rent methods with different tempers. With those who indulge
in the _stupid reverie_, we should employ strong excitations, and
present to the senses a rapid succession of objects, which will
completely engage without fatiguing them. This mode must not be
followed with children of different dispositions, else we should
increase, instead of curing, the disease. The most likely method to
break this habit in children of great quickness or sensibility, is to
set them to some employment which is wholly new to them, and which
will consequently exercise and exhaust all their faculties, so that
they shall have no life left for castle-building. Monotonous
occupations, such as copying, drawing, or writing, playing on the
harpsichord, &c. are not, _if habit has made them easy_ to the pupil,
fit for our purpose. We may all perceive, that in such occupations,
the powers of the mind are left unexercised. We can frequently read
aloud with tolerable emphasis for a considerable time together, and at
the same time think upon some subject foreign to the book we hold in
our hands.

The most difficult exercises of the mind, such as invention, or strict
reasoning, are those alone which are sufficient to subjugate and chain
down the imagination of some active spirits. To such laborious
exercises they should be excited by the encouraging voice of praise
and affection. Imaginative children will be more disposed to invent
than to reason, but they cannot perfect any invention without
reasoning; there will, therefore, be a mixture of what they like and
dislike in the exercise of invention, and the habit of reasoning will,
perhaps, gradually become agreeable to them, if it be thus dexterously
united with the pleasures of the imagination.

So much has already been written by various authors upon the pleasures
and the dangers of imagination, that we could scarcely hope to add any
thing new to what they have produced: but we have endeavoured to
arrange the observations which appeared most applicable to practical
education; we have pointed out how the principles of taste may be
early taught without injury to the general understanding, and how the
imagination should be prepared for the higher pleasures of eloquence
and poetry. We have attempted to define the boundaries between the
enthusiasm of genius, and its extravagance; and to show some of the
precautions which may be used, to prevent the moral defects to which
persons of ardent imagination are usua