Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/332

 shelves, bring in furniture, new frame the stairs, make new passages etc., after which there would be very little left of his head.' 'Remember me to dear Neddy,' he writes on another occasion. 'Bid him study moderately, and not burn his fingers with his tonge, nor pinch them in his nose. I say, cram into him some Lattin, some mathematicks, some drawing and some law, (which is almost all done already), and then let Nature work, and let him follow his own inclinations; for further forcing him to learne what you like, and not what he chooses himself, will come to no great matter. But when you see what he thrives and prospers in, provide him a course of life whereby he may make the best use of his own natural wares.'

'For further impositions' about Neddy, he writes later on, 'I think them needless. You have planted all necessarys in his ground; you have led him through all the shops and Warehouses of other things. Let Nature now worke, and see what he will choose and learn of himself. What is cramed in by much teaching will never come to much, but parch away when the teachers are gone. Within a year or two, you will have a crisis on him: let's mark that.' ... 'As to the burthen of providing for families, do you mean that a young man of 26 years old should provide for all that may descend from him before fourscore, and that not only for his ordinary food and raiment, but all the extraordinary disasters and calamities incidental to man, without any care or labour of ours. For my own part I have made my 3 children to learn and labour proportionally to their ages, and the common rate of others; and a man may as well exceed in his aims and solicitudes concerning the matter as in talking of meyriads and millions. I have laboured for them 64 years. I do not make my House a Bridewell unto them, nor myself a Bedel. I will take to myself as much as I can use, and divide the rest according to their merits, and it will become them to be thankful for so much, without grumbling that per fas et nefas I had not gotten more. To conclude, I do not think