Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/200

Rh consequences of a system of education, under which the cultivation of moral principle bears no proportion to the cultivation of the intellectual powers, it is desirable to offer all the assistance we can in the improvement of that portion of human character which is at once the most important and the most neglected. In order to strengthen the good resolutions of those who are really desirous of paying the attention and the respect to old age which is justly its due, I would suggest to the accomplished young reader, an idea which it is highly probable may never before have crossed her mind, but which I feel assured will stain her cheek with shame, if she has ever allowed herself to treat her parents, or even her grand-parents with contempt, as inferior in the scale of consideration to herself, because of their want of mental cultivation.

Let her remember, then, whatever their deficiency in other points of wisdom may be, that there is one in which they must be her superiors. She may occasionally be obliged to correct their grammatical inaccuracies; she may be able not only to dazzle them with her accomplishments, but even to baffle them in argument; yet there is one fundamental part of true knowledge, in consideration of which, every youthful head must bow to age. Not ten thousand times the sum of money expended on your education would be sufficient to purchase this treasure of human wisdom for you. And there sits the aged woman, with her white locks, and her feeble hands, a by-word, and perhaps a jest, from the very helplessness of worn-out nature; yet, all the while, this humble and neglected being may be rich in the wealth which princes are too poor to buy; for she is rich in experience, and that is where you are poor. The simple being you despise has lived to see the working out of many systems, the end of many beginnings, the detection of much falsehood, the development of much