His mind had been richly stored also, if not very sagely trained and regulated. For Sir Miles, in the course of his irregular and adventurous life, had read much more than he had meditated; had picked up much more of learning than he had of philosophy; and what philosophy he had belonged much more to the cold self-reliance of the camp than to the sounder tenets of the schools.
While filling his son’s mind, therefore, with much curious lore of all sorts; while making him a master of many tongues, and laying before him books of all kinds, the old banneret had taken little pains—perhaps he would not have succeeded had he taken more—to point the lessons which the books contained; to draw deductions from the facts which he inculcated; or to direct the course of the young man’s opinions.
Self-taught himself, or taught only in the hard school of experience, and having himself arrived at sound principles of conduct, he never seemed to recollect that the boy would run through no such ordeal, and reap no such lessons; nor did he ever reflect that the deductions which he had himself drawn from certain facts, acquired in one way, and under one set of circumstances, would probably be entirely different from those at which another would arrive, when his data were acquired in a very different manner, and under circumstances altogether diverse and dissimilar.
Thence it came that Jasper St. Aubyn, at the age of seventeen years, was in all qualities of body thoroughly trained and disciplined; and in all mental faculties perfectly educated, but entirely untrained, uncorrected and unchastened.
In manner, he was a perfect gentleman; in body, he was a perfect man; in mind, he was almost a perfect scholar. And what, our reader will perhaps inquire, what could he have been more; or what more could education have effected in his behalf?
Much—very much—good friend.
For as there is an education of the body, and an education of the brain, so is there also an education of the heart. And that is an education which men rarely have the faculty of imparting, and which few men ever have obtained, who have not enjoyed the inestimable advantage of female nurture during their youth, as well as their childhood; unless they have learned it in the course of painful years, from those severe and bitter teachers, those chasteners and purifiers of the heart—sorrow and suffering, which two are experience.
This, then, was the education in which Jasper St. Aubyn was altogether deficient; which Sir Miles had never so much as attempted to impart to him; and which, had he endeavored, he probably would have failed to bestow.
We do not mean to say that the boy was heartless—boys rarely are so, we might almost say never—nor that the impulses of his heart were toward evil rather than good; far from it. His heart, like all young and untainted hearts, was full of noble impulses—but they were impulses; full of fresh springing generous desires, of gracious sympathies and lofty aspirations—but he had not one principle—he never had been taught to question one impulse, before acting upon it—he never had learned to check one desire, to doubt the genuineness of one sympathy, to moderate the eagerness of one aspiration. He never had been brought to suspect that there were such virtues as self-control, or self-devotion; such vices as selfishness or self-abandonment—in a word, he never had so much as heard
That Right is right, and that to follow Right