and which protected them from the impulses of youthful passions, till ripening years fitted their minds for listening to serious instruction from their public teachers. Sobriety and decency of manners were then no slur on the character of a youth, and he was thought capable of struggling for independence, or pre-eminence, fit either for supporting or defending the state, although he was neither a toper nor a rake. I believe that no man who has seen thirty or forty years of life will deny that the manners of youth are sadly changed in this respect. And, without presuming to say that this has proceeded from the neglect, and almost total cessation of the moral education of the nursery, I think myself well warranted, from my own observation, to say that this education and the sober manners of young men have quitted us together. Some will call this prudery, and croaking. But I am almost transcribing from Cicero, and from Quintilian. Cornelia, Aurelia, Attia, and other ladies of the first rank, are praised by Cicero only for their _eminence_ in this respect; but not because they were _singular_. Quintilian says, that in the time immediately prior to his own, it had been the general practice of the ladies of rank to superintend the moral education both of sons and daughters. But of late, says he, they are so engaged in continual and corrupting amusements, such as the shows of gladiators, horse-racing, and deep play, that they have no time, and have yielded their places to Greek governesses and tutors, outcasts of a nation more subdued by their own vices than by the Roman arms----I dare say this was laughed at, as croaking about the corruption of the age. But what was the consequence of all this?--The Romans became the most abandoned voluptuaries, and, to preserve their mean pleasures, they crouched as willing slaves to a succession of the vilest tyrants that ever disgraced humanity.