When Grammar Should Be Taught?

one that converses only with Englishmen. Be as busy as you please with discourses of civility to your son, such as is his company, such will be his manners. A ploughman of your neighbourhood that has never been out of his parish, read what lectures you please to him, will be as soon in his language as his carriage a courtier; that is, in neither will be more polite than those he uses to converse with: and therefore, of this no other care can be taken till he be of an age to have a tutor put to him, who must not fail to be a well-bred man. And, in good earnest, if I were to speak my mind freely, so children do nothing out of obstinacy, pride, and ill-nature, ’tis no great matter how they put off their hats or make legs. If you can teach them to love and respect other people, they will, as their age requires it, find ways to express it acceptably to everyone, according to the fashions they have been used to: and as to their motions and carriage of their bodies, a dancing-master, as has been said, when it is fit, will teach them what is most becoming. In the meantime, when they are young, people expect not that children should be over-mindful of these ceremonies; carelessness is allowed to that age, and becomes them as well as compliments do grown people: or, at least, if some very nice people will think it a fault, I am sure it is a fault that should be overlooked, and left to time, a tutor and conversation to cure. And therefore I think it not worth your while to have your son (as I often see children are) molested or chid about it: but where