N° 70. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14. They saunter'd Europe round, And gather'd ev'ry vice on Christian ground; POPE. It is the error of those who speculate on the subject of education, that they consider the mind rather as a passive than an active being. Forgetting that law of our nature which decrees, that intellectual attainments shall spring only out of mental exertions, they seem to suppose that the mechanical operation of a certain degree of culture and opportunity must necessarily produce an answerable progress in knowledge and accomplishment. In the estimation of common minds, scholarship is exactly rated in proportion to the education supposed; and it would be difficult to persuade an illiterate mechanic that Charlemagne could not sign his name, and that a famous sophist of Lycia could neither read nor write. Those who are in the secret well know, that where the spirit and disposition is wanting, but little is to be done by the force of education, the abundance of resource, and the incitement of opportunity; while a mind that is vigorous and excursive by nature, breaks through every disadvantage, and grows by moments to gigantic stature, where others would perish through indigence and hunger. But this prejudice is not solely confined to the lower classes; it obtains among the better sort; and no small number of this description should seem by their conduct to imagine that knowledge is to be forced into the mind like water into a cistern; not considering, that before it becomes knowledge, where it is endeavoured to be transferred, it must undergo a process of assimilation, like that which the aliment of our bodies experiences, ere the system is nourished, and the blood and spirits recruited. Without a proper organization and predisposition of our bodies, our food would turn to but little account; and unless the mind be disposed to act upon the nourishment it has taken with the necessary force, the chyle of real knowledge will be but ill prepared and scantily supplied to the understanding. The mistake above adverted to, induces all that can afford the costs, indiscriminately to send their children abroad, with a view to the advantages which they think must necessarily result from travelling, on the principle on which they suppose that knowledge is the certain consequence of a college-education. All men are not born for all things: lessons to be learned by travelling are among the most difficult that can be offered to the human intellect, and can only enter into a capacity to which nature has been originally kind, and which culture has duly prepared. It was not till Heraclitus had the contracted a dropsy by living upon grass, that he discovered that nature had intended different foods for the ox and for Heraclitus. The natures of different minds are equally discordant; and what imparts strength and nutrition to one, to another is the source of disease and corruption. All predetermination, in respect to the disposal of a child, is folly and cruelty in the parent. He who resolves to make his son a lawyer, or a divine, without attending to the developement of his mind and bias of his talents, undertakes for a measure of ability which it is not in his power to bestow, and determines without those data on which a right judgement can alone be formed. This, however, is only acting independently of nature, but not in defiance of her; it is presumption, but not contradiction. But at the age at which young men are sent on their travels, the qualities of the head and the propensities of the heart become pretty decided and manifest to an interested observer. At this time, to send a young man to travel for improvement, whom nature has gifted with no turn for observation, or power of deduction, is to set up a mechanical process in opposition to nature's laws, and to suppose that there are artificial methods of acquiring knowledge, without the agency of the understanding, or the participation of natural capacity. "I will give my child an excellent education," is a phrase which may be thus explained—I will keep my son at school till he has reached the age of eighteen, at which time I shall suppose him accomplished in all that the discipline of his school inculcates. I shall send him from school to college,' where, those opportunities will be afforded him which his scholastic acquirements will have quali fied him to improve. After three years spent at college, in the prosecution of those advantages which the situation presents, he shall travel abroad, to mature, by practical observation, the theoretical knowledge he has laid up in his mind.-All this is a resolution formed in the mind of the parent, without allowing for any of those obstacles which the condition of the understanding or the temper may interpose; without laying their account with human infirmities, the want of taste, the want of feeling, the abuse of opportunity, the inaptitude of talent, or the indisposition of the heart. If we suppose the mind of a child to be in all or any of these predicaments, there is no more effectual method of urging him to his utter ruin than the plan I have just been describing. It is condemning him to compulsory idleness, without any resources but such as are to be found in the frivolities of fashion, the sallies of folly, or the excesses of debauch. Nature has made some men in a mould that unfits them for the paths which lead to intellectual eminence; yet her distribution, though various, is equitable and if to some she has denied the ornaments of genius and the access to academical honours, she has furnished them, for the greater part, with the means of becoming useful to mankind in the exercise of powers as productive if not so splendid, as conducive to the purposes of humanity if not so subservient to the ends of ambition. When a father is induced, from motives of pride, or from the prejudice of example, to push a youth of blunt capacity into the road to intellectual advancement, and destines him, in spite of nature's remonstrances, to move in a sphere of publicity and consequence, he pronounces, in effect, a cruel and capricious sentence of condemnation upon his own child, which, in the style of the courts, would run as follows: My son, you are now to receive that dreadful "sentence which the laws of pride, fashion, and cus"tom, direct me in my parental capacity to pro"nounce upon you. The crime of which you stand "convicted by an attentive and impartial jury, is "that of being born to a great estate, with a slender "portion of abilities. For this crime, which your "country has considered as worthy of the severest punishment, you are to suffer in the manner I am "now to declare to you. You are to be taken from "from this place to a public school, where as much "as possible of crude Greek and Latin is to be "forced into your head, to the entire exclusion of all "those subjects which your capacity might embrace "and turn to advantage. Every morning, fasting, "you are to be publicly whipped in part of your "sentence, and this punishment will be continued "through ten long years. After this, instead of sending you to hard labour for a term of three years at college, you will there pass three "compulsory idleness; during which time, all that "cast of pursuits will be shut out from your view, "which might provoke in you some laudable at"tempts to become useful, by harmonising with the "colour of your mind. In this desperation you are "to be driven into courses, for want of better em"ployment, which must terminate in the wreck of your constitution, and the total ruin of those dor"mant capacities, which, if once called forth, might "render you valuable to others, and happy in your"self. Thus your case will be put beyond all hope of redemption in this world. While you are in 66 years of |