 a short time the
children become rivals to their parents. Benefits are allayed by reproaches, and
gratitude debased by envy.
    Parents and children seldom act in concert: each child endeavours to
appropriate the esteem or fondness of the parents, and the parents, with yet
less temptation, betray each other to their children; thus some place their
confidence in the father, and some in the mother, and, by degrees, the house is
filled with artifices and feuds.
    The opinions of children and parents, of the young and the old, are
naturally opposite, by the contrary effects of hope and despondence, of
expectation and experience, without crime or folly on either side. The colours
of life in youth and age appear different, as the face of nature in spring and
winter. And how can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own
eyes show them to be false? Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce
their maxims by the credit of their lives. The old man trusts wholly to slow
contrivance and gradual progression: the youth expects to force his way by
genius, vigour, and precipitance. The old man pays regard to riches, and the
youth reverences virtue. The old man deifies prudence: the youth commits himself
to magnanimity and chance. The young man, who intends no ill, believes that none
is intended, and therefore acts with openness and candour: but his father,
having suffered the injuries of fraud, is impelled to suspect, and too often
allured to practise it. Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth
with contempt on the scrupulosity of age. Thus parents and children, for the
greatest part, live on to love less and less: and, if those whom nature has thus
closely united are the torments of each other, where shall we look for
tenderness and consolation?«
    »Surely, said the prince, you must have been unfortunate in your choice of
acquaintance: I am unwilling to believe, that the most tender of all relations
is thus impeded in its effects by natural necessity.«
    »Domestick discord, answered she, is not inevitably and fatally necessary;
but yet is not easily avoided. We seldom see that a whole family is virtuous:
the good and evil cannot well agree; and the evil can yet less agree with one
another: even the virtuous fall sometimes to variance, when their virtues are of
different kinds, and tending to extremes. In general, those parents have most
reverence who most deserve it: for he that lives well cannot be despised.
    Many other evils infest private life.
