The week had not quite passed when I received from my father the letter I am about to place before the reader; and you may judge how earnestly his soul must have been in the task it had volunteered, if you observe how little, comparatively speaking, the letter contains of the subtleties and pedantries (may the last word be pardoned, for it is scarcely a just one) which ordinarily left my father a scholar even in the midst of his emotions. He seemed here to have abandoned his books, to have put the human heart before the eyes of his pupil, and said, "Read, and _un_learn!" TO PISISTRATUS CAXTON. "MY DEAR SON,--It were needless to tell you all the earlier difficulties I have had to encounter with my charge, nor to repeat all the means which, acting on your suggestion, (a correct one,) I have employed to arouse feelings long dormant and confused, and allay others, long prematurely active, and terribly distinct. The evil was simply this: here was the intelligence of a man in all that is evil--and the ignorance of an infant in all that is good. In matters merely worldly, what wonderful acumen! in the plain principles of right and wrong, what gross and stolid obtuseness! At one time, I am straining all my poor wit to grapple in an encounter on the knottiest mysteries of social life; at another, I am guiding reluctant fingers over the horn-book of the most obvious morals. Here hieroglyphics, and there pot-hooks! But as long as there is affection in a man, why, there is Nature to begin with! To get rid of all the rubbish laid upon her, clear back the way to that Nature, and start afresh--that is one's only chance. "Well, by degrees I won my way, waiting patiently till the bosom, pleased with the relief, disgorged itself of all 'its perilous stuff,'--not chiding--not even remonstrating, seeming almost to sympathise, till I got him Socratically to disprove himself. When I saw that he no longer feared me--that my company had become a relief to him--I proposed an excursion, and did not tell him whither. "Avoiding as much as possible the main north road, (for I did not wish, as you may suppose, to set fire to a train of associations that might blow us up to the dog-star,) and, where that avoidance was not possible, travelling by night, I got him into the neighbourhood of the old Tower. I would not admit him under its roof. But you know the little inn, three miles off the trout stream?--we made our abode there.