dge stored
in his memory, by the number of Latin lines he had got by rote, by his
expertness in repeating the rules of his grammar, by his pointing out
a number of places readily in a map, or even by his knowing the
latitude and longitude of all the capital cities in Europe; these are
all useful articles of knowledge: but they are not the test of a good
education. We should rather, if we were to examine a boy of ten years
old, for the credit of his parents, produce proofs of his being able
to reason accurately, of his quickness in invention, of his habits of
industry and application, of his having learned to generalize his
ideas, and to apply his observations and his principles: if we found
that he had learned all, or any of these things, we should be in
little pain about grammar, or geography, or even Latin; we should be
tolerably certain that he would not long remain deficient in any of
these; we should know that he would overtake and surpass a competitor
who had only been technically taught, as certainly as that the giant
would overtake the panting dwarf, who might have many miles the start
of him in the race. We do not mean to say, that a boy should not be
taught the principles of grammar, and some knowledge of geography, at
the same time that his understanding is cultivated in the most
enlarged manner: these objects are not incompatible, and we
particularly recommend it to _parents who intend to send their
children to school_, early to give them confidence in themselves, by
securing the rudiments of literary education; otherwise their pupils,
with a real superiority of understanding, may feel depressed, and may,
perhaps, be despised, when they mix at a public school with numbers
who will estimate their abilities merely by their proficiency in
particular studies.

Mr. Frend,[30] in recommending the study of arithmetic for young
people, has very sensibly remarked, that boys bred up in public
schools, are apt to compare themselves with each other merely as
classical scholars; and, when they afterwards go into the world
excellent Greek and Latin scholars, are much astonished to perceive,
that many of the companions whom they had under-valued at school, get
before them when they come to actual business, and to active life.
Many, in the pursuit of their classical studies, have neglected all
other knowledge, especially that of arithmetic, that useful, essential
branch of knowledge, without which neither the abstract scie