the charming flower
through its several hopeful stages to perfection, when it shall become
one of the principal ornaments of that delicate garden, your honoured
family. Pardon me, Sir, if in the above paragraph I am too figurative.
I begin to be afraid I am out of my sphere, writing to your dear self,
on these important subjects.

But be that as it may, I will here put an end to this my first letter
(on the earliest part of my subject), rejoicing in the opportunity
you have given me of producing a fresh instance of that duty and
affection, wherewith I am, and shall ever be, my dearest Mr. B., _your
grateful, happy_,

P.B.

LETTER XCI

I will now, my dearest, my best beloved correspondent of all, begin,
since the tender age of my dear babies will not permit me to have
an eye yet to their _better_ part, to tell you what are the little
matters to which I am not quite so well reconciled in Mr. Locke: and
this I shall be better enabled to do, by my observations upon the
temper and natural bent of my dear Miss Goodwin, as well as by those
which my visits to the bigger children of my little school, and those
at the cottages adjacent, have enabled me to make; for human
nature, Sir, you are not to be told, is human nature, whether in the
high-born, or in the low.

This excellent author (Section 52), having justly disallowed of
slavish and corporal punishments in the education of those we would
have to be wise, good, and ingenuous men, adds, "On the other side, to
flatter children by rewards of things that are pleasant to them, is
as carefully to be avoided. He that will give his son apples, or
sugar-plums, or what else of this kind he is most delighted with, to
make him learn his book, does but authorize his love of pleasure, and
cockers up that dangerous propensity, which he ought, by all means,
to subdue and stifle in him. You can never hope to teach him to master
it, whilst you compound for the check you give his inclination in one
place, by the satisfaction you propose to it in another. To make a
good, a wise, and a virtuous man, 'tis fit he should learn to cross
his appetite, and deny his inclination to riches, finery, or pleasing
his palate, &c."

This, Sir, is well said; but is it not a little too philosophical and
abstracted, not only for the generality of children, but for the age
he supposes them to be of, if one may guess by the apples and the
sugar-plums proposed for the rewards of their well-doing?-