Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/148

 formed parents and who may have been their father's assistants in literary or scientific pursuits, have become, notwithstanding his intentions to the contrary, far more mature in tastes and habits than they would have been had they passed the same years at school. If however the home system be in all respects judiciously conducted—if animal health and hilarity are maintained by the proper means, and if severe exactions in the course of study are scrupulously avoided, few, if any, of the ill consequences of this early ripening of the mind will have been incurred. And yet I will not say that a father may not sometimes wish to see his sons a little more boyish than they probably will be, if they have conversed much more with him, than with their peers.

The school-boy of fourteen is what his comrades have made him; but the home-bred boy is what his parents have made him; and there is a balance of advantages between the two kinds of character. The former is the creature of instantaneous and vehement impulses and he acts under the guidance, not of individual reason, but of conventional habits. Whatever may be his acquirements, and whatever the assumed manliness of his bearing, he is child still; and is more sensual, more frivolous, and more wilful than a home-bred boy five years younger than himself. In relation however to the engagements of common life he is not ill prepared to brunt the world, as it is. He is not too thoughtful, or too wise, or too nice in his tastes or too considerate of the feelings of others, to take up the rough work of professional or commercial life; and he is saved the torture which those must endure who enter upon the broad paths of business with their own individual sense of right and wrong, and their own feelings, all about them.

To secure, for the home-bred, a portion of the same advantages, it is certain that, in approaching the later period of early life, some companionship, out of the family, must