ile in rigour
and constraint; and I am of opinion that what is not to be done by
reason, prudence, and address, is never to be affected by force. I
myself was brought up after that manner; and they tell me that in all my
first age I never felt the rod but twice, and then very slightly. I
practised the same method with my children, who all of them died at
nurse, except Leonora, my only daughter, and who arrived to the age of
five years and upward without other correction for her childish faults
(her mother's indulgence easily concurring) than words only, and those
very gentle; in which kind of proceeding, though my end and expectation
should be both frustrated, there are other causes enough to lay the fault
on without blaming my discipline, which I know to be natural and just,
and I should, in this, have yet been more religious towards the males, as
less born to subjection and more free; and I should have made it my
business to fill their hearts with ingenuousness and freedom. I have
never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more
cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate.

Do we desire to be beloved of our children? Will we remove from them all
occasion of wishing our death though no occasion of so horrid a wish can
either be just or excusable?

"Nullum scelus rationem habet."

["No wickedness has reason."--Livy, xxviii. 28]

Let us reasonably accommodate their lives with what is in our power. In
order to this, we should not marry so young that our age shall in a
manner be confounded with theirs; for this inconvenience plunges us into
many very great difficulties, and especially the gentry of the nation,
who are of a condition wherein they have little to do, and who live upon
their rents only: for elsewhere, with people who live by their labour,
the plurality and company of children is an increase to the common stock;
they are so many new tools and instruments wherewith to grow rich.

I married at three-and-thirty years of age, and concur in the opinion of
thirty-five, which is said to be that of Aristotle. Plato will have
nobody marry before thirty; but he has reason to laugh at those who
undertook the work of marriage after five-and-fifty, and condemns their
offspring as unworthy of aliment and life. Thales gave the truest
limits, who, young and being importuned by his mother to marry, answered,
"That it was too soon," and, being grown into years and urged ag