The foregoing conveys some faint idea of the precautions I would have you employ in giving children the instructions we sometimes cannot withhold without risk of their injuring themselves or others, and especially of contracting bad habits of which it will by and by be difficult to break them. But we may rest assured that in children rightly educated the necessity will seldom arise; for it is impossible that they should become intractable, vicious, deceitful, greedy, unless the vices which make them so are sowed in their hearts. For this reason what has been said on this point applies rather to exceptional than to ordinary cases. But such exceptional cases become common in proportion as children have more frequent opportunity to depart from their natural state and to acquire the vices of their seniors. Those brought up among men of the world absolutely require earlier teaching in these matters than those educated apart from such surroundings. Hence this private education is to be preferred, even if it do no more than allow childhood leisure to grow to perfection. Negative or Temporizing Education. Exactly contrary to the cases just described are those whom a happy temperament exalts above their years. As there are some men who never outgrow childhood, so there are others who never pass through it, but are men almost from their birth. The difficulty is that these exceptional cases are rare and not easily distinguished; besides, all mothers capable of understanding that a child can be a prodigy, have no doubt that their own are such. They go even farther than this: they take for extraordinary indications the sprightliness, the bright childish pranks and sayings, the shrewd simplicity of ordinary cases, characteristic of that time of life, and showing plainly that a child is only a child. Is it surprising that, allowed to speak so much and so freely, unrestrained by any consideration of propriety, a child should occasionally make happy replies? If he did not, it would be even more surprising; just as if an astrologer, among a hundred false predictions, should never hit upon a single true one. "They lie so often," said Henry IV., "that they end by telling the truth." To be a wit, one need only utter a great many foolish speeches. Heaven help men of fashion, whose reputation rests upon just this foundation!