Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/74

 mon, the leader and author of pleasures, and especially of such as are in any way vivified by intelligence.

A father who has the peculiar talent requisite for the purpose may with advantage, and especially at table, and in hours of relaxation—in the garden and the field, use a sparkling and sportive style, giving indulgence, under the restraints of good taste, to facetious turns, sudden comparisons, and sprightly apologues. A chastened pleasantry serves many purposes, more or less important:—it graces and recommends the paternal authority; it gives rise to a state of mind intermediate between sport and study, tending at once to connect the former with intelligence, and the latter with pleasurable sensations; it is a great means of quickening the sense of analogy, on which so much depends in all the higher mental processes; and it is an initiation in the vivid and elegant conversational manner that distinguishes the best society.

A happy facetiousness on the part of parents or teachers, so far from rendering the ordinary style of conversation frivolous, on the contrary, in making the society of adults agreeable to children, gives them a distaste for that sheer inanity or vulgarity which is apt to prevail among themselves. Moreover, inasmuch as this sort of converse breaks up the feeling of formality, too often separating parents and children, it promotes directly that intimacy and ingenuousness whence a real friendship may at length result. What Lord Bacon says of pleasantry, in relation to the transaction of public business, is quite true also in education—Res est supra opinionera politica, facile transire à joco ad serium, à serio ad jocum.

That degree of regularity and exactitude in carrying forward the daily routine of studies and recreations, which is indispensable in a home-taught family, as well as in a school, is secured, in different families, by very different means; and the means actually employed, in any case,