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If, when I was a school-boy, I could not hear a drum beat, but my heart beat with it was it my fault? Did I plant the propensity there? Did I sound the alarm within, or Nature? When Guy, Earl of Warwick, and Parismus and Parismenus, and Valentine and Orson, and the Seven Champions of England, were handed around the school, were they not all purchased with my own pocket-money?
Johnson controverted it, asserting that at an early age it was better to gratify curiosity with wonders than to attempt planting truth, before the mind was prepared to receive it, and that therefore, Jack the Giant-Killer, Parisenus and Parismenus, and The Seven Champions of Christendom were fitter for them than Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer. Mrs.
I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty; but from the best of motives; and therefore shall make her no apology for it when she returns back: 'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself, of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the younger affirm, 'That he never read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it. The stories of Greece and Rome, run over without this turn and application, do less service, I affirm it, than the history of Parismus and Parismenus, or of the Seven Champions of England, read with it.
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