fo as to convey a falfhood to their minds, or make them conceive they have accomplishments which they have not.

In early youth there must perhaps be fome fubjection of the pupil to the mere will of his fuperior. But even then the friend need not be altogether loft in the parent. At a certain age. the parental character fhould perhaps be wholly loft. There is no fpectacle that more forcibly extorts the approbation of the human mind, than that of a father and child, already arrived