implicity in
childhood, is sometimes succeeded in youth by a strong taste for wit
and humour. Young people are, in the first place, proud to show that
they understand them; and they are gratified by the perception of a
new intellectual pleasure. At this period of their education, great
attention must be paid to them, lest their admiration for wit and
frolic should diminish their reverence and their love for sober truth.
In many engaging characters in society, and in many entertaining
books, deceit and dishonesty are associated with superior abilities,
with ease and gayety of manners, and with a certain air of frank
carelessness, which can scarcely fail to please. Gil Blas,[55] Tom
Jones, Lovelace, Count Fathom, are all of this class of characters.
They should not be introduced to our pupils till their habits of
integrity are thoroughly formed; and till they are sufficiently
skilful in analysing their own feelings, to distinguish whence their
approbation and pleasure in reading of these characters arise. In
books, we do not actually suffer by the tricks of rogues, or by the
lies they tell. Hence their truth is to us a quality of no value; but
their wit, humour, and the ingenuity of their contrivances, are of
great value to us, because they afford us entertainment. The most
honest man in the universe may not have had half so many adventures as
the greatest rogue; in a romance, the history upon oath of all the
honest man's bargains and sales, law-suits and losses; nay, even a
complete view of his ledger and day-book, together with the regular
balancings of his accounts, would probably not afford quite so much
entertainment, even to a reader of the most unblemished integrity and
phlegmatic temper, as the adventures of Gil Blas, and Jonathan Wild,
adorned with all the wit of Le Sage, and humour of Fielding. When Gil
Blas lays open his whole heart to us, and tells us all his sins,
unwhipt of justice, we give him credit for making us his confidant,
and we forget that this sincerity, and these liberal confessions, are
not characteristic of the hero's disposition, but essential only to
the novel. The novel writer could not tell us all he had to say
without this dying confession, and inconsistent openness, from his
accomplished villain. The reader is ready enough to forgive, having
never been duped. When young people can make all these reflections for
themselves, they may read Gil Blas with as much safety as the Life of
Franklin,