Consider, first of all, the unavoidable WASTE OF TIME; of that time which is so precious in every view; not only as being the most proper for making the acquisitions, I speak of; but as being the only period of his life, which he will be at liberty to employ in that manner.
Early youth is flexible and docile: apt to take the impressions of virtue, and ready to admit the principles of knowledge. The faculties of the mind are then vigorous and alert: the conception quick, and the memory retentive. The humble drudgery of acquiring the elements of literature and science is to young minds an easy and a flattering employment. A submissive reverence for their teachers disposes them to proceed without reluctance in any path that is prescribed to them; and a springing emulation, joined to a conscious sense of gradual improvement, gives force and constancy to their pursuits. The objects of their application seem important; not only from the novelty of them, and the authority of those who have the direction of their studies, but chiefly perhaps from a confused sense of their value, much above what they would entertain, were they able to form a true and distinct judgment of them.
This, then, is the season for laying the foundations of knowledge and ability of every kind; and if you let it slip, without applying it carefully to those purposes, you will in vain lament the omission in riper years, when the cares or amusements of life afford little leisure for such pursuits, and less inclination.
There may have been some few examples of those, whose superior industry in advanced age has atoned for the defects of their education. But in general the man depends intirely on the boy; and he is all his life long, what the impressions, he received in his early years, have made him[41]. If therefore any considerable part of this precious season be wasted in foreign travel, I mean if it be actually not employed in the pursuits proper to it, this circumstance must needs be considered as an objection of great weight to that sort of education.
Your Lordship may consider, next, the DISSIPATION OF MIND attending on this itinerant education; while the scene is constantly changing; and new objects perpetually springing up before him, to solicit the admiration of our young traveller.
One of the greatest secrets in education is, to fix the attention of youth: a painful operation! which requires long use and a steady unremitting discipline; the very reverse of that roving, desultory habit, which is inseparable from the sort of life you would recommend. The young mind is naturally impatient of constraint: it hates to be confined for any time in the same track; and is flying out, at every turn, from the proper subject of its meditation. Instead of counteracting this native infirmity, you indulge and flatter it; till, by degrees, the mind loses its tone and vigour, and is utterly incapable of paying a due attention to any thing.
I insist the more on this consideration, because in acquiring the elements of learning it is of great importance that the learner proceed uniformly in the course on which he has entered. It may now and then be the privilege of a genius, to seize the principles of knowledge at once, and to grow wise, as we may say, by intuition. But the common sort of minds are of another make. It is by slow steps only that they arrive at knowledge; and, if you stop or divert their progress, their labour is all thrown away, or yields at best a shallow, superficial, and ill-digested learning.
But were no account to be had of the loss of time, or of this dissipated turn of mind, which is still more pernicious, I should nevertheless object to this travelled education, on account of the very objects to which our traveller’s APPLICATION is directed.
Instead of those necessary and fundamental parts of knowledge, which I require him to have laid in, his attention, so much of it as can be spared for any thing that looks like information, is wasted on things either frivolous or unimportant.
His first business is, to make himself perfect in the forms of breeding, which he finds in use among those he lives with, or perhaps in their forms of dress only.