of
childhood; those years which idle boys wish to pass over as quickly as
possible, men without occupation regret as the happiest of their
existence. To a child, who has been promised that he shall put on
manly apparel on his next birthday, the pace of time is slow and heavy
until that happy era arrive. Fix the day when a boy shall leave
school, and he wishes instantly to mount the chariot, and lash the
horses of the sun. Nor when he enters the world, will his restless
spirit be satisfied; the first step gained, he looks anxiously forward
to the height of manly elevation,

"And the brisk minor pants for twenty-one"

These juvenile anticipations diminish the real happiness of life;
those who are in continual expectation, never enjoy the present; the
habit of expectation is dangerous to the mind, it suspends all
industry, all voluntary exertion. Young men, who early acquire this
habit, find existence insipid to them without the immediate stimuli of
hope and fear: no matter what the object is, they must have something
to sigh for; a curricle, a cockade, or an opera-dancer.

Much may be done by education to prevent this boyish restlessness.
Parents should refrain from those imprudent promises, and slight
inuendoes, which the youthful imagination always misunderstands and
exaggerates.--Never let the moment in which a young man quits a
seminary of education, be represented as a moment in which all
instruction, labour, and restraints, cease. The idea, that he must
restrain and instruct himself, that he must complete his own
education, should be excited in a young man's mind; nor should he be
suffered to imagine that his education is finished, because he has
attained to some given age.

When a common school-boy bids adieu to that school which he has been
taught to consider as a prison, he exults in his escape from books and
masters, and from all the moral and intellectual discipline, to which
he imagines that it is the peculiar disgrace and misery of childhood
to be condemned. He is impatient to be thought a man, but his ideas of
the manly character are erroneous, consequently his ambition will only
mislead him. From his companions whilst at school, from his father's
acquaintance, and his father's servants, with whom he has been
suffered to consort during the vacations, he has collected imperfect
notions of life, fashion, and society. These do not mix well in his
mind with the examples and precepts of Greek and Roman v