You are about, Sir, to send your son to a public school; Eton or Westminster; Winchester or Harrow; Rugby or the Charter House, no matter which. He may come from either an accomplished scholar to the utmost extent that school education can make him so; he may be the better both for its discipline and its want of discipline; it may serve him excellently well as a preparatory school for the world into which he is about to enter. But also he may come away an empty coxcomb or a hardened brute—a spendthrift—a profligate—a blackguard or a sot. To put a boy in the way he should go, is like sending out a ship well found, well manned and stored, and with a careful captain; but there are rocks and shallows in her course, winds and currents to be encountered, and all the contingencies and perils of the sea. How often has it been seen that sons, not otherwise deficient in duty toward their parents, have, in the most momentous concerns of life, taken the course most opposite to that in which they were trained to go, going wrong where the father would have directed them aright, or taking the right path in spite of all inducements and endeavours for leading them wrong! The son of Charles Wesley, born and bred in methodism and bound to it by all the strongest ties of pride and prejudice, became a papist. This indeed was but passing from one erroneous persuasion to another, and a more inviting one. But Isaac Casaubon also had the grief of seeing a son seduced into the Romish superstition, and on the part of that great and excellent man, there had been no want of discretion in training him, nor of sound learning and sound wisdom. Archbishop Leighton, an honor to his church, his country, and his kind, was the child of one of those firebrands who kindled the Great Rebellion. And Franklin had a son, who notwithstanding the example of his father (and such a father!) continued stedfast in his duty as a soldier and a subject; he took the unsuccessful side—but _nunquam successu crescat honestum._[1] [Footnote 1: LUCAN.]