Letter LII

Summary

I will now, my dearest, my best-beloved Correspondent of all, begin, since the tender Age of my dear Babies will not permit me to have an Eye yet to their better Part, to tell you what are the little Matters, to which I am not quite so well reconcil’d in Mr. Locke: And this I shall be better inabled to do, by my Observations upon the Temper and natural Bent of my dear Miss Goodwin, as well as by those, which the Visits I make now-and-then to the bigger Children of my little School, and those at the Cottages adjacent, have enabled me to form: For human Nature, Sir, you are not to be told, is human Nature, whether in the High-born, or in the Low.

This excellent Author, in his Fifty-second Section, having justly disallow’d of slavish and corporal Punishments in the Education of those we would have to be wise, good, and ingenious Men, adds:—“On the other Side, to flatter Children by Rewards of Things, that are pleasant to them, is as carefully to be avoided. He that will give his Son Apples, or Sugarplums, or what else of this kind he is most delighted with, to make him learn his Book, does but authorize his Love of Pleasure, and cockers up that dangerous Propensity, which he ought, by all means, to subdue and stifle in him. You can never hope to teach him to master it, whilst you compound for the Check you give his Inclination in one Place, by the Satisfaction you propose to it in another: To make a good, a wise, and a virtuous Man, ‘tis fit he should learn to cross his Appetite, and deny his Inclination to Riches, Finery, or pleasing his Palate, &c.”

This, Sir, is excellently said; but is it not a little too philosophical and abstracted, not only for the Generality of Children, but for the Age he supposes them to be of, if one may guess by the Apples and the Sugarplums proposed for the Rewards of their Well-doing? Would not this, Sir, require in Children, that Memory and Reflection, which the same Author, in another Place, calls the Concomitant of Prudence and Age, and not of Childhood?