preferred to such improvements; and will take care to preserve his child's innocence and modesty at home, as being nearer of kin, and more in the way of those qualities, which make an useful and able man. Nor does any one find, or so much as suspect, that the retirement and bashfulness, which their daughters are brought up in, makes them less knowing or less able women. Conversation, when they come into the world, soon gives them a becoming assurance; and whatsoever, beyond that, there is of rough and boisterous, may in men be very well spared too for courage and steadiness, as I take it, lie not in roughness and ill-breeding.

Virtue is harder to be got, than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered. Sheepishness and ignorance of the world, the faults imputed to a private education, are neither the necessary consequences of being bred at home; nor, if they were, are they incurable evils. Vice is the more stubborn, as well as the more dangerous evil of the two; and therefore, in the first place, to be fenced against. If that sheepish softness, which often enervates those, who are bred like fondlings at home, be carefully to be avoided, it is principally so for virtue's sake; for fear lest such a yielding temper should be too susceptible of vicious impressions, and expose the novice too easily to be corrupted. A young man, before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortified with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtue; lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and has steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation. Were it not for this, a young man's bashfulness, and ignorance of the world, would not so much need an early care. Conversation would cure it in a great measure; or, if that will not do it early enough, it is only a stronger reason for a good tutor at home. For, if pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue, when he goes into the world under his own conduct.

It is preposterous, therefore, to sacrifice his innocency to the attaining of confidence, and some little skill of bustling for him

self among others, by his conversation with ill-bred and vicious boys; when the chief use of that sturdiness, and standing upon his own legs, is only for the preservation of his virtue. For if confidence or cunning come once to mix with vice, and support his miscarriages, he is only the surer lost, and you must undo again, and strip him of that he has got from his companions, or give him up to ruin. Boys will unavoidably be taught assurance by conversation with men when they are brought into it; and that is time enough. Modesty and submission, till then, better fits them for instruction: and therefore there needs not any great care to stock them with confidence beforehand. That which requires most time, pains, and assiduity, is to work into them the principles and practice of virtue and good breeding. This is the seasoning they should be prepared with, so as not easily to be got out again: this they had need to be well provided with. For conversation, when they come into the world, will add to their knowledge and assurance, but be too apt to take from their virtue; which therefore they ought to be plentifully stored with, and have that tincture sunk deep into them.

P. 111, 1. 7.

Some Thoughts concerning Education.

Conversation, it is perhaps not superfluous to remind the reader, does not mean "talking,” but “intercourse.” The comparison of the matter of this passage with that of Ben Jonson supra is so interesting as also to excuse the sugges tion of it.

"A

ROBERT SOUTH.

Robert South was born at Hackney in 1633, was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, and became Public Orator at Oxford. Clarendon made him his chaplain, and introduced him to a series of preferments, which is said to have stopped short of the Bench by his own desire merely. He died in 1716, leaving a very high reputation for soundness in Toryism, Churchmanship, morals, and style.

THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES I.

ND it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean you by this service? that you shall say, It is the Lord's Passover; who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our fathers," etc. So say I to all true English parents. When your children shall ask you, Why do we keep the thirtieth of January as a fast? and the twenty-ninth of May as a festival? What mean you by this service? Then is the time to rip up and lay before them the tragical history of the late rebellion, and unnatural civil war. A war commenced without the least shadow or pretence of right; as being notoriously against all law. A war begun without any provocation, as being against the justest, the mildest, and most pious prince, that had ever reigned. A war raised upon clamours of grievances; while the subject swam in greater plenty and riches than had ever been known in these islands before; and no grievances to be found in the three kingdoms, besides the persons who cried out of them. Next to this let them tell their children over and over of the villainous imprisonments, and

contumelious trial, and the barbarous murder of that blessed and royal martyr, by a company of cobblers, tailors, draymen, drunkards, whoremongers, and broken tradesmen; though since, I confess, dignified with the title of the sober part of the nation. These, I say, were the illustrious judges of that great monarch. Whereas the whole people of England, nobles, and commons together, neither in Parliament, nor out of Parliament, as that great judge in the trial of the regicides affirmed, had power by law to touch one hair of his head, or judicially to call him to account for any of his actions. And then in the last place, they are to tell their children also of the base and brutish cruelties practised by those bloodhounds in the plunders, sequestrations, decimations, and murders of their poor fellow subjects: likewise of their horrid oaths, covenants, and perjuries; and of their shameless, insatiable, and sacrilegious avarice, in destroying the purest church in the world, and seizing its revenues, and all this under the highest pretences of zeal for religion, and with the most solemn appeals to the great God, while they were actually spitting in his face.

These things, I say, and a thousand more, they are to be perpetually inculcating into the minds of their children, according to that strict injunction of God himself to the Israelites, Deut. vi. 6, 7, 8. "These words shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt diligently teach them thy children, and shalt talk of them, when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." Such discourses should open their eyes in the morning, and close them in the evening. And I dare undertake, that if this one thing had been faithfully and constantly practised, even but since the late Restoration, which came upon these poor kingdoms like life from the dead, the fanatics had never been so considerable, as to cause those terrible convulsions in Church and State, and those misunderstandings between the king and his people, which we have seen and trembled at, and must expect to see, as long as the same spirit, which governed in forty-one, continues still so powerful, as it does, amongst us. For, I am sure, no king and that, can ever reign quietly together.

Sermons.

PLAINNESS OF APOSTOLIC SPEECH.

A SECOND property of the ability of speech, conferred by Christ upon his apostles, was its unaffected plainness and simplicity: it was to be easy, obvious and familiar; with nothing in it strained, or far fetched: no affected scheme, or airy fancies, above the reach or relish of an ordinary apprehension; no, nothing of all this; but their grand subject was truth, and consequently above all these petit arts, and poor additions; as not being capable of any greater lustre or advantage, than to appear just as it is. For there is a certain majesty in plainness; as the proclamation of a prince never frisks it in tropes, or fine conceits, in numerous and well-turned periods, but commands in sober, natural expressions. A substantial beauty, as it comes out of the hands of nature, needs neither paint nor patch: things never made to adorn, but to cover something that would be hid. It is with expression, and the clothing of a man's conceptions, as with the clothing of a man's body. All dress and ornament supposes imperfection, as designed only to supply the body with something from without, which it wanted, but had not of its own. Gaudery is a pitiful and a mean thing, not extending farther than the surface of the body; nor is the highest gallantry considerable to any, but to those, who would hardly be considered without it: for in that case indeed there may be great need of an outside, when there is little or nothing within.

And thus also it is with the most necessary and important truths; to adorn and clothe them is to cover them, and that to obscure them. The eternal salvation and damnation of souls, are not things to be treated of with jests and witticisms. And he, who thinks to furnish himself out of plays and romances with language for the pulpit, shews himself much fitter to act a part in the revels, than for a cure of souls.

I speak the words of soberness, said St. Paul, Acts xxvi. 25. And I preach the Gospel not with the enticing words of man's wisdom, I Cor. ii. 4. This was the way of the apostles discoursing of things sacred. Nothing here of the fringes of the