point, of some importance, to be kept in view during the year or two that may elapse after a profession has been chosen, and until the college course is commenced, and it is to engage the mind with studies that may serve as the correctives of professional pursuits, and which are likely to be discarded, or held in low esteem, when once the professional enthusiasm is kindled. It is not intended that a youth should be compelled to addict himself to studies altogether distasteful to him, or which he has no ability to cope with. To preclude a misunderstanding on this point, I will offer an exemplification of my meaning.
Let it then be premised that a home education supposes always the diffusion of so much liberal and expansive intelligence in a family as must have the effect of excluding exclusiveness of tastes, and so, of bringing all minds, whatever may be their particular preferences, into agreeable sociality with all the muses, and all the sciences. This being supposed, then, if for example, the legal profession were in prospect, a teacher need not be told that his pupil should become conversant with history; or that he should be exercised in the ready use of the faculties of abstraction, analysis, analogy, and ratiocination; or that he should be practised in a fluent, pointed, extemporaneous utterance of his thoughts:―all this is obvious enough; but beyond this, we ought to look out for pursuits, the tendency of which will be to counteract the ill influence of the legal profession upon the mind and the moral sentiments. With this view peculiar attention should be given (let no offence be taken at the suggestion) to that sound moral training which brings the universally applicable logic of inflexible rectitude to bear upon the technical logic of mere pleading to carry a point. History, read under a proper guidance, and especially those more elaborate specimens of modern history, wherein the real motives and private character of public men are exposed in their confidential letters―this sort of
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