irtue: a
temporary enthusiasm may have been kindled in his soul by the
eloquence of antiquity; but, for want of sympathy, this enthusiasm
necessarily dies away. His heroes are not the heroes of the present
times; the maxims of his sages are not easily introduced into the
conversation of the day. At the tea-table he now seldom hears even
the name of Plato; and he often blushes for not knowing a line from a
popular English poet, whilst he could repeat a cento from Horace,
Virgil, and Homer; or an antistrophe from AEschylus or Euripides. He
feels ashamed to produce the knowledge he has acquired, because he has
not learned sufficient address to produce it without pedantry. On his
entrance into the world, there remains in his mind no grateful, no
affectionate, no respectful remembrance of those under whose care he
has passed so many years of his life. He has escaped from the
restraints imposed by his school-master, and the connection is
dissolved for ever.

But when a son separates from his father, if he has been well
educated, he wishes to continue his own education: the course of his
ideas is not suddenly broken; what he has been, joins immediately with
what he is to be; his knowledge applies to real life, it is such as he
can use in all companies; there is no sudden metamorphosis in any of
the objects of his ambition; the boy and man are the same individual.
Pleasure will not influence him merely by her name, or by the contrast
of her appearance with the rigid discipline of scholastic learning; he
will feel the difference between pleasure and happiness, and his early
taste for domestic life will remain or return upon his mind. His old
precepts and new motives are not at war with each other; his
experience will confirm his education, and external circumstances will
call forth his latent virtues. When he looks back, he can trace the
gradual growth of his knowledge; when he looks forward, it is with the
delightful hope of progressive improvement. A desire in some degree to
repay the care, to deserve the esteem, to fulfil the animating
prophecies, or to justify the fond hopes of the parent who has watched
over his education, is one of the strongest motives to an ingenuous
young man; it is an incentive to exertion in every honourable pursuit.
A son who has been judiciously and kindly educated, will feel the
value of his father's friendship. The perception, that no man can be
more entirely interested in every thing that concer