As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who, instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules, horror and cruelty.  Away with this violence! away with this compulsion! than which, I certainly believe nothing more dulls and degenerates a well-descended nature.  If you would have him apprehend shame and chastisement, do not harden him to them:  inure him to heat and cold, to wind and sun, and to dangers that he ought to despise; wean him from all effeminacy and delicacy in clothes and lodging, eating and drinking; accustom him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris, a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man.  I have ever from a child to the age wherein I now am, been of this opinion, and am still constant to it.  But amongst other things, the strict government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me; peradventure, they might have erred less perniciously on the indulgent side.  ’Tis a real house of correction of imprisoned youth.  They are made debauched by being punished before they are so.  Do but come in when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their pedagogues drunk with fury.  A very pretty way this, to tempt these tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious countenance, and a rod in hand!  A cursed and pernicious way of proceeding!  Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences, and particularly our way of chastising.  How much more decent would it be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with the bloody stumps of birch and willows?  Were it left to my ordering.  I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his.  Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too.  Such viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should be sweetened with sugar, and such as are dangerous to them, embittered with gall.  ’Tis marvellous to see how solicitous Plato is in his Laws concerning the gaiety and diversion of the youth of his city, and how much and often he enlarges upon the races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances:  of which, he says, that antiquity has given the ordering and patronage particularly to the gods themselves, to Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses.  He insists long upon, and is very particular in, giving innumerable precepts for exercises; but as to the lettered sciences, says very little, and only seems particularly to recommend poetry upon the account of music.