corner of the world. In general, the richest
and best endowed universities have been slowest
in adopting those improvements, and the
most averse to permit any considerable change
in the established plan of education. Those
improvements were more easily introduced into
some of the poorer universities, in which
the teachers, depending upon their reputation
for the greater part of their subsistence,
were obliged to pay more attention to the current
opinions of the world.
But though the public schools and universities
of Europe were originally intended only
for the education of a particular profession,
that of churchmen; and though they were not
always very diligent in instructing their pupils,
even in the sciences which were supposed
necessary for that profession; yet they gradually
drew to themselves the education of
almost all other people, particularly of almost
all gentlemen and men of fortune. No better
method, it seems, could be fallen upon, of
spending, with any advantage, the long interval
between infancy and that period of life
at which men begin to apply in good earnest
to the real business of the world, the business
which is to employ them during the remainder
of their days. The greater part of what is
taught in schools and universities, however,
does not seem to be the most proper preparation
for that business.
In England, it becomes every day more and
more the custom to send young people to travel
in foreign countries immediately upon their
leaving school, and without sending them to
any university. Our young people, it is said,
generally return home much improved by their
travels. A young man, who goes abroad at
seventeen or eighteen, and returns home at
one-and-twenty, returns three or four years
older than he was when he went abroad; and
at that age it is very difficult not to improve
a good deal in three or four years. In the
course of his travels, he generally acquires
some knowledge of one or two foreign languages;
a knowledge, however, which is seldom
sufficient to enable him either to speak or
write them with propriety. In other respects,
he commonly returns home more conceited,
more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more
incapable of any serious application, either to
study or to business, than he could well have
become in so short a time had he lived at
home. By travelling so very young, by spending
in the must frivolous dissipation the most
precious years of his life, at a distance from
the inspection and controul of his parents and
relations, every useful habit, which the earlier
parts of his education might have had some
tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted
and confirmed, is almost necessarily
either weakened or effaced. Nothing but the
discredit into which the universities are allowing
themselves to fall, could ever have brought
into repute so very absurd a practice as that
of travelling at this early period of life. By
sending his son abroad, a father delivers himself,
at least for some time, from so disagreeable
an object as that of a son unemployed,
neglected, and going to ruin before
his eyes.
Such have been the effects of some of the
modern institutions for education.
Different plans and different institutions for
education seem to have taken place in other
ages and nations.
In the republics of ancient Greece, every
free citizen was instructed, under the direction
of the public magistrate, in gymnastic exercises
and in music. By gymnastic exercises,
it was intended to harden his body, to sharpen
his courage, and to prepare him for the fatigues
and dangers of war; and as the Greek
militia was, by all accounts, one of the best
that ever was in the world, this part of their
public education must have answered completely
the purpose for which it was intended.
By the other part, music, it was proposed, at
least by the philosophers and historians, who
have given us an account of those institutions,
to humanize the mind, to soften the
temper, and to dispose it for performing all
the social and moral duties of public and private
life.
In ancient Rome, the exercises of the Campus
Martius answered the same purpose as
those of the Gymnasium in ancient Greece,
and they seem to have answered it equally
well. But among the Romans there was nothing
which corresponded to the musical education
of the Greeks. The morals of the Romans,
however, both in private and public
life, seem to have been, not only equal, but,
upon the whole, a good deal superior to those
of the Greeks. That they were superior in
private life, we have the express testimony of
Polybius, and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
two authors well acquainted with both nations;
and the whole tenor of the Greek and
Roman history bears witness to the superiority
of the public morals of the Romans. The
good temper and moderation of contending
factions seem to be the most essential circumstances
in the public morals of a free people.
But the factions of the Greeks were almost
always violent and sanguinary; whereas,
till the time of the Gracchi, no blood had
ever been shed in any Roman faction; and
from the time of the Gracchi, the Roman republic
may be considered as in reality dissolved.
Notwithstanding, therefore, the very respectable
authority of Plato, Aristotle, and
Polybius, and notwithstanding the very ingenious
reasons by which Mr. Montesquieu endeavours
to support that authority, it seems
probable that the musical education of the
Greeks had no great effect in mending their
morals, since, without any such education,
those of the Romans were, upon the whole,
superior. The respect of those ancient sages