y twirling
his hat upon his fingers, and by various uncouth gestures. Men who
think a great deal, sometimes acquire habitual awkward gestures, to
relieve the pain of intense thought.

When attention first becomes irksome to children, they mitigate the
mental pain by wrinkling their brows, or they fidget and put
themselves into strange attitudes. These odd motions, which at first
are voluntary, after they have been frequently associated with certain
states of mind, constantly recur involuntarily with those feelings or
ideas with which they have been connected. For instance, a boy, who
has been used to buckle and unbuckle his shoe, when he repeats his
lesson by rote, cannot repeat his lesson without performing this
operation; it becomes a sort of artificial memory, which is necessary
to prompt his recollective faculty. When children have a _variety_ of
tricks of this sort, they are of little consequence; but when they
have acquired a few constant and habitual motions, whilst they think,
or repeat, or listen, these should be attended to, and the habits
should be broken, otherwise these young people will appear, when they
grow up, awkward and ridiculous in their manners; and, what is worse,
perhaps their thoughts and abilities will be too much in the power of
external circumstances. Addison represents, with much humour, the case
of a poor man who had the habit of twirling a bit of thread round his
finger; the thread was accidentally broken, and the orator stood mute.

We once saw a gentleman get up to speak in a public assembly, provided
with a paper of notes written in pencil: during the exordium of his
speech, he thumbed his notes with incessant agitation; when he looked
at the paper, he found that the words were totally obliterated; he was
obliged to apologize to his audience; and, after much hesitation, sat
down abashed. A father would be sorry to see his son in such a
predicament.

To prevent children from acquiring such awkward tricks whilst they are
thinking, we should in the first place take care not to make them
attend for too long a time together, then the pain of attention will
not be so violent as to compel them to use these strange modes of
relief. Bodily exercise should immediately follow that entire state of
rest, in which our pupils ought to keep themselves whilst they attend.
The first symptoms of any awkward trick should be watched; they are
easily prevented by early care from becoming habitual. If any