My consistency in this representation, I doubt, is less questionable, than my civility. For the ladies, on whom I bestowed those high, but just encomiums, were chiefly such as I had known in my younger days, before the passion for travel had got among them. Now indeed the case is altering apace, and the effects are answerable. The virtues of the English ladies, when they staid at home, were more conspicuous than those of our travelled gentlemen. Now that they, too, begin to travel, their follies are, also, more glaring: in either case, I am willing to own, for the credit of my civility, from the same reason, that both good and ill qualities strike us most, when set in the precious metal of that sex.
However, from the whole of my experience, I must needs conclude, that this finishing of a travelled education only serves to corrupt good qualities, or inflame bad ones.
But the ladies are not in my province. If they were, a knowledge of the world is not the leading virtue I might wish to see them possessed of. In the men, I confess, this accomplishment is of more importance; and I am therefore solicitous, that no well-meaning youth, whom it so much concerns to gain a knowledge of the world, should be misled in his search of it.
Seriously, my Lord, the WORLD, which I am forced to repeat so often, is a solemn word, and the study of it has an air of something plausible and imposing. But those, who know what the world is, will think it best that a young man begin with what is the first and last concern of every man, the study of himself; and if, in due time, he come to understand, and, still more, to value as they deserve, the characters of the great and good men of his own country, the opprobrious name of home-bred will not hinder him from acquiring the best fruit, with which a knowledge of the world, rightly understood, can furnish him.
For, my Lord, I must not, on so inviting an occasion as this, conceal an odd fancy of mine from your Lordship.
The affair of knowing the world, about which weak and fantastic people make so much noise, and which one hears them perpetually insisting upon with so much sufficiency, is of all others the nicest and most momentous step that is made in education. And, though volumes have been written to teach us how we may best become scholars, orators, courtiers, what not; yet not one leaf do I ever remember to have seen, composed by any capable man, that instructs us in the proper way of getting into this great secret.
It is not a matter to be entered upon, if I were vain enough to think myself capable of it, in this casual conversation; but thus much I may presume to say, that whoever designs to let a young man into a safe and useful knowledge of the world, must do it in a way very remote from that which has hitherto been taken.
A young man, they tell us, must know the world; therefore, say they, push him into it at once, that he may acquire that knowledge, which his own experience, and not another’s, must procure for him.
I, on the other hand, take upon me to say, Therefore keep him out of that world, as long as you can; and when you commit him to it, let the ablest friend or tutor lend him his best experience, to conduct him gradually, cautiously, imperceptibly, into an acquaintance with it.
You ask the reason of this mysterious procedure; yet methinks it should be obvious enough. From sixteen to one and twenty (a period, in which the cares of an ordinary education cease, or are much relaxed) is that precise season of life, which requires all the attention of the most vigilant, and all the address of the wisest, governor. The passions are then opening; curiosity awake; and the young mind ready to take its ply from the seducements of fashion, and creditable example.