that they are impatient of any accidental delay in the payment of
their wages.

With the precautions which have been mentioned, we may hope to see
children grow up in real friendship together. The whole sum of their
pleasure is much increased by mutual sympathy. This happy moral truth,
upon which so many of our virtues depend, should be impressed upon the
mind; it should be clearly demonstrated to the reason; it should not
be repeated as an a priori, sentimental assertion.

Those who have observed the sudden, violent, and surprising effects of
emulation in public schools, will regret the want of this _power_ in
the intellectual education of their pupils at home. Even the
acquisition of talents and knowledge ought, however, to be but a
secondary consideration, subordinate to the general happiness of our
pupils. If we _could_ have superior knowledge, upon condition that we
should have a malevolent disposition, and an irritable temper, should
we, setting every other moral consideration aside, be willing to make
the purchase at such a price? Let any person, desirous to see a
striking picture of the effects of scholastic competition upon the
moral character, look at the life of that wonder of his age, the
celebrated Abeillard. As the taste and manners of the present times
are so different from those of the age in which he lived, we see,
without any species of deception, the real value of the learning in
which he excelled, and we can judge both of his acquirements, and of
his character, without prejudice. We see him goaded on by rivalship,
and literary ambition, to astonishing exertions at one time; at
another, torpid in monkish indolence: at one time, we see him
intoxicated with adulation; at another, listless, desponding, abject,
incapable of maintaining his own self-approbation without the
suffrages of those whom he despised. If his biographer[82] does him
justice, a more selfish, irritable, contemptible, miserable being,
than the learned Abeillard, could scarcely exist.

A philosopher,[83] who, if we might judge of him by the benignity of
his writings, was surely of a most amiable and happy temper, has yet
left us a melancholy and discouraging history of the unsociable
condition of men of superior knowledge and abilities. He supposes that
those who have devoted much time to the cultivation of their
understandings, have habitually less sympathy, or less exercise for
their sympathy, than those who live less abstracted f