"O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant all this—that they will outgrow these particular actions, yet with what HABITS of feeling will they arrive at youth and manhood? Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides, when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a plaything—when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after caresses—when everything is remembered individually, and sense of injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others—a strict schoolmaster—than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward the same person which subverts the very principle of our impulses. Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet always going on—yea! even from a twelvemonth old—at six or seven the child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when, as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to annoy.
THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR
There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the illuminati themselves in the first instance; but to their successors, habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and stagnate truth into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar—nay, because the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them, and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on.
POETRY AND PROSE
When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999⁄10000000 of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, from causes I need not here put down, there will be a poetical language; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical—that is, formally—which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will assist us in disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impassioned words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the German prose writers. Produce to me one word out of Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping—it admits nothing that prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it presupposes a more continuous state of passion. N.B.—Provincialisms of poets who have become the supreme classics in countries one in language but under various states and governments have aided this false idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri, foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on "Lingua Volgare Nobile," the first, I believe, of his prose or prose and verse works; for the "Convito" and "La Vita Nuova" are, one-third, in metre.
WORLDLY WISE
I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation. By David Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never rise in the world. N.B.—I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular—a man revered by his children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be beloved by one proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will go to hell—but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner.