PREFACE. TO PARENTS. "Tell me with whom you live, and I will tell you what you are," said the satirist. And why? Because it is by conversation, by daily intercourse, that character is chiefly formed. The royal road to knowledge is that of oral communication: you prove the necessity of this when you first puzzle your children with essays and grammars, and then resolve the difficulties into question and answer; and Franklin justly remarks that you must even converse with your own judgment, by putting an argument into a regular pro and con statement, ere you can know justly and clearly how to decide on any subject. Familiar intercourse with our children is the best mode of education. If we add to their pleasures, and participate in their occupations, by showing them that we too read, and that information gives zest to our conversation, as well as employment to their school hours, we shall then see them more instructed and less pedantic; they will then neither hate reading as tiresome and anti-social, nor boast of it as a merit; they will be ashamed of ignorance rather than vain of knowledge; they will learn to interweave and connect the subjects of their reading, and will be taught to use that moral lens which forms the light of truth, by the concentration of the most opposite colouring. I give you here the plan of a daily hour of society which we all enjoy and improve by, and not less the elders of our family party than the children. By associating with them, we get into "true nature and simplicity of manners, so much nearer innocence-that is truth, and infancy-that is openness ;" and, whilst they profit by our experience, and become enlightened by our knowledge, we are purified by their guilelessness, and our affections are re-animated by their generous ardour. The union of a family party must ever be beneficial to the different ages of which it consists; and those who are employed in preserving their children from the corruption of evil communication will find their society in turn a powerful corrective of that worldly-minded spirit which gradually obtains possession of the best and noblest,-which is first prudence, but finally selfishness. |