by the Devil.

But there are lessons to be learnt other than the elementary one that
virtue is a wiser guide than vice: many an Interlude was written to
castigate a particular form of laxity or drive home a needed reform, in
those years when the Stage was the Cinderella of the Church; one at
least, _The Four Elements_, was written to disseminate schoolroom
learning in an attractive manner. _Nice Wanton_ (about 1560) traces the
downward career of two spoilt children, paints the remorse of their
mother, and sums up its message at the end thus:

Therefore exhort I all parents to be diligent
In bringing up their children; aye, to be circumspect.
Lest they fall to evil, be not negligent
But chastise them before they be sore infect.

_The Disobedient Child_ (printed 1560), of which the title is a
sufficient clue to its purpose, permits a boy to refuse to go to
school, and, as a young man, to flout his father's advice in regard to
matrimony, only to bring him to the bottom rung of miserable drudgery
and servitude under a scolding wife. Of some interest is the lad's
report of a schoolboy's life, voicing, as it possibly does, a needed
criticism of the excessive severity of sixteenth-century pedagogues.
Speaking of the boys he says:

For as the bruit goeth by many a one,
Their tender bodies both night and day
Are whipped and scourged and beat like a stone,
That from top to toe the skin is away.