reak
a pupil of any one bad habit, have no idea of the degree of patience
requisite to success. We once heard an officer of dragoons assert,
that he would rather break twenty horses of their bad habits, than one
man of his. The proportionate difficulty of teaching boys, may be
easily calculated.

It is sometimes asserted, that the novelty of a school life, the
change of situation, alters the habits, and forms in boys a new
character. Habits of eight or nine years standing, cannot be
instantaneously, perhaps can never be radically, destroyed; they will
mix themselves imperceptibly with the new ideas which are planted in
their minds, and though these may strike the eye by the rapidity of
their growth, the others, which have taken a strong root, will not
easily be dispossessed of the soil. In this new character, as it is
called, there will, to a discerning eye, appear a strong mixture of
the old disposition. The boy, who at home lived with his father's
servants, and was never taught to have any species of literature, will
not acquire a taste for it at school, merely by being compelled to
learn his lessons; the boy, who at home was suffered to be the little
tyrant of a family, will, it is true, be forced to submit to superior
strength or superior numbers at school;[29] but does it improve the
temper to practise alternately the habits of a tyrant and a slave? The
lesson which experience usually teaches to the temper of a school-boy,
is, that strength, and power, and cunning, will inevitably govern in
society: as to reason, it is out of the question, it would be hissed
or laughed out of the company. With respect to social virtues, they
are commonly amongst school-boys so much mixed with party spirit, that
they mislead even the best dispositions. A boy at home, whose
pleasures are all immediately connected with the idea of self, will
not feel a sudden enlargement of mind from entering a public school.
He will, probably, preserve his selfish character in his new society;
or, even suppose he catches that of his companions, the progress is
not great in moral education from selfishness to spirit of party: the
one is a despicable, the other a dangerous, principle of action. It
has been observed, that what we are when we are twenty, depends on
what we were when we were ten years old. What a young man is at
college, depends upon what he was at school; and what he is at school,
depends upon what he was before he went to school. In hi