University of Virginia Library

ADVERTISEMENT.

The work which follows is submitted with great
deference and some doubt to the reader. It is an
experiment; and the style and spirit are, it is believed,
something out of the beaten track. The
events are of real occurrence, and, to the judgment
of the author, the peculiarities of character which
he has here drawn—if they may be considered such,
which are somewhat too common to human society—are
genuine and unexaggerated. The design
of the work is purely moral, and the lessons sought
to be inculcated are of universal application and importance.
They go to impress upon us the necessity
of proper and early education—they show the
ready facility with which the best natural powers
may be perverted to the worst purposes—they stimulate

to honorable deeds in the young,—teach firmness
under defeat and vicissitude, and hold forth a
promise of ultimate and complete success to well
directed perseverance. By exhibiting, at the
same time, the injurious consequences directly
flowing from each and every aberration from the
standard of a scrupulous morality, they enjoin the
strictest and most jealous conscientiousness. The
character of Martin Faber, not less than that of
William Harding, may be found hourly in real life.
The close observer may often meet with them.
They are here put in direct opposition, not less
with the view to contrast and comparison, than incident
and interest. They will be found to develope,
of themselves, and by their results, the nature
of the education which had been severally
given them. When the author speaks of education
he does not so much refer to that received at the
school and the academy. He would be understood
to indicate that which the young acquire at
home in the parental dwelling—under the parental
eye—in the domestic circle—at the family fireside,
from those who, by nature, are best calculated to
lay the guiding and the governing principles. It
is not at the university that the affections and the
moral faculties are to be tutored. The heart, and—
les petites morales—the manners, have quite another
school and other teachers, all of which are but too
little considered by the guardians of the young.
These are—the father and the mother and the
friends—the play-mates and the play-places.