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.

All singularity in our manners and conditions is to be avoided, as
inconsistent with civil society. Who would not be astonished at so
strange a constitution as that of Demophoon, steward to Alexander the
Great, who sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun? I have seen
those who have run from the smell of a mellow apple with greater
precipitation than from a harquebuss-shot; others afraid of a mouse;
others vomit at the sight of cream; others ready to swoon at the making
of a feather bed; Germanicus could neither endure the sight nor the
crowing of a cock. I will not deny, but that there may, peradventure,
be some occult cause and natural aversion in these cases; but, in my
opinion, a man might conquer it, if he took it in time. Precept has in