Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

hurried forward to a distant and far other state. Our friends may be our fond companions by the way, they may assuage our sorrows and heighten our delights, and with a transient tenderness may hold our hands and assist us in our task; but their bosoms must no more be our resting-place than any other thing on earth; they are treasures that must be parted from; they are possessions that time must steal; they are goods that must corrupt and pass away. Heaven has pronounced it so, and so it must be. And if in this, as in all other things, we persist in acting, feeling, and expecting, as if the world were our home, and the things of it our lasting heritage: instead of being, as they might, our sweetest consolation, our purest enjoyment, and highest zest of life; our friendships must become a source of mortification, chagrin, and discontent.

But are we, therefore, to say there is no such thing as friendship; or that it is not worth seeking; morosely repel it, or suspiciously distrust it? If we do, we shall pay our folly's price in the forfeiture of that without which, however we may pretend, we never are or can be happy; preferring to go without the very greatest of all earthly good, because it is not what perhaps it may be in heaven. Rather than this, it would be wise so to moderate our expectation and adapt our conduct, as to gain of it a larger measure: or, as far as may be possible, to gather of its flowers without exposing ourselves to be wounded by the thorns it bears. This is only to be done by setting out in life with juster feelings and fairer expectations,

It is not true that friends are few, and kindness rare. No one ever needed friends and deserved them, and found them not: but we do not know them when we see them, or deal with them justly,

when we have them. We must allow others to be as variable, and imperfect, and faulty as ourselves. We do not wish our young readers to love their friends less, but to love them as what they are, rather than as what they wish them to be; and instead of the jealous pertinacity that is wounded by every appearance of change; and disgusted by every detection of a fault, and ready to distrust and cast away the kindest friends on every trifling difference of behaviour or feeling; to cultivate a moderation in their demands; a patient allowance for the effect of time and circumstance; an indulgence towards peculiarities of temper and character, and above all, such a close examination of what passes in their own hearts, as will teach them better to understand and excuse what they detect in the hearts of others, ever remembering that all things on earth are earthly, and therefore changeful, perishable, and uncertain.

EMULATION.

As in the hazy darkness of the scarcely-breaking twilight, every object is indistinct and uncertain; and the more the eye searches the more it is bewildered; and the foot moves uncertainly, unable to discern between the firm green sward and the darkening chasm-so obscured, so uncertain were the moral perceptions of mankind, ere the day star of Christian truth arose upon our world. They who talked most of virtue, and professed to love it most, and would perhaps have loved it had they known what it was, mistook the nature of the good they sought, and took evil in its stead. When the great man of antiquity prepared the tissue of moral beauty with which to dress himself for popular applause, pride and selfishness were the thread with which he wove it; the flowers he wrought in it were the evanescent charms of time and sense. Examining the finest specimens of Greek and Roman virtue, what do we find them? The hero was one to whom the world was a plaything, and men's lives a toy. His hard bosom was forbidden every kindly emotion; every tender sympathy was imperiously sacrificed to a stern will, determined on self-aggrandizement. He was a traitor, a tyrant, and a robber; yet he lived admired, respected, and, it may be, beloved; and died, as he believed, the favourite of the gods: still looking to the laurel wreath as his eternal crown, and the tortures of his enemies as the amusement of his Elysium.

The sage, the philosopher, though a more harm less, was a more self-deluding being still. He sought the applause of the world in affecting to despise it; and did but call off his senses, passions, and feelings from the things around him, to fix them solely and entirely on himself. He mistook for greatness the contempt with which he rejected all the good that God or man could offer, and for magnanimity the defiance with which he braved Heaven itself to subdue him. And these were the high standards of heathen virtue, by others admired at a distance, and at a distance imitated. A self-sufficing pride, an impatient susceptibility that would not suffer the slightest touch of wrong; a bitterness of revenge that never pardoned it; these were among the foremost of a heathen's virtues. In considering the institutions of Lycurgus and other ancient legislators for the education of youth, harsh and unnatural as they appear to us, we are struck with their fitness to effect the purpose designed in them, of rearing their children to what had been accepted as the standard of moral excellence, Having determined that there was more disgrace in the discovery of a theft, than in the theft itself, the Spartans pursued a consistent purpose in teaching their children to steal adroitly; and thus throughout, we find the institutions of the wisest of heathen nations admirably fitted to make their children what they considered that they ought to be: virtuous, according to their dark perceptions; heroes and wise men, such as we have described.

Perhaps my readers are thinking, and my critics making ready to assert, that I am talking instead of listening; and lamenting what has been, rather than observing what is. But they are mistaken. Little connected as the subjects may seem, I never should

have thought of Cato, or Lycurgus, or Cæsar, or Diogenes, if I had not listened one whole day in mute attention to the progress of education in a certain school-room, and following thence into the world its tutored inmates, I traced in idea the results of all the lessons I had seen them learning. When they were taught music, it was expected they should play; when they were taught French, it was expected they should understand it: and except in some few unhappy instances, I suppose the results corresponded with the expectations. But some things I observed were taught them that it was not expected they should learn, or desirable that they should practise: and if, in after life, they evinced an unexpected proficiency in these studies, few, perhaps, of their instructors would recognize the fruit of their own labours; the produce of the seed their industry had

sown.

Parents who brought their daughters to this school -at least I heard it of so many, that I am inclined to suppose it of the rest-had said either that they were so stupid they could not, or so careless they would not, pursue their studies well at home; and they thought that the emulation excited by rivalship with others would much tend to promote their progress. The governess who should venture to contradict this introductory clause would probably lose her school: added to which, it is an admitted rule, that what every one says must be true. By parity of reasoning, what one is always hearing, one must believe; and conscientiously, and in pure good faith, this lady undertook what was asked of her, and performed what she undertook. The young ladies were powerfully stimulated by the very means prescribed, and made a very rapid progress in every thingyes, alas! in much that was unperceived and un

« ForrigeFortsæt »