e found entirely free from
these defects, and if it be even impossible to correct any completely,
without writing the whole over again, yet much may be done by those
who hear children read. Explanations can be given at the moment when
the difficulties occur. When the young reader pauses to think, allow
him to think, and suffer him to question the assertions which he meets
with in books, with freedom, and that minute accuracy which is only
tiresome to those who cannot reason. The simple morality of childhood
is continually puzzled and shocked at the representation of the crimes
and the virtues of historic heroes. History, when divested of the
graces of eloquence, and of that veil which the imagination is taught
to throw over antiquity, presents a disgusting, terrible list of
crimes and calamities: murders, assassinations, battles, revolutions,
are the memorable events of history. The love of glory atones for
military barbarity; treachery and fraud are frequently dignified with
the names of prudence and policy; and the historian, desirous to
appear moral and sentimental, yet compelled to produce facts, makes
out an inconsistent, ambiguous system of morality. A judicious and
honest preceptor will not, however, imitate the false tenderness of
the historian for the dead; he will rather consider what is most
advantageous to the living; he will perceive, that it is of more
consequence that his pupils should have distinct notions of right and
wrong, than that they should have perfectly by rote all the Grecian,
Roman, English, French, all the fifty volumes of the Universal
History. A preceptor will not surely attempt, by any sophistry, to
justify the crimes which sometimes obtain the name of heroism; when
his ingenious indignant pupil verifies the astonishing numeration of
the hundreds and thousands that were put to death by a conqueror, or
that fell in one battle, he will allow this astonishment and
indignation to be just, and he will rejoice that it is strongly felt
and expressed.

Besides the false characters which are sometimes drawn of individuals
in history, national characters are often decidedly given in a few
epithets, which prejudice the mind, and convey no real information.
Can a child learn any thing but national prepossession, from reading
in a character of the English nation, that "boys, before they can
speak, discover that they know the proper guards in boxing with their
fists; a quality that, perhaps, is peculia