men, there is little skill in planting them, but after they are born, we have a varied burden, full of toil and anxiety, in training and nurturing them.[1] (a) The display of their inclinations is so slight and so obscure at that tender age, the promises so uncertain and so deceitful, that it is difficult to base on them sure judgements. (b) Look at Cymon, look at Themistocles, and a thousand others, how inconsistent they were with themselves.[2] The young of bears and dogs show their native inclination; but men, being cast forthwith into the midst of usages, opinions, and laws, are easily changed or disguised.[3] (a) Yet it is hard to overcome the natural propensities; whence it happens that, for lack of having fitly chosen their path, we often labour to no purpose, and employ much of our life in training children to things in which they can not find a footing. Howbeit, in this difficulty my judgement is to direct them always to the best and most profitable things, and that we should pay little heed to the slight conjectures and prognostications that we derive from the impulses of their childhood. (c) Plato even, in his Republic, seems to me to give them too much authority.[4]
(a) Learning is a noble adornment, madame, and a marvellously useful tool, notably to persons raised to such a degree of fortune as you are. In fact, it is of no true use in mean and low hands. It is much more proud to lend its resources to conduct a war, to rule a people, to cultivate the friendship of a prince or a foreign nation, than to draft a dialectical argument, or to argue an appeal, or concoct a mixture for pills. And so, madame, because I believe that you will not forget this portion of the education of your children, you who have tasted its delights and who are of a lettered race, — for we have still the writings of those former Comtes de Foix from whom monsieur le comte, your husband, and you are both descended; and François, Monsieur de Candale, your uncle, gives birth every day to other writings which will extend the knowledge of this quality of
