has got the pox, is an enemy to pleasure.  If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other.  She can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed beds:  she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good things, and how to lose them without concern:  an office much more noble than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices.

If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum, that excites the youthful ardour of his companions, leaves that to follow another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of a duke; according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own souls.

Since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and that infancy has there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to children betimes?

         “Udum et molle lutum est; nunc, nunc properandus, et acri
          Fingendus sine fine rota.”

["The clay is moist and soft:  now, now make haste, and form the
pitcher on the rapid wheel.”—­Persius, iii. 23.]

They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living.  A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read Aristotle’s lecture on temperance.  Cicero said, that though he should live two men’s ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric poets; and I find these sophisters yet more deplorably unprofitable.  The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the remainder is due to action.  Let us, therefore, employ that short time in necessary instruction.  Away with the thorny subtleties of dialectics; they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended:  take the plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of Boccaccio’s novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than of learning to read or to write.  Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood, as well as for the decrepit age of men.