Page:The Mothers of England.djvu/147

142 It is astonishing how far some well-meaning persons seem to think they can stretch the credulity of youth by representing the allurements of the world as no allurements at all. When it was so much the fashion to admire Lord Byron that young people scarcely admired any other author, many good persons, without the least talent for criticism, felt it their duty to depreciate him as a poet; while perhaps the very individuals they addressed had their minds so imbued with the true spirit of poetry as to feel their understandings insulted at the same time that their taste was offended, by a mode of reasoning from data so evidently false.

It is thus with much that is too pleasing in the world. We wish it was otherwise; but since it is pleasing, and especially so to youth, we gain nothing by denying the fact, or by speaking in disparaging terms of what is really the very thing they most desire. There must, with children, and with all in whose feelings we wish to produce a radical change, be a certain kind of meeting half-way, a candid acknowledgment of the truth, so far as it goes, even when most opposed to our wishes; or by what means are they to be made to believe, that we enter so far into their feelings as to sympathize with them, and so far into the case itself as to understand it?

Toward the support of true dignity of character, many things are required, which would not, on first looking at the subject, appear to be at all essential. Among these I would class a habit which ought to be made part of the education of children — that of always speaking and behaving well at home. Two sets of manners, one for the home circle, and one for the circle of society to which they are occasionally admitted, are sure to produce the effect of making a character only half what it ought to be. It is as easy to learn to speak well, as to speak otherwise; and where the language of the fireside is always correct, there can be no danger of being guilty of vulgarisms on public occasions.

We are too apt to confuse the two ideas of good society, and society above us. It is in the power of all united and