He saw the boy’s promise early, and gave him an education which is condemned by Robert’s chief biographer as irregular and desultory, but had a method in it. He believed that sons are always what their fathers were at their age, with the same kind of faults and virtues; and the men whose influence would have been best for himself would, he thought, be the best teachers for Robert. At the same time he believed with the “Émile” that a sort of _laissez faire_ was the best policy in the education of children; they should be left to grow, and use their own eyes and hands and heads for themselves. At the age of nine or ten, say in the year 1776, Robert was accordingly delivered over to Mr. Richard Graves, Rector of Claverton, near Bath, to be taught little but Latin and good behaviour, along with a few other boys, most of them older than himself. Graves, who was Daniel’s senior by some years, had been intimate with the poet Shenstone at Pembroke College, Oxford, “a society which for half a century” (on Johnson’s partial testimony) “was eminent for English poetry and elegant literature.” From his novel, _The Spiritual Quixote, or the Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose_,[957] we should not fancy him the best guide for ingenuous youth. The book is a coarse and offensive satire on Whitfield and Wesley;[958] and shows Graves as a clergyman to be liker Laurence Sterne than Dr. Primrose. “Don Roberto,” however, as the tutor nicknamed his pupil, was fonder of fun and fighting than of his books, and at the ripe age of ten is not likely to have been troubled about the universe or about clerical consistency. From Graves he passed[959] into the hands of a much better man, Gilbert Wakefield, a clergyman who had rebelled against the Articles, turned dissenter, and become classical master of an academy at Warrington, founded in 1779 “to provide a course of liberal education for the sons of dissenters, and particularly for dissenting ministers.”[960] About one-third of the boys at the Warrington Academy were sons of members of the Church of England, who were, like Daniel Malthus, liberal in their opinions, and wished their sons to be likewise. Wakefield held decided views on education; and they were in close accordance with Daniel and the Émile. “The greatest service of tuition,” he said, “to any youth, is to teach him the exercise of his own powers, to conduct him to the hill of knowledge by that gradual process in which he sees and secures his own way, and rejoices in a consciousness of his own faculties and his own proficiency. Puppies and sciolists alone can be expected to be formed by any other process.”[961] The tutor’s best service is to point the pupil to the best authors and give him advice (not lectures) when he wants it. There was self-denial as well as wisdom in Wakefield’s view, for in one case at least the pupil showed his proficiency by departing from the opinions of his tutor.