remember to have seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures (as has afterwards appeared in their manhood); I say no man has passed through this way of education, but must have seen an ingenuous creature expiring with shame, with pale looks, beseeching sorrow, and silent tears, throw up its honest eyes, and kneel on its tender knees to an inexorable blockhead, to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse: the child is punished, and the next day he commits a like crime, and so a third with the same consequence. I would fain ask any reasonable man whether this lad, in the simplicity of his native innocence, full of shame, and capable of any impression from that grace of soul, was not fitter for any purpose in this life, than after that spark of virtue is extinguished in him, though he is able to write twenty verses in an evening? 1 Seneca says, after his exalted way of talking, 'As the immortal gods never learnt any virtue, though they are endued with all that is good; so there are some men who have so natural a propensity to what they should follow, that they learn it almost as soon as they hear it.' Plants and vegetables are cultivated into the production of finer fruit than they would yield without that care; and yet we cannot entertain hopes of producing a tender conscious spirit into acts of virtue, without the same methods as are used to cut timber, or give new shape to a piece of stone. It is wholly to this dreadful practice that we may attribute a certain hardness and ferocity which some men, though liberally educated, carry about them in all their behaviour. To be bred like a gentleman, 1 Epist. 95. and punished like a malefactor, must, as we see it does, produce that illiberal sauciness which we see sometimes in men of letters. The Spartan boy who suffered the fox (which he had stolen and hid under his coat) to eat into his bowels, I dare say had not half the wit or petulance which we learn at great schools among us: but the glorious sense of honour, or rather fear of shame, which he demonstrated in that action, was worth all the learning in the world without it. It is, methinks, a very melancholy consideration, that a little negligence can spoil us, but great industry is necessary to improve us; the most excellent natures are soon depreciated, but evil tempers are long before they are exalted into good habits. To help this by punishments, is the same thing as killing a man to cure him of a distemper; when he comes to suffer punishment in that one circumstance, he is brought below the existence of a rational creature, and is in the state of a brute that moves only by the admonition of stripes. But since this custom of educating by the lash is suffered by the gentry of Great Britain, I would prevail only that honest heavy lads may be dismissed from slavery sooner than they are at present, and not whipped on to their fourteenth or fifteenth year, whether they expect any progress from them or not. Let the child's capacity be forthwith examined, and he sent to some mechanic way of life, without respect to his birth, if nature designed him for nothing higher; let him go before he has innocently suffered, and is debased into a dereliction of mind for being what it is no guilt to be, a plain man. I would not here be supposed to have said, that our learned men of either robe who have been whipped at school, are not still men of noble and liberal minds; but I am sure they had been much more so than they are, had they never suffered that infamy.' But though there is so little care, as I have observed, taken, or observation made of the natural strain of men, it is no small comfort to me, as a Spectator, that there is any right value set upon the bona indoles of other animals; as appears by the following advertisement handed about the county of Lincoln, and subscribed by Enos Thomas, a person whom I have not the honour to know, but suppose to be profoundly learned in horseflesh : 'A chestnut horse called "Cæsar," bred by James Darcey, Esq.; at Sedbury near Richmond, in the County of York; his granddam was his old royal mare, and got by "Blunderbuss," which was got by "Hemsly Turk," and he got by Mr. Courant's Arabian," which got Mr. Minshul's Jew's Trump." Mr. Cæsar sold him to a nobleman (coming five years old, when he had but one sweat) for three hundred guineas. A guinea a leap and trial, and a shilling the man. T. ENOS THOMAS.' 1 Steele was far in advance of his day on this subject. Dr. Johnson thought that a diminution of flogging involved less learning, 'so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.' No. 158. Friday, August 31, 1711 O [STEELE. Nos hæc novimus esse nihil.-MARTIAL, xiii. 2. not: 'Mr. SPECTATOR, 'I HAVE observed through the whole course of your rhapsodies (as you once very well called them), you are very industrious to overthrow all that many your superiors who have gone before you have made their rule of writing. I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well with the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign. of Charles the Second: we then had, I humbly presume, as good understandings among us as any now can pretend to. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with the utmost arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon which we conducted ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man of wit, and yet deny that honour in a woman is anything else but peevishness, that inclination is the best rule of life, or virtue and vice anything else but health and disease. We had no more to do but to put a lady in good humour, and all we could wish followed of course. Then again, your Tully, and your discourses of another life, are the very bane of mirth and good humour. Prithee don't value thyself on thy reason at that exorbitant rate, and the dignity of human nature; take my word for it, a setting dog has as good reason as any man in England. Had you (as by your diurnals one would think you do) set up for being in vogue in town, you should have fallen in with the bent of passion and appetite; your songs had then been in every pretty mouth in England, and your little distichs had been the maxims of the fair and the witty to walk by: but, alas, sir, what can you hope for from entertaining people with what must needs make them like themselves worse than they did before they read you? Had you made it your business to describe Corinna charming, though inconstant; to find something in human nature itself to make Zoilus excuse himself for being fond of her; and to make every man in good commerce with his own reflections, you had done something worthy our applause; but indeed, sir, we shall not commend you for disapproving us. I have a great deal more to say to you, but I shall sum it all up in this one remark; in short, sir, you do not write like a gentleman. I am, SIR, 'Mr. SPECTATOR, Your most humble Servant.' 'THE other day we were several of us at a tea table, and according to custom and your own advice had the Spectator read among us. It was that paper wherein you are pleased to treat with great freedom that character which you call a Woman's Man.' We gave up all the kinds you have mentioned, except those who, you say, are our constant visitants. I was upon the occasion commissioned by the company to write to you, and tell 1 See No. 156. |