“Have a little altar for the children,” the author counsels, “and teach them the different colours and the different vestments for the several festivals. Let them ring the ‘Hours’ with their own small bell. Nor were it ill done to let them preach to you; to the which preaching do you listen with all due attention and reverence. So shall they learn more easily, and more exactly, their Christian Doctrine, and you will have an opportunity of judging what progress they are really making in it.” Dominici loves to see the young things gambol about. “As for games,” he says, “let them run and jump, and gambol and play”—but never so as to scare away the little playmate, Jesukin. He throws in a word of warning about the choice of their companions among the neighbour’s children. Dominici is not in favour of sending children to the schools, as things then were. (It must be remembered that he was engaged in a work of reform among those responsible for those schools.) He advises the mother to teach the children as much as she can at home herself. Here the question of what they should study meets him. Is it safe to let their young and innocent minds come into contact with pagan morality? He strongly regrets the old days and the old ways. Our ancestors were wiser. First they taught the Psalter, and Sacred Doctrine. Then, if the child was to go further: the Morality of Cato, the Fictions of Aesop, the profitable wisdom of Prospero (i.e., certain “sentences” taken from the works of Saint Augustine); the Fidei Confessio of Bœthius; the philosophy of the “Eva Columello,”[10] the “Tres leo Naturas”[11]; and to help them to memorize the Sacred Story, the poem “Aethiopium Terras.” He was writing this book for a woman who had known much trouble, who had seen her husband’s family driven into exile by the Medici. It behoves her then to rear up her children in the possession of that liberty of which no Cosimo can dispossess them—the liberty which is in the heart of every true man who has emancipated his Will from the thraldom of his passions. Again and again, he returns to this point: train their will. Teach them to know Good from Evil, and to _choose_ good. No man can be free who is not free from these three things: free from sin, free from vengeance, free from debt. Nor can a man be free whose soul is in bondage to the appetites of his body. Rear your children hardily; so shall they have no fear of future evil fortune. Again he goes into detail: “Teach them to eat bitter things, lest too great daintiness be their undoing.” And again: “if they are sick, do not show them too much compassion, for so shall you take from them the opportunity of practising patience.”