To measure the degree of indulgence which may be safe for any given pupils, we must attend to the effect produced by pleasure upon their imagination and temper. If a small diminution of their usual enjoyments disturbs them, they have been rendered not too happy, but too susceptible. Happy people, who have resources in their own power, do not feel every slight variation in external circumstances. We may safely allow children to be as happy as they possibly can be without sacrificing the future to the present. Such prosperity will not enervate their minds.
We make this assertion with some confidence, because experience has in many instances confirmed our opinion. Amongst a large family of children, who have never been tormented with artificial trials of temper, and who have been made as happy as it was in the power of their parents to make them, there is not one ill tempered child. We have examples every day before us of different ages from three years old to fifteen.
Before parents adopt either Epicurean or Stoical doctrines in the education of the temper, it may be prudent to calculate the probabilities of the good and evil, which their pupils are likely to meet with in life. The Sybarite, whose night's rest was disturbed by a doubled rose leaf, deserves to be pitied almost as much as the young man who, when he was benighted in the snow, was reproached by his severe father for having collected a heap of snow to make himself a pillow. Unless we could for ever ensure the bed of roses to our pupils, we should do very imprudently to make it early necessary to their repose: unless the pillow of snow is likely to be their lot, we need not inure them to it from their infancy.
[39] V. Chapter on Sympathy and Sensibility.
[40] By Mr. Townsend, in his Travels into Spain.
[41] V. Chapter on Toys.
[42] V. Chapter on Attention.
[43] Lord Kames, p. 109.
[44] V. Chapter on Rewards and Punishments.