him, in his twentieth year, to receive the finishings of education necessary for that purpose, at one of the universities.
Yet he had not, I have heard him say, the most favourable opinion of the general course of education there; but he knew, that a young man might there have an opportunity of acquiring much knowlege, if he were inclined to it; and that good principles might preserve him uncorrupted, even amidst the dangers of some surrounding dissipation▪ besides, he had an additional inducement to this plan, from the repeated request of a distant relation, who filled an office of some consequence at Oxford, and had expressed a very earnest desire to have his young kinsman sent thither, and placed under his own immediate inspection.

Before he set out for that place, Annesly, though he had a sufficient confidence in his son, yet thought it not improper to mark out to him some of those errors, to which the unexperienced are liable: he was not wont, as I have before observed, to press instruction upon his children; but the young man himself seemed to expect it, with the solicitude of one who ventured, not without anxiety, to leave that road, where the hand of a parent and friend had hitherto guided him in happiness and safety. The substance of what he delivered to his son and daughter (for she too was an auditor of his discourses) I have endeavoured to collect from some of the papers Mrs. Wistanly put into my hands; and to arrange, as far as it seemed arrangeable, in the two following chapters.
It will not, however, after all, have a perfectly-connected appearance; because, I imagine, it was delivered at different times, as occasion invited, or leisure allowed him; but its tendency appeared to be such, that, even under these disadvantages, I could not forbear inserting it.

YOU are now leaving us, my son, said Annesly, to make your entrance into the world: for, though from the pale of a college, the bustle of ambition, the plodding of business, and the tinsel of gaiety, are supposed to be excluded; yet as it is the place where the persons that are to perform in those several characters often put on the dresses of each, there will not be wanting, even there, those qualities that distinguish in all. I will not shock your imagination with the picture which some men, retired from its influence, have drawn of the world; nor warn you against enormities, into which, I should equally affront your understanding and your feelings, did I