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of captive youth, whom they render disorderly by punishment beforehand. Go to one of them when the lessons are in progress: you hear nothing but outcries of children being punished and of masters drunk with anger. What a way of awakening an appetite for their lesson in those young and timid souls, to conduct them to it with a terrifying air and hands armed with whips! A wicked and pernicious fashion. It may be added, what Quintilian has very well observed, that such imperious authority leads to dangerous results, and especially our method of chastisement.[1] How much more seemly would it be if their classrooms were strewn with flowers and leaves rather than with bits of blood-stained switches! I would have joy and gladness pictured there, and Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus had in his school.[2] Where their profit is, there let their pleasure be also. We should sweeten the food that is healthy for the child, and make bitter what is harmful to him. It is a marvel how solicitous Plato shows himself in his Laws, regarding the gaiety and pastimes of the youth of his city, and how he dwells upon their races, games, songs, jumpings, and dances, of which he says that the ancients attributed their ordering and patronage to the gods themselves — Apollo and the Muses and Minerva. He branches out in innumerable rules for his gymnasia; as for letters, he occupies himself very little with them, and seems especially to commend poetry only for music.[3]
(a) All eccentricity and peculiarity in our manners and conditions is to be avoided as a foe to intercourse and companionship with others, (c) and as unnatural. Who would not be astonished at the constitution of Demophon, Alexander’s major-domo, who sweated in the dark and shivered in sunshine?[4] (a) I have seen those who fled from the odour of apples more than from a volley of musketry,others frightened at a mouse, others sickened by the sight of cream, others by seeing a feather-bed shaken up; and Germanicus could