Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/201

190 truth; in short, the operation of principles upon the lives and conduct of men; and here, in this most important point of wisdom, you are—you must be her inferior.

The wisdom of experience, independently of every other consideration, presents a strong claim upon the respectful attention of youth, in cases where propriety of conduct is a disputed point between parent and child. Young persons sometimes think their parents too severe in the instructions they would enforce; but let it ever be remembered, that those parents have experience to direct them; and that, while the child is influenced only by inclination, or opinion, founded upon what must at least be a very limited and superficial knowledge of things in general, the opinion of the parent is founded upon facts, which have occurred during a far longer acquaintance with human nature, and with what is called the world.

Let the experience of the aged, then, be weighed against your modern acquirements, and even without the exercise of natural affection, we find that they are richly entitled to your respectful attention. But there is something beyond this consideration in the overflowing of the warm and buoyant feelings of youth, which so naturally and so beautifully supply the requirements of old age, that scarcely can we picture to ourselves a situation more congenial to the daughters of England, than one of those fire-side scenes, where venerated age is treated with the gratitude and affection which ought ever to be considered as its due.

It sometimes happens that the cares and the anxieties of parental love have a second time to be endured by those who have had to mourn the loss of their immediate offspring. Perhaps a family of orphan sons and daughters have become their charge, at a time of life when they had but little strength of body, or buoyancy of spirit, to encounter the turbulance of childhood, and the waywardness of youth,