ON THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS

[摘要] Henry Adams (1838-1918), grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams, in his privately-printed The Education of Henry Adams describes his father's way of educating and amusing young Henry as follows:By way of educating and amusing the children, Mr. Adams read much aloud, and was sure to read political literature, especially when it was satirical, like the speeches of Horace Mann and the Epistles of Hosea Biglow, with great delight to the youth. So he read Longfellow and Tennyson as their poems appeared, but the children took possession of Dickens and Thackeray for themselves. Both were too modern for tastes founded on Pope and Dr. Johnson. The boy Henry soon became a desultory reader of every book he found readable, but these were commonly eighteenth-century historians because his father's library was full of them. In the want of positive instincts, he drifted into the mental indolence of history. So, too, he read shelves of eighteenth-century poetry, but when his father offered his own set of Wordsworth as a gift on condition of reading it through, he declined. Pope and Gray called on no mental effort; they were easy reading; but the boy was thirty years old before his education reached Wordsworth.

[学科分类] 儿科学