icular stroke is not seen. Young children, who are much caressed
in company, are less intent than others upon pleasing those they live
with, and they are also less independent in their occupations and
pleasures. Those who govern such pupils have not sufficient power over
them, because they have not the means of giving pleasure; because
their praise or blame is frequently counteracted by applause of
visiters. That unbroken course of experience, which is necessary for
the success of a regular plan of education, cannot be preserved. Every
body may have observed the effect, which the extraordinary notice of
strangers produces upon children. After the day is over, and the
company has left the house, there is a cold blank; a melancholy
silence. The children then sink into themselves, and feel the
mortifying change in their situation. They look with dislike upon
everything around them; yawn with ennui, or fidget with fretfulness,
till on the first check which they meet with, their secret discontent
bursts forth into a storm. Resistance, caprice, and peevishness, are
not borne with patience by a governess, though they are submitted to
with smiles by the complaisant visiter. In the same day, the same
conduct produces totally different consequences. Experience, it is
said, makes fools wise; but such experience as this, makes wise
children fools.

Why is this farce of civility, which disgusts all parties, continually
repeated between visiters and children? Visiters would willingly be
excused from the trouble of flattering and spoiling them; but such is
the spell of custom, that no one dares to break it, even when every
one feels that it is absurd.

Children, who are thought to be clever, are often produced to
entertain company; they fill up the time, and relieve the circle from
that embarrassing silence, which proceeds from the having nothing to
say. Boys, who are thus brought forward at six or seven years old, and
encouraged to say what are called _smart_ things, seldom, as they grow
up, have really good understandings. Children, who, like the fools in
former times, are permitted to say every thing, now and then blurt out
those simple truths which politeness conceals: this entertains people,
but, in fact, it is a sort of _naivete_, which may exist without any
great talent for observation, and without any powers of reasoning.
Every thing in our manners, in the customs of the world, is new to
children, and the relations of appare