The minister's family - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1839 edition. Excerpt: ...failures may be almost enough to blight the prospects of the young man, whose character does not yet stand sufficiently high to enable him to triumph over one failure, on the strength of many instances of success. Indeed, it not unfrequently happens that the most difficult and unmanageable cases meet the young private tutor at the very commencement of his career, when he has least skill, experience, and established reputation to enable him to surmount them. It may also be his good fortune to be requested to aid in the private tuition of attentive, good tempered, and intelligent boys, whom it is a positive pleasure to teach; and whose parents, kind, friendly, candid, and honourable, give him every aid and encouragement in their power, and feel the gratitude and respect due to one whose labours are devoted to the task of communicating valuable instruction to their children. In such cases it is a pleasure, and that too of a high order, to remove obstacles too great for the youthful mind, to mark the brightening of tle intelligent eye, as it catches the full import of a beautiful or a sublime passage, to note the endeavour of the awakening genius to find apt language for the expression of its glowing and expanding thoughts and feelings, and catching the kindred inspiration, to pour forth in freer, bolder, and more classic language, an imitation almost, rather than a translation, of the noble strains of ancient poets, warriors, and statesmen, while pupil and tutor alike forget every thing but the lofty lays by which they are both excited and borne swiftly and triumphantly along. But even in the most favourable cases, the labours of a private tutor are great and trying. The winter evenings may be wild and stormy,--the streets may be deeply smothered...