Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, July 1849Various
General
Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, July 1849
Various
Literature -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals
While filling his son’s mind, therefore, with much curious lore of all
sorts; while making him a master of many tongues, and laying before him
books of all kinds, the old banneret had taken little pains—perhaps he
would not have succeeded had he taken more—to point the lessons which
the books contained; to draw deductions from the facts which he
inculcated; or to direct the course of the young man’s opinions.
Self-taught himself, or taught only in the hard school of experience,
and having himself arrived at sound principles of conduct, he never
seemed to recollect that the boy would run through no such ordeal, and
reap no such lessons; nor did he ever reflect that the deductions which
he had himself drawn from certain facts, acquired in one way, and under
one set of circumstances, would probably be entirely different from
those at which another would arrive, when his data were acquired in a
very different manner, and under circumstances altogether diverse and
dissimilar.
Thence it came that Jasper St. Aubyn, at the age of seventeen years, was
in all qualities of body thoroughly trained and disciplined; and in all
mental faculties perfectly educated, but entirely untrained, uncorrected
and unchastened.
In manner, he was a perfect gentleman; in body, he was a perfect man; in
mind, he was almost a perfect scholar. And what, our reader will perhaps
inquire, what could he have been more; or what more could education have
effected in his behalf?
Much—very much—good friend.
For as there is an education of the body, and an education of the brain,
so is there also an education of the heart. And that is an education
which men rarely have the faculty of imparting, and which few men ever
have obtained, who have not enjoyed the inestimable advantage of female
nurture during their youth, as well as their childhood; unless they have
learned it in the course of painful years, from those severe and bitter
teachers, those chasteners and purifiers of the heart—sorrow and
suffering, which two _are_ experience.
This, then, was the education in which Jasper St. Aubyn was altogether
deficient; which Sir Miles had never so much as attempted to impart to
him; and which, had he endeavored, he probably would have failed to
bestow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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