to
_books_ for learning. It is evident, speaking of boys, that, at last,
they must study the art, or science, that you intend them to pursue; if
they be to be surgeons, they must read books on surgery; and the like in
other cases. But, there are certain _elementary_ studies; certain books
to be used by _all persons_, who are destined to acquire any
book-learning at all. Then there are departments, or branches of
knowledge, that every man in the middle rank of life, ought, if he can,
to acquire, they being, in some sort, necessary to his reputation as a
_well-informed_ man, a character to which the farmer and the shopkeeper
ought to aspire as well as the lawyer and the surgeon. Let me now, then,
offer my advice as to the _course_ of reading, and the _manner_ of
reading, for a boy, arrived at his _fourteenth_ year, that being, in my
opinion, early enough for him to begin.

311. And, first of all, whether as to boys or girls, I deprecate
_romances_ of every description. It is impossible that they can do any
_good_, and they may do a great deal of harm. They excite passions that
ought to lie dormant; they give the mind a taste for _highly-seasoned_
matter; they make matters of real life insipid; every girl, addicted to
them, sighs to be a SOPHIA WESTERN, and every boy, a TOM JONES. What
girl is not in love with the _wild_ youth, and what boy does not find a
justification for his wildness? What can be more pernicious than the
teachings of this celebrated romance? Here are two young men put before
us, both sons of the same mother; the one a _bastard_ (and by a parson
too), the other a _legitimate child_; the former wild, disobedient, and
squandering; the latter steady, sober, obedient, and frugal; the former
every thing that is frank and generous in his nature, the latter a
greedy hypocrite; the former rewarded with the most beautiful and
virtuous of women and a double estate, the latter punished by being made
an outcast. How is it possible for young people to read such a book, and
to look upon orderliness, sobriety, obedience, and frugality, as
_virtues_? And this is the tenor of almost every romance, and of almost
every play, in our language. In the 'School for Scandal,' for instance,
we see two brothers; the one a prudent and frugal man, and, to all
appearance, a moral man, the other a hair-brained squanderer, laughing
at the morality of his brother; the former turns out to be a base
hypocrite and seducer, and is brought t