know, and 'tis the effect of a high and well-tempered soul, to know how
to condescend to such puerile motions and to govern and direct them.
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.

Such as, according to our common way of teaching, undertake, with one and
the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several
boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and
'tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found
above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and
discipline. Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical
construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let
him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory,
but by that of his life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a
hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to
see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking
instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato. 'Tis
a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office
unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it
to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust, when bound and compelled to
follow the appetite of another's fancy, enslaved and captivated under the
authority of another's instruction; we have been so subjected to the
trammel, that we have no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own
vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:

"Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt."

["They are ever in wardship."--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an