"'For, ah! it wounds me like his dart.' "Pray how do you like that Ah! doth it not make a pretty figure in that place? Ah!--it looks as if I felt the dart, and cried out at being pricked with it. "'For, ah! it wounds me like his dart.' "My friend Dick Easy," continued he, "assured me, he would rather have written that Ah! than to have been the author of the AEneid. He indeed objected, that I made Mira's pen like a quill in one of the lines, and like a dart in the other. But as to that--" "Oh! as to that," says I, "it is but supposing Cupid to be like a porcupine, and his quills and darts will be the same thing." He was going to embrace me for the hint; but half a dozen critics coming into the room, whose faces he did not like, he conveyed the sonnet into his pocket, and whispered me in the ear, "he would show it me again as soon as his man had written it over fair." XVII.--FATHERLY CARE. From my own Apartment, June 23. Having lately turned my thoughts upon the consideration of the behaviour of parents to children in the great affair of marriage, I took much delight in turning over a bundle of letters which a gentleman's steward in the country had sent me some time ago. This parcel is a collection of letters written by the children of the family to which he belongs to their father, and contain all the little passages of their lives, and the new ideas they received as the years advanced. There is in them an account of their diversions as well as their exercises; and what I thought very remarkable is, that two sons of the family, who now make considerable figures in the world, gave omens of that sort of character which they now bear in the first rudiments of thought which they show in their letters. Were one to point out a method of education, one could not, methinks, frame one more pleasing or improving than this; where the children get a habit of communicating their thoughts and inclinations to their best friend with so much freedom, that he can form schemes for their future life and conduct from an observation of their tempers; and by that means be early enough in choosing their way of life, to make them forward in some art or science at an age when others have not determined what profession to follow. As to the persons concerned in this packet I am speaking of, they have given great proofs of the force of this conduct of their father in the effect it has upon their lives and manners. The older, who is a scholar, showed from his infancy a propensity to polite studies, and has made a suitable progress in literature; but his learning is so well woven into his mind, that from the impressions of it, he seems rather to have contracted a habit of life than manner of discourse. To his books he seems to owe a good economy in his affairs, and a complacency in his manners, though in others that way of education has commonly a quite different effect. The epistles of the other son are full of accounts of what he thought most