o education like this, is indispensably necessary, as co-operating with
schoolmasters and ministers of the gospel, the never-ceasing vigilance
of parents; not so much exercised in superadding their pains to that of
the schoolmaster or minister in teaching lessons or catechisms, or by
enforcing maxims or precepts (though this part of their duty ought to be
habitually kept in mind), but by care over their _own_ conduct. It is
through the silent operation of example in their own well-regulated
behaviour, and by accustoming their children early to the discipline of
daily and hourly life, in such offices and employment as the situation
of the family requires, and as are suitable to tender years, that
parents become infinitely the most important tutors of their children,
without appearing, or positively meaning to be so. This education of
circumstances has happily, in this district, not yet been much infringed
upon by experimental novelties; parents here are anxious to send their
offspring to those schools where knowledge substantially useful is
inculcated, and those arts most carefully taught for which in after life
there will be most need; this is especially true of the judgments of
parents respecting the instruction of their daughters, which _I know_
they would wish to be confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic, and
plain needlework, or any other art favourable to economy and
home-comforts. Their shrewd sense perceives that hands full of
employment, and a head not above it, afford the best protection against
restlessness and discontent, and all the perilous temptations to which,
through them, youthful females are exposed. It is related of Burns, the
celebrated Scottish poet, that once while in the company of a friend, he
was looking from an eminence over a wide tract of country, he said, that
the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind that
none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness
and worth which they contained. How were those _happy_ and _worthy_
people educated? By the influence of hereditary good example at home,
and by their parochial schoolmasters opening the way for the admonitions
and exhortations of their clergy; that was at a time when knowledge was
perhaps better than now distinguished from smatterings of information,
and when knowledge itself was more thought of in due subordination to
wisdom. How was the evening before the sabbath then spent by the
famili