They retain so much of their Saxon or Norman character, that their noblest passion is that of the Chace; unless a horse-race may, haply, contend with it. Their ideas are all taken from the stable or kennel; and they have hardly words for any other sort of conversation.
In conjunction with this habit, or in direct consequence of it, they plunge themselves into the brutalities of the bottle and table. Having little use of the faculty of thinking or discoursing on any reasonable subject, they care not how soon they disable themselves for either. To this end, their surloins are of sovereign effect; and if any spark of the divine particle be still unsubdued, they quench it forthwith in the strongest wines, or, which suits their taste and design best, in their own country liquor.
This sottish debauch leads to others. My young master will be denied no animal gratification. And thus low intrigues and vulgar amours follow of course, in which the sum of his refined pleasures is, at length, completed.
The rest of his life runs on in this drowzy tenour; unless perhaps you except those intervals, which can hardly be called lucid, when his half-closed understanding seems stunned, rather than awakened, by party-rage, election bustle, and the noise of faction.
Admirable patriots these! and usefuller citizens by far, than if they had acquired some relish of temperance, decency, and reason, in foreign courts, and the more improved societies of Europe.
But suppose our young gentleman to have escaped this sordid taste, and by better luck than ordinary to have finished his home education without much injury to his morals. Nay, suppose him to be inured, in good time, to better discipline, and to have had the advantage of what is called amongst us, by a violent figure of speech, a liberal education.
To put the case at the best, suppose him to have been well whipped through one of our public schools, and to come full fraught, at length, with Latin and Greek, from his college. You see him, now, on the verge of the world, and just ready to step into it. But, good heavens, with what PRINCIPLES and MANNERS? His spirit broken by the servile awe of pedants, and his body unfashioned by the genteeler exercises! Timid at the same time, and rude; illiberal and ungraceful! An absurd compound of abject sentiments, and bigoted notions, on the one hand; and of clownish, coarse, ungainly demeanor, on the other! In a word, both in mind and person, the furthest in the world from any thing that is handsome, gentlemanlike, or of use and acceptation in good company!
Bring but one of these grown boys into a circle of well-bred people, such as his rank and fortune entitle him, and in a manner oblige him, to live with: and see how forbidding his air, how embarrassed all his looks and motions! His awkward attempts at civility would provoke laughter, if, again, his rustic painful bashfulness did not excite one’s pity. What wonder if the young man, under these circumstances, is glad to shrink away, as soon as possible, from so constraining a situation; and to seek the low society of his inferiors, at least of such as himself among his equals, where he can be at ease, and give a loose to his unformed and disorderly behaviour!
But now, on the other hand, let a young gentleman, who has been trained abroad; who has been accustomed to the sight and conversation of men; who has learnt his exercises, has some use of the languages, and has read his Horace or Homer in good company; let such an one, at his return, make his appearance in the best societies; and see with what ease and address he sustains his part in them! how liberal his air and manner! how managed and decorous his delivery of himself! In short, how welcome to every body, and how prepared to acquit himself in the ordinary commerce of the world, and in conversation!
I should think, if there were no other advantage of early travel, beside this of manners, it were well worth setting against all the other inconveniences, whatever they be, of this sort of Education.