“To me, who have enjoyed the liberty of a public school, and experienced the liberality of private tuition, my present situation is extremely irksome and disagreeable. Confined within a narrow pale, I survey a beautiful country, which I am forbid to enter, on the penalty of expulsion from the society. I shudder at the reflexion that for a juvenile indiscretion, which is overlooked at a public institution, not considered as a fault in private education—(the merely taking a walk)—one’s character is liable to be blasted by ignominious dismission.
“When, moreover, I consider that most of my contemporaries have finished their classical career, that mathematical knowledge can be acquired elsewhere with as much facility as at my present abode, that my character is hitherto unimpeachable, and by a timely secession from a place in which it is hourly exposed to imminent danger, will be secured, I confess I ardently desire to be admitted at the University, and to leave a society from which little profit and no pleasure is to be derived.
“Nor am I singular in my opinion that the University
would be
| 34 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“Some people are apt to think that these private seminaries are free from the vices of the age, but give me leave to assure you they are grossly mistaken. The same vices that flourish at Eton or Westminster are practised at Hitcham, with this glorious addition that here deceit is necessary to conceal them; there they gratify their passions without breach of truth and sincerity.
“Adieu, dear Sir, and believe me,
“P.S.—The Captain intends to send me to Cambridge next summer, because I shall then be more discreet. Q. Are the passions of a young man of eighteen less strong than those of one who is seventeen years and six months old?”
