A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-DayReade, Charles
General
A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day
Reade, Charles
England -- Fiction
“Never!” shouted Sir Charles: then, in a broken voice, “He is my
first-born, and my idol; his coming into the world rescued me out of a
morbid condition: he healed my one great grief. Bar the entail, and put
his younger brother in his place--never!”
Mr. Rolfe bowed his head politely, and left the subject, which, indeed,
could be carried no farther without serious offense.
“And now for my advice. The question is, how to educate this strange
boy. One thing is clear; it is no use trying the humdrum plan any
longer; it has been tried, and failed. I should adapt his education to
his nature. Education is made as stiff and unyielding as a board; but
it need not be. I should abolish that spectacled tutor of yours at
once, and get a tutor, young, enterprising, manly, and supple, who
would obey orders; and the order should be to observe the boy's nature,
and teach accordingly. Why need men teach in a chair, and boys learn in
a chair? The Athenians studied not in chairs. The Peripatetics, as
their name imports, hunted knowledge afoot; those who sought truth in
the groves of Academus were not seated at that work. Then let the tutor
walk with him, and talk with him by sunlight and moonlight, relating
old history, and commenting on each new thing that is done, or word
spoken, and improve every occasion. Why, I myself would give a guinea a
day to walk with William White about the kindly aspects and wooded
slopes of Selborne, or with Karr about his garden. Cut Latin and Greek
clean out of the scheme. They are mere cancers to those who can never
excel in them. Teach him not dead languages, but living facts. Have him
in your justice-room for half an hour a day, and give him your own
comments on what he has heard there. Let his tutor take him to all
Quarter Sessions and Assizes, and stick to him like diaculum,
especially out-of-doors; order him never to be admitted to the
stable-yard; dismiss every biped there that lets him come. Don't let
him visit his nurse so often, and never without his tutor; it was she
who taught him to look forward to your decease; that is just like these
common women. Such a tutor as I have described will deserve 500 pounds
a year. Give it him; and dismiss him if he plays humdrum and doesn't
earn it. Dismiss half a dozen, if necessary, till you get a fellow with
a grain or two of genius for tuition. When the boy is seventeen, what
with his Oriental precocity, and this system of education, he will know
the world as well as a Saxon boy of twenty-one, and that is not saying
much. Then, if his nature is still as wild, get him a large tract in
Australia; cattle to breed, kangaroos to shoot, swift horses to thread
the bush and gallop mighty tracts; he will not shirk business, if it
avoids the repulsive form of sitting down in-doors, and offers itself
in combination with riding, hunting, galloping, cracking of rifles, and
of colonial whips as loud as rifles, and drinking sunshine and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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