Certainly not, in prescribing good habits as a cure for bad ones. But
your Lordship had done well to shew what there is in a foreign air,
that is so propitious to good habits, as that none but such can thrive
in it; or, if there be a mixture of good and bad, as with us, how your
traveller shall be secured against an ill choice. Otherwise our young
spark may pick up new habits indeed; but they may only be different
from what he took from home, not better or more reasonable.
I doubt, my Lord, that, when such rude and untutored boys find
themselves removed from that restraint which the eye of a parent,
though but little accustomed to civility himself, imposed upon them,
they will rather give way to a freer indulgence of their own froward
humours, than be in any disposition to check and reform them. What
inclination will such persons have to benefit by good company? or how
indeed will they gain admittance into it?
I appeal to your own observation, whether, when this sort of
ill-educated people get abroad, and settle for a time in some
frequented city, their usual way be not to keep at distance from
the better company of the place, and to flock together into little
knots and clubs of their own countrymen, or of such others as are
most resembling in taste and manners to themselves; where all their
low humours are freely indulged, and even inflamed, by the mutual
society and countenance of one another. This, your Lordship knows,
is most frequently the case; while the obsequious tutor is at length
more likely to be swayed by the importunity, and perverted by the ill
example, of his disciples, than they are to be restrained by his advice
and authority.
But, though foreign travel should be indeed a remedy for the mischiefs,
complained of, I still question whether it would be a _proper_ one.
Suppose our young gentleman to be of so pliant a make, as to lay aside
his rustic and illiberal habits in complaisance to the better company,
he is obliged to live with: does it immediately follow, that he will
adopt none but what are fit for him to assume; and, with so raw and
undiscerning a judgment as he carried out with him, that he will have
the skill to select only and assume such manners as are most becoming
and ornamental?