CHAPTER VI.
THE THIRD PERIOD OF EARLY LIFE, AND CONCLUDING TERM OF HOME EDUCATION.
The practical difference between a public and a private education becomes broadly apparent about the time when boyhood succeeds to childhood. In their twelfth year children who have been reared beneath the paternal roof, and who have lived in the society of well-informed adults, are found to be very unlike, in tastes and habits, those of the same standing who have already passed several years at school.—They will be less childish, and more childlike: they will in a sense be too adult, and too infantile: there is an advantage they will possess, and a disadvantage also; and we must be prepared at once to avail ourselves to the utmost of the former, and to find means for obviating, as far as possible, the latter.
I do not profess to strike the balance between the two methods; but simply keeping my eye fixed upon that which I have adopted, and whic I undertake to treat of, shall labour to point out the means of doing the best with it.
Home education, when it reaches its later stages, is not unlikely to present an apparent, and perhaps to some extent, a real inconsistency, with the leading principle professed in this volume—I mean that of a retarded development of the mind; for it may often be found that intelligent children, who are constantly the companions of well-in-
